Re: JMS: Midnight Nation

 Posted on 6/26/2002 by jmsatb5@aol.com to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated


>Midnight Nation soars above just about everything that I have ever read
>or seen... B5 included.
>
>It is a triumph of words and art; an utterly flawless story.

Thank you. It's a story that I'm inestimably proud of; I still can't get
through the last issue without falling apart, for some reason it just hits me
hard. It's a very personal story for me, and there's a lot of me in the
characters and what they're working through.

>You wrote (or said) a couple of years ago that you will not reach your
>prime for at least "10 years." Reading that, then, it was hard to
>imagine that you could ever top B5. I was thinking in terms of the
>majesty of the B5 story... Even with all it's flaws what could top it?
>And in short order you gave us Midnight Nation.

It came out far better than I could've hoped, and it's definitely my favorite
prose work to date. To compare it with B5, I dunno, that's kind of in a
separate category from everything else. It's the old comparins apples and
woodchucks thing.

BTW, two asides (and I'm putting this here because I generally am not posting
as much while my hand goes through therapy, I'm trying to do only the typing I
absolutely *have* to do)....

On the DVDs, last I heard they'll be out around mid-November, with the whole
first season at about a hundred bucks. I did the commentaries on Signs and
Portents and Chrysalis, and an on-camera intro and interview. They've also
done new interviews with Rick Biggs, Claudia, John Iacovelli, John Copeland,
Stephen Furst, Jerry Doyle and others. So it should be a pretty big deal
overall, much better than the movie dvd.

Item two, just for the humor of it...when we finished B5, all the sets were
demolished, no bits and pieces of it remain...with one exception, and it's a
doozy. The last remaining set piece from not only the B5 series, but from the
set of Babylon 4. An absolute rarity. I mention this because I just saw it
come up on ebay (I'd handed it off as a souvenir some time ago). I especially
liked the final line, where it said that the seller could not be held
responsible for temporal abnormalities that make the buyer's house disapper
mysteriously....

Funny stuff.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
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