Featured Novel: Babylon 6: A New Era
It is the dawn of a new era. The Shadow Wars are over. The First Ones are gone. Now it is the time of the Younger Races, to meet the challenge of freedom from the past and to reach out and forge their own destinies among the stars.
So our story begins.
The world of Babylon 5, created by J. Michael Straczynski is one of the well-defined universes that reached out to those outside the science fiction world. But, we weren’t satisfied with that. We wanted more.
In April, a small group of us, now the MoBs, started chatting about ‘What if…’ scenarios. We didn’t like the idea or redoing the story that was already told. We wanted original and that’s what we went for. Within eight days, we had a solid idea, we had a cast and we had universe to explore.
In that spirit, we decided to move time up a bit and make certain concessions about characterization. We have no canon characters. And we wanted to keep it as true to the Babylon 5 universe as possible. It was decided that with a whole universe to play with, originality was the best way to go. The Babylon 6 station is exact to the Babylon 5 station to give those of us non-technical folks an edge.
There is an overall story - a threat to the universe as we know it that we are beginning to introduce into the story. It is a long term idea with little sidesteps along the way.
It is a city in space. And just like a city, it can support just about anything a city can. There are stories out there to tell. It is in each character’s ability to live a life on the station or as a transit visitor. We just need the characters to tell their stories.
This is what we are striving for at Babylon 6: A New Era. We want to interweave the personal stories with the overall novel story. Other novels try it the other way and it works for them. But, here the personal stories are what will drive our novel. It’s an interaction that we don’t see in a lot of novels that should be there.
It is the Earth year 2324. After 60 years of relative peace and growth, a new, as yet undefined threat is arising out of the depths of space to endanger that future. In order to meet it, the Younger Races have united to resurrect the Babylon Project. A new space station has been built over the neutral world of Epsilon 3. It is a port of call for ambassadors, businessmen, wanderers - travelers of every sort.
Are you ready for what lies out there? Come on over and find out. You’ll never know what might be lurking around the corner.
