A sea for encounters : essays towards a postcolonial commonwealth

In an age of globalized language, minority languages are under threat of annihilation. Almost one-third of the global population is competent in English to varying degrees. Historically, the movement of the language can be traced through the voyages of exploration to the Americas, Asia, and the Antipodes, followed by the nineteenth-century British colonial expansion in Africa and the South Pacific. This was followed by mass European emigration to the 'melting-pot' nations which hosted multilingual, multicultural and multiracial populations brought together by the use of the English language as official or semi-official language. The use of English in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada has further contributed to the global spread of English which is represented in every continent. The fact that the USA and Britain are, politically, two highly influential nations, and that the media and technology industries, as well as the entertainment industry, all function in English have effectively made English, in its many varieties, the most used medium of communication on a global level. One of the implications of the power exerted by the English language is that it poses a threat to the survival of minority languages that live side by side with English. The fear of language-loss is a very real one; David Crystal estimates that "at least 50 per cent of the world's 6,000 or so having languages will die out within the next century." Among the concrete moves to counter this trend is the European Union's stance in using its members' national languages and in actively protecting minority languages spoken in the Union, recognizing them as the unique cultural artifacts and means of cultural expressions that they indeed are. It is against this background that we are to consider the particular case of Malta's national language. A national language is clearly a depository of a particular nation's memory and experience of the world through time. It bears traces of the attitudes of its inhabitants, of its history, as well as of its particular climatic and social environment, which are reflected in its vocabulary, its expressions, and even its verb-structure. It is easy, therefore, to revere a nation's language as a prized possession, and to regard the use of the language as the epitome of what it means to belong to a particular culture. A frequently recurring notion in postcolonial writing is the desire, more often seen as a right, to be allowed to speak one's own native language. Yet this feeling is neither universal nor historically consistent. In fact, the specific historical case of language-choice and language-use in Malta in the nineteenth century, described in this essay, seems to fly in the face of this norm.peer-reviewe

Keep to the local or aim for the global? Issues at the borders of a minority language

This paper takes a look at the paradoxical situation faced by writers of minority languages in countries in which English is a strong second language. The choice of whether to write in Maltese for a very small readership, to write directly in English giving the language a local flavour, or to rely on translation is based on a range of considerations examined here. Language choice and issues of post-colonial identity played a strong role in the last decades of the 20th century, however these considerations seem to have been left behind as recent writing embraces a bilingual strategy that reflects actual language use and code-switching practices. This new style, in line with international trends, poses its own set of problems when it comes to translation into English. Perhaps collaborative re-writing rather than translation which creates a similar but not identical text is the only possible solution.peer-reviewe

Confronting the challenge : Innovation in the regulation of broadcasting in Malta

This discussion paper attempts to provide an overview of certain aspects of the broadcasting sector in Malta. In particular, it focuses on clauses 118 and 119 of the Constitution of Malta as well as the Broadcasting Act, exploring possibilities for innovation in the sector while also taking into account the implications of rapid changes brought about by new technologies.N/

Infertility in science fiction as a consequence of warfare

Warfare is an indissoluble aspect of humanity, and is an equally indissoluble part of mythology. Greek mythology is replete with strife between the gods themselves, allegories of human strife, and the most epic aspects were the succession myths, with the primordial couple Gaia and Ouranos overthrown by the Titans, who were, in their turn, overthrown by the Olympians. Warfare is a common trope in all branches of fiction, including science-fiction (SF), and the old pulp magazines were replete with such stories, narratives that featured exotic weapons and that often had Faustian implications, with devastating consequences. Military organisations take technological advances very seriously, as several military works show, to the extent that the ‘line between science and science fiction […] has never been totally clear. One of the earliest and most famous SF novels dealing with atomic warfare was Herbert George Wells’s The World Set Free (1914), which prefigures the misuse of atomic energy as a weapon of mass destruction. Wells was cognizant of the fact that technological development would lead to such deadly weapons as ‘[t]he history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal’. Warfare can be nuclear, biological, chemical or cyberwarfare. And it is abundantly clear that the entire corpus of work dealing with warfare and SF is too vast to be discussed. Reginald Bretnor has made inroads into this lacuna with three anthologies that assemble both fiction and essays with regard to potential future trends in warfare of all types. Furthermore although the author of this paper is a medical doctor, even the health aspects are too great to realistically discuss in one paper. Hence, only the intersection of infertility in warfare within the genre will be analysed. The approach will thematic, and will attempt to list and taxonomise all narratives that deal with infertility inflicted by warfare in the SF. Many of the narratives now appear dated with entirely new ways of waging warfare that were too far-fetched for ‘that Buck Rogers stuff’, such as electronic warfare, since for the ‘present and for the foreseeable future, electronic systems serve and will continue to serve as the foundation of systems for the control of forces and weapons […] in all branches of the armed forces’. What follows is a brief reading of key texts, a necessarily concise exercise due to the multitude of narratives that have delved into this intersection.peer-reviewe

