BPP: Babylon 5 Short Stories Part 1

The Babylon Project Podcast

In this penultimate episode of the Babylon Project Podcast, we discussed three of six short stories from the Babylon 5 universe: “The Shadow of His Thoughts”; “Genius Loci”; and “Space, Time, and the Incurable Romantic.” All three were written by J. Michael Straczynski. The episode was particularly special because we were joined by our Producer, Troy Rutter!

“The Shadow of His Thoughts” was published in Amazing Stories Magazine, #597. The events in August 2262, six days after Londo’s coronation as Emperor, placing the story during Season 5 of the original series. London suffers from a recurring nightmare in which he’s forced to kill a helpless animal called a Chakat, and the story picks up after he awakens on the seventh day. One of Londo’s first duties is to install a new Prophetess. He departs the palace in a highly-ornamented carriage and meets with the young girl who is the Prophetess to be. During Londo’s conversation with her, he learns she’s a true seer, when she tells Londo of what will be his final (in every meaning of the word) encounter with G’Kar. This alarms Londo’s Keeper, seeing a risk to its future plans, and it orders Londo to kill the girl. Londo disobeys and instead pulls enough jewels from the carriage to give to the young girl to carry her and her family for the rest of their lives. He grants her freedom and to protect her, banishes her. He installs the girl’s governess (power-hungry, not an actual prophetess and therefore no threat to the Keeper’s mission) as Prophetess, saving the young girl’s life and the satisfying the Keeper. Later, Londo finds a note from the young girl thanking him for her freedom. When Londo has his dream again, he frees the Chakat rather than killing it. He never has the dream again.

All four of us gave this story a “thumbs-up”.

Next we dove into “Genius Loci”, published in Amazing Stories #599. Events in this story take place approximately six weeks after G’Kar and Lyta Alexander depart Babylon 5 on G’Kar’s self-imposed exile.

While making a transit through hyperspace, they encounter a Psi Corps ship adrift, with only one life form on board—a dying Psi Cop. He tells them the rest of the crew was left on a planet that scared him badly. Lyta accesses the ship’s systems and determines the location of the planet.

Once on the planet, they separate and each of them discovers a colony. Interestingly (or perhaps oddly) G’Kar finds a colony of Barn while Lyta finds a colony of telepaths. G’Kar and Lyta both quickly learn things aren’t what they appear to be. In particular, the telepaths all have the same mental patterns, suggesting they’re all one person. Shortly thereafter, they discover the planet is actually a hive-minded telesymbiotic biomass, and has been showing both our travelers what it believed they wanted to see, probably in an attempt to keep them there. Lyta uses her Vorlon-enhanced abilities to destroy the malevolent being, and they go on their way.

We had a split vote on this story. Jim, Troy and JP were neutral, and Raul gave it a thumbs-up.

The final story of the episode was “Space, Time, and the Incurable Romantic”, also published in Amazing Stories #602.

The final story for this episode was published in Amazing Stories #602 and occurs, approximately 300 years after Marcus Cole’s death (which we saw in Season 4 of the original series.

Marcus has been in cryo-sleep since his death, put there by Susan Ivanova in her meager hope that someday his life could be restored after he gave it to save her. When he learns what happened, he decides he must resurrect Susan, no matter the cost. Finding an archive that captured a volume of Susan’s memories on data crystals, he obtains them and brings them to a “doctor” who is willing to create a clone of Susan and restore the memories. To pass the time between the creation of the clone and its growth to the age at which Susan died, he puts himself back to sleep for 32 years.

He awakens, takes possession of the clone and brings her to an idyllic place where they can finally “live” in peace together.

The four of us reacted badly to this story, giving four thumbs-down, feeling it tarnished (if not ruined) the character of Marcus as we knew him.

Please join us next time for what will be the final episode of the Babylon Project Podcast,when we discuss three more short stories from the B5 universe. As always, we hope you can read along with us, and join in on the conversation!

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