>So JMS, what's next for the world of B5?

Dunno.
>
>I do hope you haven't given up.
>
Given up what?

>By the way - what went wrong?

Dunno...did something go wrong? Did the master tapes of B5 get degaussed or
something?

Not to make light, but you have to look at this from my side...as I said, the
main thing was the five years. We got them. Anything else is a bonus. The
finished eps are there, and will be for as long as images are transmitted.
It's there, on the shelf.

Will something else happen with B5 down the road someday? The universe being
as cyclical as it is, almost certainly. But if nothing ever does, *I'm okay
with that*.

I was at a convention a while ago -- one of the last I attended, and you can
put a cause and effect thing there if you want -- and there were all these
actors and people campaigning for their shows to come back, from V to
Battlestar to Lost in Space, you name it...and people kept coming up to me and
saying, with great gentility and real affection, "I hope you get your show back
on again."

And I kept trying to tell them...I ain't here for that. I'm not trying to get
it back on. If that were the case I wouldn't have chosen to end it after five
years in the first place. I was there to celebrate that we'd *done* it, not
that it should come back or that I wanted people to campaign for it. Which is
why I haven't urged writing campaigns or anything else.

I set out to tell the story I wanted to tell, and I told it. If something else
in the B5 universe comes along, terrific, I'm there...but if not, that's okay
too. It's like Zack said in Sleeping in Light, which was meant as a sorta coda
to the production of the show...everything we set out to do, we did, and nobody
can ever take that away.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2002 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>Hoping I'm not too far off base, JMS.

No, that's just about right.

The other thing that needs to be emphasized, in terms of fan letter campaigns,
is that the currency of the fan campaign is that it's been in large measure
devalued by over-use, at least in terms of how the studios see it (having been
told this straight up). These days *any* show that is nominally SF or fantasy,
when its time ends, gets a writing camapign to get it back or keep it on the
air. Good show, bad show, indifferent...the campaigns come regardless. So it
doesn't really carry the same weight it did once.

And I think they've always been of limited impact anyway...it did have some
impact on S3 of the original Trek, and if a show is "on the bubble" as they
say, bordering between renewal and cancellation...but beyond that, it really
doesn't have an impact.

The first ST feature wasn't commissioned because of fan mail, it came because
Star Wars came out and did huge bucks and somebody in the Paramount brain trust
said, literally, "waitaminnit, don't WE have one of those?" and rushed ST
forward.

It's not passivity on my part as much as just trusting to the forces of
history. Sooner or later, what goes around, comes around. My job is to make
sure it's done right when it happens.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2002 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)