Customer Reviews

The A to Z Guide of Babylon 5

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

THIS IS A VERY HELPFUL BOOK BUT ONLY COVERS SEASON 1, 2 AND 1ST 3 EPISODES OF SEASON 3.

Not much to say really. This book really covers everything a Babylon 5 index should hold: facts, names, dates, people, tribes & races, spacecraft, the works. What can only be suggested to the author and the publishing company is that a re-print is not a new edition, so people who have bought the previous edition do not need to buy the same book twice. Also a required reading for all Babylon 5 fans, together with the Andy Lane guide.

No matter what you want to know about the most minute detail of the BABYLON 5 series, it's in there.this is a guide where the characters and references, however brief in appearance, rate an entry. The best for beginners and afficianados alike. A must for "fivers".

Despite containing little (nothing?) that is new to regular visitors to the Lurker's Guide and other on-line B5 resources, this little tome brings it all together in a easy to reference book that can be carried with you if needed.
The only flaw, as has been mentioned in other eviews, is its history - covering only the first two seasons. It does this well however and enables us to find out what even a delicately adjusted PAUSE on the VCR fails to reveal in the way of newspaper articles/headlines etc.
If/When a revision is brought out it will make one of the most useful reference works available.

btw - for the previous review, vocabulary aside the term used in the episode WAS anti-agapic! Maybe jms erred somehwere!!

This book is a British production, continuing the tradition of "Babylon 5" being more popular abroad than at home. This shows in its odd size and poor production -- not that British books are necessarily inferior to American, but at this present time the British seem to have a lower minimum standard. Its origin is also occasionally betrayed by such locutions as "baseball pitch". (That's a "baseball field" to us colonials.)

The book is thorough, although somewhat dated, covering the show only through "A Day in the Strife" (although an attempt was made to add one fact from "Voices of Authority", but so hurriedly as to create the book's single greatest howler). It also covers the first four original paperback novels and all 11 issues of the first DC comic book series.

Most of the faults in the book seem to have been made in typesetting. However, the author alone must be blamed for the many references to Jha'dur's immortality serum as an "anti-agapic"; the word, of course, is "anti-agathic". (An "anti-agapic" is a drug that makes Christians suddenly vote Republican.)

All these faults, and others, aside, this book is, at present, without competition in hardcopy. There are better resources on-line, but none are so easily portable. I do not regret owning a copy, and, given the tremendous effort that has clearly put into it, let us hope that the author will have just a little more time for checking the galleys before the second edition (and I, for one, would be willing to buy it) goes to press.

Despite the warnings of how dated the book's material is, given the widew scope of history on the show, this novel is invaluable to even the most casual fan of sci-fi tv. It's well written seems stunningly thorough and even goes into the more references that many might overlook. All in all it's the best reference guide without being online.

The book includes a list of all the main characters, and it describes them very similar to the real series on television. Although the book is written in partil particip, it's a good forum for all Babylon5 lovers