The first volume of the “Asked and Answered” series is now available from B5Books.com
OVERVIEW OF THE ASKED & ANSWERED SERIES
It’s true. The creator of Babylon 5 answers 5,296 fan questions covering every aspect of the show in over 100 categories in this new Babylon 5 book series.
J. Michael Straczynski answered these questions as they surfaced over a period of 18 years as part of an online experiment he started in 1991 and continues to this day.
This makes Asked & Answered something that has never been done before with a television show: an oral history IN REAL TIME. No revisionism. Nothing forgotten. No detail spared. Because this dialouge with fans starts in 1991, it pre-dates the production of the Babylon 5 pilot, so you’ll discover JMS’ complete vision for the series, many aspects of which never made it to the screen.
Even better, these questions and answers include interactions on AOL Bulletin Boards, GEnie Forums, the moderated usenet group, CIS Discussion threads and Chat Transcripts, some of which are not available in archives anywhere.
In addition to Babylon 5, Asked & Answered includes JMS’ responses to personal questions about his life, politics, love, religion, writing and more. These responses are grouped with a related B5 topic showing fans – for the first time – the provenance of the Babylon 5 philosophy and culture. All that plus JMS’ real life stories behind the stories.
To make this the ultimate reference, this series took 2½ years and a crew of four B5 experts – in addition to J. Michael Straczynski – to compile, categorize and edit.
As the cover notes, this is only part 1. There will be 5 parts (hmm,coincidence?) to this series.
Part 1 is red, the same color as the first Babylon station, and Part 5 is blue, the same as the fifth Babylon station. I’m not sure about the color of the middle volumes.
No word yet on the possible electronic index they mentioned on the podcast.
Gary, as I understand, there are no colors assigned to the middle volumes. Volumes 2 and 3 spontaneously combusted at the printers, and the manuscript for Volume 4 mysteriously vanished.
…but when 4 re-appears several years later, it’ll be green, and will be the largest of the bunch. 😉
From Jan (Scripts Team): The basic appearance is the same white, only the title and part # colors will be changing. Assuming JMS approved them, the colors should be red, gold, purple, green, blue.
Heh heh, I was right about 4 being green. 🙂
Hehehe.. I found the cover really poorly designed.. Not really anything that scream Babylon 5…..
It would be great if we could hear from some people who ordered the books what they think of them. I have all the previous volumes of the series, but these books have not yet looked convincing enough for me.
For the most part, I am with the crowd that would love to have them as a digital edition. I find that I use the internet most times when I look for B5 quotes and not the book. The only time I used the book so far was when my internet connection was down (oh, what an awful day).
So, any _critical_ listener feedback on the books yet?
Cheers from Germany,
Starstuff
The first book looks really nice. Somehow seeing it in print, it is a lot better than I thought it would be. It is perfect for just randomly opening and getting absorbed into something. JMS did write a introduction for the first book.
As far as a digital edition – that would be nice as well, but we do have much of the material month by month at http://www.jmsnews.com