John T. Phillifent was born in Durham, England on November 10, 1916.

As with last week’s entry, Henry J. Kostkos, Phillifent worked as an electrical engineer.

Although Phillifent wrote some short fiction and three The Man from U.N.C.L.E. tie-in novels under his own name, he also used the pseudonym John Rackham for the majority of his fiction. According to Phillifent, he reserved his own name for his best material.

His first published work was the Jupiter Equilateral, published by the Tit-Bits Science Fiction Library in 1954 under the Rackham name.  He wouldn’t publish anything under his own name until the story “Point” appeared in the December 1961 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination.

Ian Sales described Phillifent’s Time to Live as “hackwork right from the first page.” He also comments that “the entire story feels like it was made up as Rackham wrote it.” Rich Horton describes Phillifent as “a pretty reliably producer of competent middle-range SF adventure.” A Blackgate article in which Horton looked at another of Phillifent’s novellas was entitled “When science fiction sucks.”

His final story, “The Halted Village,” published under the Rackham name, appeared in 1945 in New Writings in SF 25, edited by Kenneth Bulmer.

While many are familiar with Damon Knight’s definition of science fiction as “it means what we point to when we say it,” Phillifent coined Rackham’s Law, which states that science fiction “was unique in that it was invariably written by ‘the science-fiction method’ analogous to the ‘scientific method’ which…underpins all science.” Although Phillifent failed to define what the “science-fiction method” might actually mean.

Phillifent died on December 15, 1976 in London.

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-two-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.