Dragon Magazine #91, November 1984

"Does Anyone Here Speak Aslan?"

The ARES section -- pages 71-73.

All too often science fiction gets around the notion of communicating with aliens by way of universal translators, telepathy and the like. But what if there are no such things in the universe that your players inhabit? What is life--and game play--like then? This article looks at Traveller and postulates what your players will face out there in the Great Black in a galaxy where everyone speaks a different language than you do.

Back when I was still unpublished, I was writing for a certain small SF magazine whose editor rejected me routinely, yet continuously suggested that I send him something else. When I read in one of his editorials a rant against universal translators, I figured that I had stumbled on an article that he had to accept. I was wrong, of course ... and he rejected the article with such brusqueness that I turned around and sent it to his biggest competitor, DRAGON magazine--an act that all of my friends said was crazy. Well, DRAGON's editor, Roger E. Moore, decided to take a chance on me (I was unpublished at the time, which my friends knew but he did not) and he asked me to rewrite the article on spec. We ended up working on it together for months before I got it to where he wanted it to be, but once I did, the result earned me $175 and my first paid publishing credit--in a national magazine no less.