<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Crusade and the Telepath War should come first.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Not a chance. JMS has said, and I agree with him, that
Crusade was designed as a TV series and that's the way the story should be told. Until and unless he is absolutely sure that there is no way for the show to return he is not going to deal with the story in any other medium.
The only way that is going to happen is if there is no
Rangers series, or the series is made but is cancelled quickly. As long as
Rangers is on the air there is a chance that either Sci-Fi will want a second
B5 series or that he can deal with elements of the
Crusade story in
Rangers itself.
The Telepath War is being saved for a
B5 feature film - period. JMS has gone
out of his way to write around the event - including the timing of the
Rangers movie. He has also said that the outline Warner Bros. commissioned for the
B5 big screen adventure deals with the Vorlons and the Telepath Crisis. He isn't going to "waste" this idea on a novel.
The
B5 feature film will be much more likely if
Rangers is a hit, but even if there is no new series, or
Rangers doesn't catch on with fans, the feature is still possible. Hollywood sees gold in old TV shows (
The Six Million Dollar Man is making a big-screen comback, probably inflation-adjusted to Six Billion) and
B5 is starting to qualify. The Sci-Fi reruns have introduced it to a new audience, and if the DVDs do well, Warner Bros. Studios will probably sit up and take notice.
But it will be at least a year before a
Rangers series can establish enough of a track record for Sci-Fi to start thinking about
Crusade, and likely several years before Warner Bros. does anything about a
B5 feature film. (Especially given JMS's other responsibities, including overseeing as many as three TV series by that point.) So even if everything broke badly enough that we actually
got these two stories in book form, there is no way in the world that they're going to be the "first" of a new series of books. (Which again, nobody is planning or even thinking about as far as I know, much less writing.)
These two stories are simply off the table for the foreseeable future. And I say that's a good thing.
Regards,
Joe
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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net