The coldest of all cold monsters : state infliction of infertility

The state may decide to limit its population due to a variety of reasons. This paper reviews the intersection of state-induced infertility in science-fiction, exploring eugenics, overpopulation, along with state-devised strategies to control both overpopulation and the quality of the remaining population.peer-reviewe

The last (fertile) man on earth : comedy or fantasy?

The trope of infertility in science fiction may be explored through the theme of a single fertile man remaining on earth, with the fate of the entire species devolving on this one single individual. The article will review narratives that deal with this premise, and will outline the obvious, the not so obvious, and the even potentially comic outcomes that arise from the overturning of the usual male-chasing-female paradigm.peer-reviewe

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal : pharmacological immortality in science fiction

Immortality is a common feature in science-fiction (SF). This paper lists the ways in which the pharmacological induction of immortality has been depicted in SF, and the resultant outcomes. Immortality or extreme longevity are often melded with infertility in order to eliminate the overpopulation issues that would inevitably arise. This is only one way in which theoretical utopias which afford life extension become dystopias, cautionary tales that admonish against hubris. In this fashion, SF attempts to divine the paths that scientific discoveries or future events reveal to us, and the possible consequences that our decisions may have, whether taken advisedly and with due deliberation, or carelessly with no attempt to discern the consequences of our actions.peer-reviewe

The pill in the future : pharmacological contraception in science fiction

Contraception dates back to Mesopotamian times. Science fiction (SF) has utilised many contraceptive plot devices and this paper will explore these stratagems from the pharmacological point of view. It will be shown that the oral contraceptive pill and the contraceptive implant were both predicted in SF as well as other forms of contraception of which we only, as yet, have tantalising research possibilities.peer-reviewe

Single-gendered worlds in science fiction : better for whom?

An excess of one gender is a regular and problematic trope in Science Fiction, instantly removing any potential tension between the two sexes while simultaneously generating new concerns. While female only societies are common, male-only societies are rarer. This is partly a true biological obstacle because the female body is capable of bringing a baby forth into the world after fertilization, or even without fertilization, so that a prospective author’s only stumbling block to accounting for the society’s potential longevity. For example, gynogenesis is a particular type of parthenogenesis whereby animals that reproduce by this method can only reproduce that way. These species, such as the salamanders of genus Ambystoma, consist solely of females which does, occasionally, have sexual contact with males of a closely related species but the sperm from these males is not used to fertilise ova. Instead, it stimulates ovum development without any exchange of genetic material. It is believed that this species has survived due to the extremely rare (perhaps one in one million matings) fertilisation of ova by sperm, allowing genetic mixing and a modicum of biodiversity due to the introduction of new material in this salamander’s gene pool. On the other hand, the male body needs to be considerably re-engineered in order to carry a baby to term, necessitating a uterus, placenta and a delivery mode/orifice. However, conception may be dispensed with through an asexual method of reproduction, such as cloning or parthenogenesis, and the gestating process may be bypassed by a postulated ectogenetic process. The latter may also serve to gestate a baby that is produced by a sexual reproduction, through the conventional recombination of a spermatozoon with an ovum, and the resulting zygote implanted in an artificial uterus in the same way that a zygote is now implanted in a uterus by in-vitro fertilisation. Yet another reason that explains why women-only worlds are commoner than men-only worlds is that a number of writers have speculated whether a world constructed on strict feminist principles might be utopian rather than dystopian, and ‘for many of these writers, such a world was imaginable only in terms of sexual separatism; for others, it involved reinventing female and male identities and interactions’. These issues have been ably reviewed in Brian Attebery’s Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), in which he observes that ‘it’s impossible in real life to to isolate the sexes thoroughly enough to demonstrate […] absolutes of feminine or masculine behavior’, whereas ‘within science-fiction, separation by gender has been the basis of a fascinating series of thought experiments’. Intriguingly, Attebery poses the question that a singlegendered society is ‘better for whom’?peer-reviewe