The Babylon 5 Blog

Following the poor reception of the first six “Babylon 5” novels, the publisher worked with JMS to commission three additional novels based on outlines supplied by the Great Maker himself.  The first of the new novels, “The Shadow Within”, finally delivered a solid B5 novel and gave fans hope that all three new novels would meet or exceed expectations.

That did not happen.

This particular book is easily the worst of the B5 novels, and it’s hard to imagine why the final product was so shoddy in comparison.  The author had a fairly good outline, as evidence by the fact that the book’s 60+ chapters might as well be the outline.  Allow me to repeat that fact: the book, weighing in at just over 200 pages, has more than 60 chapters.  It took me about two hours to read it from cover to cover, and that’s because I kept putting it down in disgust.

I’ve said it before: I can’t stand books where the chapters are only a couple pages long.  It betrays the writer’s inability to think beyond the bullet points of an outline, and it completely disrupts the flow of characterization and nuanced plot progression.  In this case, one can see how the author had absolutely no feel for the characters themselves, outside of the information supplied in the outline.  The dialogue is all wrong, the motivations don’t mesh, and items that should have been fleshed out are minimalized.  It’s the kind of book that fans slap on the table when the quality of fan fiction vs. professional work is debated.

The story often tries to fall back on light comedy, as if that would overcome the weaknesses in the rest of the writing.  The end result is amplification of the offense: during that moment in the series’ timeline, everything was deadly serious and heavily serialized.  Not only would the characters have no time for the antics on display (particularly the officers on Babylon 5), but none of them would set aside the concerns of war for “playing James Bond”.

I have the feeling that JMS outlined the Centauri Prime story, because it fits the timeline relatively well.  If the novel had focused entirely on Londo and Vir’s struggle to stop a Narn rescue squad from liberating G’Kar, it might have worked.  I could even accept Lyndisty as a clever “complication” for Vir, approached with more care.  Every other element, on the other hand, betrays continuity and undermines what was established early in the fourth season.

The bottom line is that JMS himself would have preferred a rewrite, but once he saw the final product, it was too late to make adjustments.  I think it’s safe to say that he was being kind, because canceling the book altogether and sending out a postcard of apology to the entire fandom may have been a better use of the print stock.

Rating: 2/10