As I foretold, I have returned to this thread. So much going on here. Lets start with a few questions and thoughts - spoilers herein.
The origin of telepathy, a lot of different dates are mentioned. I am somewhat confused... when was the first set of telepaths actually crafted? I love the beginning of the book and how telepathy is discovered. Truly brilliant. Some freakin' grad students were making yet another shitty paper on telepathy which everyone at the time of course regards with proper skepticisms and thinks is retarded until there are results. It's important that it was grad students, not real researchers at first... who would have dismissed the thought almost immediately as garbage and never spent time on it. And of course the one study and talk show drama that many silly topics receive long before they are perceived with any legitmacy. The amount of skepticism and the later public outcry / overreaction was very well written and I found it most believable. Human nature is what it is.
Senator Lee Crawford: Now here is an interesting character. The man is essentially the founder of the Psi Corp., but what I enjoyed was his behavior and motivations. Not truly an evil man, but not a hero either, Crawford does his best to stop violence and ultimately comes up with a solution to "The Telepath Problem" that is a lot less dramatic and oppressive than some of his counterparts might have implemented. Not above getting messy, the man is certainly no role model and obviously is interested in increasing his own political power, but also seems to be aware and concerned with the social ramifications of his creation. I was confused as to what killed him. Was it Monkey and Kevin? Or just Monkey and Kevin didn't try to stop it? He obviously had a close relationship with Kevin and Kevin was saddened by his death... did he really have a large hand in it?
Alexander Family: I was worried when they introduce, "Blood" Alexander as a powerful telepath - it seemed unlikely given what we know about Lyta the P5. Still, this was a great play on the "5 generations back" line, and the author seemed to have a handle on the subleties of the plot after all when Natasha Alexander is "sadly only P5." Not sure how I feel about Lyta's mother having an encounter with a Vorlon before Lyta... they're going to have to do one hell of a job explaining why Lyta of all people ended up on B5 with Kosh, otherwise I'm not buying the coincidence.
Other telepath ancestors: I caught a Winters and an Ironheart. I knew that the Winters girl would eventually be brought into the corp. The "diary of Ann Franke" format was a nice touch, because you know just by her last name which way she's going to go. I don't remember the last names of any other telepaths in the story right now, were there other references in there that I missed? I find it interesting that Monkey ends up being both an ancestor of the Alexander family and the adopted father of the Vacet / Bester line. Hell, Lyta and Al are almost related...
The book had a great challenge in that it had to jump around through time a lot and write new characters. The last sequence with Matthew and Fiona and Stephen and their awkward relationship with one another was very human, very real, and actually made me care about these characters who were introduced only in the last quarter of the book. The internal conflict within Stephen was fantastically written. The relationship made even more complex that, ya know, they can read each others minds.
So weird to read a B5 book that takes place almost entirely on earth, among humans. But I really liked it. I might jump in with more thoughts later but I'd like to hear some responses from some of you who have read this. If you haven't, you really should do so - it's a great book.
