I like science fiction. I’m hooked the way lonely housewives are addicted to romance novels and the Lifetime Network. I’ll watch the movies, I’ll quickly commit to a season of episodic television, I’ll read the novels and the short stories. I doubt there’s any one reason why I’m drawn to fantastic descriptions of utopian or dystopian futures, rather it’s probably the same combination of events in my youth that nurtured my fondness for hi-tech gadgets, comic books, and computer games.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the big conceits of sci-fi – interspecies communication. For each movie, show, or book there is usually a God-like device inserted to enable the author to get past the language barrier. Douglas Adams imagined the improbable Babel Fish (appropriately adopted by Altavista search engine geeks as the name for their web page translation tool), but it was Star Trek that introduced The Universal Translator into the public conscience.

Whatever the contrivance, the intent is the same: To shelve the language barrier in deference to the story being told. It’s understandable. As a viewer, can you imaging watching every sci-fi story with a realistic alien language barrier? You would either have to read a lot of subtitles or miss out on half the story. Of course, if written well, the process of communication barriers could be very interesting – but how many authors or scriptwriters have the ability to create entire languages while telling a compelling story?

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