The question of what is or isn't SF is one of the most boring and
pointless conversations you can have. And I tend to ignore people who
say, asyou do, "there's nothing sci-fi about the story." (Partly because
the term sci-fi is abhorrent and I don't like it.)

Babylon 5 is a dramatic series about people who live in a space
station in the year 2258. It is about their lives, on a daily basis. And
some things their lives come into contact with are "SF" oriented, and some
things are oriented toward their personal lives. To some people, unless
it's got hardware and technobabble, it ain't SF. For me, if it's on a
space station, in the future, with aliens...it's SF. (And by my lights,
SF stands for speculative fiction...which includes speculation on
society, religion, anthropology, psychology and lots of other areas.)

"A Canticle for Liebowitz" is one of the *classics* of science
fiction. But 99% of it takes place after a nuclear war, and there's NO
hardware, no aliens, no space travel, no nothing. Ditto for "Alas,
Babylon" and hundreds of other SF stories and novels.

It's as if someone in the 1800s wrote a novel about live in the
year 1994, and everything was about putting on jet packs and eating food
pills and talking to my secretary whose name is A7B...and nothing in it
about being married, or having friends over for dinner, or seeing a
baseball game, or having friends pass away.

This is our best attempt at a realistic dramatic series set in the
future, about the way people will live there. It isn't always going to
match the purely arbitrary notion that you *must* include some bit of
technobabble or hardware to meet someone's definition of SF. Like the
original Trek, it's an opportunity to address issues and themes that are
of general importance, and to advance the characters and the universe. To
me, it's important to say that, 250 years from now, we will *all* go into
space, all our cultures will continue, judaism included. No other series
has done this. Maybe you think that's unimportant because someone didn't
reverse the polarity on the tachyon driver. I happen to think that it's
very important.

jms