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Friday 17 January 2025
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Toys
This entry deals with sf-based toys; for discussion of fictional toys, see Toys in SF. / From a commercial point of view, sf toys used to be traditionally more important than sf Games, and they have at least as long a history. They continue to be of greater commercial significance than Role Playing Games, WarGames or Gamebooks, but were ...
Spector, Warren
(1955- ) US Game designer who has worked on both pen and paper and digital games. His first published design was the Role Playing Game Toon (1984), an amusing homage to classic US cartoons, written with Greg Costikyan and developed by Steve Jackson Games. Spector went on to help design various Board Games and ...
Moore, Brian
(1921-1999) Irish-born author, in Canada 1948-1959, in the USA from 1959, best known for non-genre works like The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960); he also published at least seven detective thrillers beginning with Wreath for a Redhead (1951) under his own name and as by Bernard Mara and Michael Bryan. Several of his novels contain strong elements of fantasy, like Fergus (1970) and Cold Heaven (1983), two tales linked by their preoccupation ...
Curtis, Jean-Louis
Pseudonym of French author Louis Lafitte (1917-1995), author of several untranslated works, none fantastic; his collection of five satirical sf stories, Un saint au néon (coll 1956; trans by Humphrey Hare as The Neon Halo: The Face of the Future 1958), very sharply depicts a Near-Future world whose centre cannot hold. The tone is vivacious, didactic, circumstantial; its wit is distanced in the récit fashion long ...
Miss Fury
US Comic strip created, drawn and written by Tarpé Mills, real name June Tarpé Mills (1912-1988). Miss Fury was the first female Superhero created by a woman, introduced in a syndicated Sunday newspaper comic strip entitled The Black Fury on 6 April 1941; the strip and the heroine were retitled Miss Fury in November that year. The newspaper strip ran until 1952; eight comic books (1942-1946) were ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...