Third Age Thursday

"It was the dawn of the third age of mankind, ten years after the Earth-Minbari War. The Babylon Project was a dream given form. Its goal: to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call, home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last, best hope for peace. This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2258. The name of the place is Babylon 5." - Jeffrey Sinclair

Welcome to a new feature here on UnfetteredBrilliance - "Third Age Thursday!" I had so much fun creating the "Walter White Wednesday" posts for the Wanna Cook? project that I decided to continue those weekly posts for the new project, which is gearing up now. Yep, Ensley and I are co-writing again - you can check out his blog here; he's got plans for weekly book-related posts, too - and this time, we're tackling Babylon 5, an American science fiction series that  deserves a book-length treatment to deal with all its incarnations.  See, Babylon 5 not only had five full-length television seasons, there were movies, spin-offs, canonical novels, short stories, and comics - and no one has ever collected material on all of it in one place. On top of that, Babylon 5 is the starting point for any discussion of the "long arc" on television - a fully-realized story spread out over these various media that was planned from the jump(gate). There has been a lot of information collected about the show over the years - it's been just over 20 years since the first episode was aired in January of 1994 - but assembling it all in one place (and with a word count!) hasn't been done, although the online Lurker's Guide does a yeoman's job.

We know this is a huge project and we know that Babylon 5 fans are passionate and we're bound to skim something that is near and dear to some fan's heart in the effort to cover everything (and keep to that pesky word count; our publisher wants one book, not a multi-volume set!) - but we promise to do it justice. After all, we're fans, too!

So please, follow the progress of Dreams Given Form: An Unofficial Guide to Babylon 5 by linking to these posts, following us on Twitter and using other forms of social media - and tell us what you want included! We've got our ideas (and our dreams regarding interviews!) but that doesn't mean we don't want to hear yours. The finished manuscript is due in a year (Sept. 1, 2015) with publication sometime in 2016 - we'll keep you informed as things progress.

Check back next Thursday!

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