Rog Phillips / Craig Browning

Craig Browning and Rog Phillips were, along with a host of other pseudonyms, the working names of US writer Roger Phillips Graham (1909-1966), a prolific contributor to the sf magazines of the late 1940s and 1950s.

His first story was “Let Freedom Ring!” in December 1945 for Amazing Stories, which, along with its companion magazine Fantastic Adventures, remained his most regular market. His best-known story is “The Yellow Pill” (October 1958 Astounding), an ingenious exercise in perception paradoxes. Under the aegis of Amazing editor Raymond A. Palmer, Phillips conducted an influential Fanzine-review column, The Club House (March 1948-March 1953), later reviving it in other magazines edited by Palmer: Universe Science Fiction and Other Worlds. Fiction from the end of his active career has been assembled as Rat in the Skull and Other SF Classics.

Phillips published four novels in book form: Time Trap (1949), Worlds Within (1950), World of If (1951) and The Involuntary Immortals (December 1949 Fantastic Adventures; rev 1959), the last being an example of a kind of tale intrinsic to genre sf: a group of young paranormals must band together to protect themselves from the vengeance of ungifted normal humans. A further novel, So Shall Ye Reap, issued posthumously in book form, presumes that the first atom bombs have generated a slow chain reaction; the tale follows the lead-up to the inevitable Holocaust, during which period the American government creates vast keeps underground to house the chosen few for two millennia. The whole story is told within a Ruined Earth frame, in the year 2196.

(Edited from Phillips’ entry at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Click the link for the full article.)

Rog Phillips' Futures Past Editions eBooks