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Who are the most famous science fiction characters? The UK website Lonympics has a list of 50 strong alien contenders (http://www.lonympics.co.uk/ne w/Most_famous_aliens.htm). Which would you identify as global household words? That would probably depend on what age you are and whether your preferred entertainment medium is literature, film, or comic book.

A select few seem to have a universal presence in Western culture. Not only do the characters keep popping up, but the themes of their stories have become a staple of scifi literature. Here are my personal choices for scifi immortality:

FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER (aka "Frankenstein", the name of his creator)
When Mary Shelley completed her book "Frankenstein" in 1817, she created a modern myth of science gone awry. Her Frankenstein's monster was a nameless creature eight feet tall, with translucent skin, glowing eyes, flowing black hair, and black lips. The Frankenstein we have come to know and love is derived from Boris Karloff's interpretation in the 1931 movie.. He has starred in many movies and has even done comedy with Abbot and Costello. Mary's concept was of a sensitive and intelligent individual who had read Paradise Lost and Plutarch's Lives, and was a victim of human presumption and cruelty. The text of the novel is available at http://www.literature.org/auth ors/shelley-mary/frankenstein/

CAPTAIN NEMO
Jules Verne's character from the novel 40,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870) keeps popping up in subsequent science fiction. His electric submarine, the Nautilus, is camouflaged as a giant fish, and has the deadly capacity to sink ships. Nemo is an enigmatic and ambiguous character who is trying to re-shape the world without much regard for its rules. The text of the novel can be read at http://www.online-literature.c om/verne/leaguesunder/. The Nautilus and its captain play a major role in the 2003 film League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

BUCK ROGERS
This space explorer marooned in the future got his start in the entertainment industry as Anthony Rogers in a novella "Armageddon 2419 A.D." by Philip Francis Nowlan, first published in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. In 1930, re-named "Buck" Rogers, he became the hero of a publication first: a syndicated newspaper comic strip which continued until 1967, and was briefly revived between 1979-84. From 1932 until 1947, he was featured on the first science fiction radio show. He even made it to the Chicago World's Fair in 1933-4, where a 10-minute film about

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