Richard Phillips Books in Order

If you want the full Rho saga in story order: Once Dead → Dead Wrong → Dead Shift → The Second Ship
If you want to jump straight to the alien-tech conspiracy: The Second Ship → Immune → Wormhole
If you want epic fantasy first: Mark of Fire → Prophecy's Daughter → Curse of the Chosen
If you want his newest AI thriller: The Ripper's Son

Richard Phillips was born in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1956, and he grew up in a part of the country where stories about UFOs, desert secrets, and military projects never seem very far away. He has also written about spending time at his family’s ranch in the high country of New Mexico, which helps explain why place matters so much in his books. Even when his stories go cosmic or fantastical, they still feel tied to real landscapes.

Before he became a novelist, Phillips built a career that sounds almost custom-made for writing techno-thrillers. He graduated from West Point in 1979, qualified as a US Army Ranger, and served as an Army officer. In 1989 he earned a master’s degree in physics from the Naval Postgraduate School, doing thesis work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and later worked as a research associate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before completing his Army tour.

After that came years in software and defense work. Phillips worked as a project manager and senior software developer at General Electric, Hughes Aircraft, Lockheed Martin Space Operations, and General Dynamics. That background shows up all over his fiction. His books tend to care about systems, chain of command, unintended consequences, and what happens when powerful technology lands in human hands before people are ready for it.

His path into fiction started later than many readers might expect.

Phillips has said that during a 2005 vacation in Maui he decided to write a science fiction trilogy loosely inspired by Roswell and set around Los Alamos. That idea became The Second Ship and eventually the larger Rho universe. Readers who click with those books usually come for the mix of alien technology, government secrecy, military action, and big questions about how much change humanity can absorb before it stops being itself.

The Rho books kept growing. Immune and Wormhole widen the scale from hidden research and nanotech to global danger, altered humans, and rival alien agendas. Along the way, Jack Gregory and Janet Price became such important figures in the larger story that Phillips went back and gave them their own prequel trilogy in Once Dead, Dead Wrong, and Dead Shift. Those books lean more into spy-thriller territory, but they keep the same interest in secret programs, dangerous ideas, and people trying to stay human under extreme pressure.

He did not stay only with science fiction.

With Mark of Fire, Phillips moved into epic fantasy and opened The Endarian Prophecy, a longer story centered on Carol Rafel, ancient magic, and a prophecy tied to the fate of kingdoms. Books like Prophecy’s Daughter and The Time Seer keep his usual forward drive, but trade labs and covert agencies for warlords, dark mages, and old powers. More recently, The Ripper’s Son returns to near-future sci-fi and artificial intelligence, which fits neatly with one of his favorite themes: new technology may solve real problems, but it can also create disasters no one saw coming.

After the success of his novels, Phillips retired in 2013 to write full-time. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife, Carol. His writing career did not come out of a writing program or a straight literary path. It came out of Roswell, the Army, physics, software, and a decision to finally finish the book.