On 19 February 2022, I recorded material for two episodes of the Doctor Who Literature podcast.
For my first episode, I told host Jason Miller how my love for Doctor Who led me to Harlan Ellison, who wrote the 1978 introduction for the U.S. editions of Doctor Who novelizations published by Pinnacle Books. (I share the segment with Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe, who returned to pay tribute to writer Chris Boucher.)
For eight years, I was senior editor at B5 Books, overseeing an array of volumes documenting the creation of Babylon 5 and its spinoffs for Synthetic Worlds Publishing and Publishing 180. When I resigned on 31 December 2016, I had one regret: that Volumes 2 and 3 of Crusade: What the Hell Happened? by J. Michael Straczynski remained unreleased, their publication postponed by the author’s busy schedule.
While thirteen may have proved an unlucky number for Crusade the series—cancelled after that many episodes were produced—it’s a luckier one for the story of that ill-fated series, with Volumes 2 and 3 published in hardcover, paperback, and e-books thirteen years after Volume 1, which has been reissued.
While Volume 1 was reprinted as it originally appeared in 2010, I approached the editorial work on Volumes 2 and 3 from scratch, selecting the script drafts after thirteen years of detailed study and annotated each teleplay with information gathered while preparing my own books for the Babylon 5 Preservation Project.
Highlights include Straczynski’s first draft of “The Needs of Earth”, which differs substantially from the filmed episode; early drafts of later scripts, before TNT’s problematic resulted in a production shutdown; a version of “The Path of Sorrows” featuring Lyta Alexander and Lennier; as well as the two unfilmed stories that would have seen the series arc bare its teeth.
These are not the books as originally conceived in 2010 (or even 2022), but I’m pleased to see them finally complete the saga of the Excalibur in print.
For editorial and/or publishing services, please contact me at ellison.editor@gmail.com.
Crusade: What the Hell Happened? Volume 2 by J. Michael Straczynski (Synthetic Worlds, 2023)
Edited by Jason Davis. Cover art by Luc Mayrand.
Hardback ISBN: 9781630771331 • Paperback ISBN: 9781630771348
8.5″ by 11″ / 7.5″ by 9.25″ 354pp.
Crusade: What the Hell Happened? Volume 3 by J. Michael Straczynski (Synthetic Worlds, 2023)
Edited by Jason Davis. Cover art by Luc Mayrand.
Hardback ISBN: 9781630771324 • Paperback ISBN: 9781630771287
8.5″ by 11″ / 7.5″ by 9.25″ 354pp.
To purchase, please visit B5Books.com.
“We know that you know, Mr. Caul.”
I miss the static, or “snow” that analog televisions displayed in the absence of a signal. The Wikipedia tells me Indonesians call it semut bertengkar, the “war of the ants,” and that it was made up of a mix of “cosmic microwave background radiation, or more localized radio wave noise from nearby electronic devices.”
I liked it because it was what it was: noise. As television evolved, circuits came along to hide the noise behind placid blue screens, and honest noise gave way to a different kind of noise masquerading as signal, a pervasive, inescapable noise that exhausts me. I miss the noise of my youth.
In 1992, owning a live animal—or the finest imitation thereof—is an emblem of status among those too gene-damaged to flee Earth’s prosperous off-world colonies, where every citizen gets an android slave. The earthbound spend their time empathizing with Wilbur Mercer to prove their humanity while escaped androids attempt to hide among the refuse of humanity, evading bounty hunters like Rick Deckard.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick, relates to the movie Blade Runner (1982) as Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) relates to world history—recognizably the same place populated by similar characters, but seen from an entirely different perspective, informed by different parade of facts.
“There goes Stuart Sutcliffe. He could have been one of the Beatles.”
dialogue from Backbeat by Iain Softley, Michael Thomas & Stephen Ward
Stuart Sutcliffe (1940–62) accomplished so much in so short a time. Sometimes, the images are stronger than the sounds.
I have not read as much of Mark Twain’s œuvre as I should, A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT when I first dove into Arthurian mythology, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN in school, “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” at the behest of a friend, and others here and there.
But my favorite of Mr. Clemens’s works—thus far, at least—is:
“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offesnes,” which opens thus:
It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.
Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.
There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:
1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.
2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.
You can read the rest here: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/3172
Had the trailer featured even one note of Wojciech Kilar’s score or a scintilla of the mood that pervades the film, I could tell you why I went to see The Ninth Gate in early 2000. I went alone, to a pre-noon screening, and I’m pretty sure I drove straight from the theater to Barnes & Noble where I bought the book it was ostensibly based upon.
EL CLUB DUMAS (1993) by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Sonio Soto is a Favorite. As much as I loved the movie, I was astonished to discover that the screenplay by John Brownjohn & Enrique Urbizu and Roman Polanski had effectively omitted half the story—the better half, in my opinion—dealing with the works of Alexandre Dumas, père, and supplying the title to the novel. Thus began my love for literary mysteries. I’d read Umberto Eco’s IL NOME DELLA ROSA (1980) for a grad school class the next year and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s LA SOMBRA DEL VIENTO (2001) four years later. And, if I can ever achieve some degree of momentary stability again, I’ll finish my own long-gestating entry in the genre, put off time and again to look after other people’s books.
My friend recently told me of a notion he had, perhaps inspired by these Favorites of mine, so today’s Favorite is dedicated to Eric, incorporating his Dodo concept back into mine.
Despite being only five, I know precisely where I was on the morning of 26 May 1983: the parking lot of the United Artists Hulen 6. I’d previously seen E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982) in that multiplex, and now—thanks to my babysitter’s boyfriend, who camped out for tickets—I was going to see Return of the Jedi (1983) on the second day of its release.
I loved that theater, and saw most of my early movies there until 1988, when I moved away. (I somehow never noticed it became the UA 8 in 1986.) When I came back in ’92, the place was somewhat rundown, but it had become the art house cinema of Fort Worth, TX. Seemingly operated entirely by a staff of octogenarians and boasting the unique tactile experience of a floor stained by so many soft drinks that it took a significant act of will (and leg strength) to walk to your seat, I split my affections between it and its sibling on Bowen Road in Arlington (where worked the much-admired Karl), briefly forsaking them for the glitz of the extravagant new Eastchase location in ’97 before reaffirming my allegiance to my first love with a movie every Monday during the superlatively scheduled fall semester of my sophomore year in college. I remember standing alone in the theater for The Green Mile (1999), the chairs too rickety and uncomfortable for the length of the film in its last week of exhibition.
The Eastchase location is now operated by AMC, the Hulen is a Movie Tavern, and Bowen…is a self-storage place. I wonder what Karl’s up to.
Historical Note: According to the Digital Bits, I’d have seen a 70mm Six-Track Dolby Stereo presentation of Return of the Jedi, which is nice to know.
