For a time in the 1990s, 'Babylon 5' was required watching for all serious sf fans, even those who normally scorned something as minor as a tv show. Here was a show written, produced and directed by a proper sf fan, someone who had grown up reading the literature of our dreams. JMS (as he is known) had finally got the green light to make the sort of sf show that he wanted to see; and many of the rest of us did, too. He enlisted a major sf author, Harlan Ellison, to advise and help him, and he got a number of known authors to write scripts for him. But most of the work he did himself.

B5 was notable, for the first time in episodic sf tv series, for having a coherent five-year story arc; this is now taken for granted in series tv, but at the time it was unusual for a series to blatantly work on that basis. This book is the script (with a few additions) of one of the key episodes in that story arc, 'The coming of Shadows'. It deals with love, hate, interstellar politics, tragedy, intrigue and revelations. The episode won a Hugo award, which in this case is a recommendation and meant even more to JMS who had, in his sf-reading youth, taken the Hugos to be a mark of recommendation. ( )