No, I did not use "The Faded Sun" as (to quote you) "a source when
(I) created the Minbari."

That's called plagiarism.

And now I'm going to vent for a moment.

Why the fuck is it that every time a TV writer comes up with
something, everybody scurries to figure out what book or short story it
was swiped from? That standard is virtually never applied to novels that
I've seen. But it always comes to us TeeVee types.

I have a brain, you know. I'm perfectly capable of thinking up
stuff on my own. I've published novels. I've published short stories.
I've written plays. I've never read ANY of Cherryh's work that I can
recall.

Instead of suggesting something was cribbed, all you needed to say
was, "So, JMS, where did you get the name Minbari?"

And I would've told you that a "minbar" is the name for a pulpit in
a Mosque. The first time I heard that, I thought it would be great as a
name for an alien or an alien planet. And the people who would live there
would be called Minbari.

Not everything that comes out of TV is cribbed, okay?

End of venting.

If I seem a bit pissed, it's not specifically directed at you but at
the general sense that TV writers have the creative capacity of blowfish
and are incapable of creating *anything* on their own. (And you weren't
pointing to just the name but to the whole concept and parts thereof.) I
don't mean to flame, but I've heard it enough over the years, and I'm
getting a little tired of it.

Every TV writer gets it, and almost no prose writer does, and that's
simple discrimination and stereotyping.

jms