Babylon 5: A Dark, Distorted Mirror

[Mitth'raw'nuruo]

Who all has read it? I've tried on several occasions; and despite the fact that the writing is AMAZING - I can never even make it through the first book because I simply can no read something that long on a computer.

I can not believe that this guy has not been published yet; it is a real shame. He does a much better job then many sci-fi writers I've read.


Thoughts?

http://www.b5-dark-mirror.co.uk/index.html


This site is the home of a five-volume series of novels which forms a dark "mirror universe" to the television show Babylon 5. The familiar characters are all there, but with a difference. Ten years before the story opens a single, pivotal event occurred differently....

.... And history changed. Destiny faded. All that was, and is, and yet may be was altered; irrevocably, eternally, forever.

And twelve years ago, as history changed, the two Vorlons in Dukhat's secret chamber, who once had been called the future, realised in that one, fateful moment, that the future they knew now belonged elsewhere, and a new future was theirs.

And the seeds of a bargain were struck.


What happen? Anyone that has watched B5 can easily figure it out. The Minbari stopped at the Battle of the Line....

[Winterwind]

Never heard about it, sounds awesome though. Babylon 5 is my most favourite show by ridiculous amounts, dwarfing any other; I'll make sure to give this a try. Thanks for posting that link here.

[Mitth'raw'nuruo]

yea; the author has won several fan fiction awards; and is not allowed to submit to several fan fiction companions because his work is to well written. He writes in the same episodic style as B5; and breaks his books; chapters down like that.

[Athaniar]

Babylon 5 Mirror Universe? Just to see those words together makes me full with joy. I'll definitely have to read it tomorrow.

[Winterwind]

"read it tomorrow"?
I hope you read really fast then, as the whole thing is... big. As big as a giant in the playground, at the very least.

[Varen_Tai]

OK, so this thread prompted me to start reading this, and I am almost done. Since I'm tech support at work, I read during my down time. :)

Here's my take - his treatment of the major canon characters is rather shallow, for the most part. His best characters are the ones he's created (like Sinoval) or very minor canon characters that he's developed (like Welles and Dexter Smith).

For instance:

Spoiler

Show

1. Garibaldi working for (and friends with) Bester? No way, no how. Garibaldi hates telepaths, always has, always will. The destruction of Earth wouldn't change that. And while I could see Bester being friends with a mundane that didn't hate telepaths (Ben Zayne), he would never make the effort to befriend one who didn't.

2. G'Kar and Londo are both very shallow. He has done very little real character development with either of them, as if he's saying, "Hey! Remember how cool and deep these characters were in the show? Well, that's how cool and deep they are in my story." In the show, G'Kar became a spiritual figure after a great deal of pain and intervention by Kosh, yet somehow in this story, he's reached that pinnacle long long before and without Kosh's influence. I don't buy it.

3. And one of the biggest stretches was David Sheridan being a Shadow agent. The man was way too principled to make that bargain under any circumstance. They would have had to do to him what they did to Anna in the show - put him in a ship because he wouldn't go along with them willingly.

His writing is good, I've certainly enjoyed the story well enough to read the whole dang thing. And the plot is well executed and plenty complex, worthy of the original in many ways.

The Sinoval/Kozorr/Kats/Sonovar subplot in particular I think was very well done.

Oh, yeah - another couple of complaints:

Spoiler

Show

"Comes the Inquisitor" was one of the best, most profound eps in the entire series, but the Inquisitor scene with John and Delenn was awful. No depth. They parroted a few of the lines from the ep, but there was no heart in the whole thing.

Same goes with the Vorlons in general - he kept repeating the same phrases they used in the show (and how often did they repeat themselves when they were being cryptic? The correct answer: veeerrry rarely) over and over. "Understanding is a three edged sword", anyone? Seriously, I think they've said it about 100 times. Sorry, making the effort to write for the Vorlons means coming up with more of your own stuff instead of repeating what JMS did time and time again.

After all that, I have to say, there's a REASON why fan fiction (good fan fiction, anyhow) is hard to write - people like me take apart your stuff based on how *I* perceive the story. :) So lest anyone say, "Oh yeah? Let's see you do better!", I'll admit that he did a better job of doing this than I likely could have, but I'm not interested in writing with someone else's characters in a story of my own. I'll do my own original thing both because it's easier to work with my own characters, and because it's harder to not use someone else's framework.

Final score: (This without getting to the very end yet) Somewhere in the range of 7.5-8.5, which is significantly better than almost anything else out there.

Side note: I've enjoyed how he's pulled in characters from some of the book series - Rem Lamas in particular is from the Centauri Trilogy, and one of the alien races is from another B5 book that I forget the name of. The race that getting knocked unconscious makes them into cold blooded killers.

Though while he obviously had read the Centauri trilogy before writing this, he did not read the Technomage trilogy, though that may simply be because it was not published yet, who knows?

V_T out.