Rick Raphael

Born in New York City on February 20, 1919, Rick Raphael worked primarily as a journalist while building a modest but admired science-fiction career on the side. Reference sources describe him as an American journalist and author, and note that his fiction output was relatively small but made a strong impression in the field.

He began publishing science fiction with "A Filbert Is a Nut" in Astounding in 1959. Much of his best-known work appeared in the early 1960s, with stories later gathered in The Thirst Quenchers and Code Three. His story "Code Three" was nominated for the 1964 Hugo Award, and "Once a Cop" received a Hugo nomination the following year.

Raphael died on January 4, 1994, in Minnesota. Even with only about a dozen widely noted stories, he developed a reputation for brisk, believable speculative fiction shaped by a working reporter's eye for systems, institutions, and the way ordinary people adapt to changing technology.