SWEVEN, Godfrey

   Pseudonym of New Zealand writer and professor of English John Macmillan Brown (1846-1935), Chancellor of the University of NEW ZEALAND from 1923. Both his fiction and his nonfiction deal almost exclusively with the South Pacific. Of sf interest is his 2-part Antarctic UTOPIA, published as Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles (1901 US) and Limanora: The Island of Progress (1903 US; rev 1931 UK), in which an ethereal man with artificial wings is shot down in the South Pacific but survives - he's British - to recount his long trek through a mist-enshrouded group of ISLANDS, each of them exemplifying different modes of existence, until he finds himself in the scientific utopia of Limanora, which GS anatomizes in extraordinary detail. Here he is physically and psychologically reconstructed.

   JC

   See also: HISTORY OF SF.