home > SF > cons > The Wrap Party: B5 '98

The Wrap Party
21-24 August 1998, Radisson Edwardian Hotel, Heathrow

GoHs: J. Michael Straczynski , Harlan Ellison , James White , Bryan Talbot, Jack Cohen , Peter David, John Matthews, Inge Heyer, Dave Lally, ...

I don't go to media cons -- I prefer cons run by fans for fans, not by pros for money. But this was a fan con, to celebrate the five year arc of Babylon 5 , the best SF TV show ever , with the GoHs including Joe Straczynski -- B5 Executive Producer, writer, and Keeper of the Arc -- and Harlan Ellison -- B5 Conceptual Consultant, SF writer, and controversial speaker. So I went. And I had a great time. (Joe Straczynski was recovering from pneumonia, so was a little less ebullient than he might have been -- but he still had some fascinating insights.) But it was very much Morgan's convention.

There were non-B5 programme items, too. The first day was dominated by lots of interesting NASA, Mars, and Hubble Space Telescope stuff, then the focus moved to B5 itself.

Of gravitational lensing: Objects behind massive galaxies may appear brighter than they are.

The Radisson Edwardian Hotel is all very long, absolutely identical corridors --- "you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike". Even though I had been there less than three years earlier, at Evolution , it didn't help; I still got disoriented.

Programme highlights

• Inge Heyer and Dave Clements : Hubble and the Cosmos
• Inge Heyer : An Overview of the Mars Mission
• Peter David : GoH talk -- including the tale of "Skippy, the Jedi Droid"
• Panel: My Vision, Your Vision, Their Vision, Our Vision
• Inge Heyer : Living and Working in Space
• Panel: 4000 Years of Women in Science
• Panel: The Women of Babylon 5
• Harlan Ellison : GoH talk
• Joe Straczynski : A Work In Progress
• Jack Cohen : Credible Aliens... .
• Mary Talbot : Aliens and 'Otherness'
• Morgan interviews Harlan Ellison
• James White : My Life as a Fan
• Joe Straczynski and Harlan Ellison : GoH 'double act'
• Panel: The Hero in SF
• Quiz: Sounds Familiar -- unfortunately the sound system distorted the clips rather too much
• Jack Cohen : ...and What They Do to Each Other .
• Morgan : An Overview of B5
• Morgan interviews Joe Straczynski

Inge Heyer: An Overview of the Mars Mission

• The volcano Olympus Mons is the highest mountain on Mars, much higher than anything on Earth. It is so big and broad that if you stood on the top and looked down, all you would see is slope, no horizon.
• Continual sandstorms can also blow small rocks around.
• The two landing sites, previous Viking and recent Sojourner, have the same composition of sand -- the sandstorms have spread the sand everywhere.
• All the rocks are volcanic.
• Relative costs of space missions: the recent Mars mission cost $154M; the movie Waterworld cost $174M.

Panel: 4000 Years of Women in Science

• Introductory overview based on material from the 4000 Years of Women in Science website.
• Some wrangling over the definition of 'science', and that it hasn't been around for 4000 years. But most of the early examples were mathematicians and astronomers. And when the Hypatia's philosophy was repeated, there was much agreement that that sounded like a scientific attitude.
• When someone mentioned they had read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus , another audience member riposted with a recent cartoon punchline: "and Pop-psychology from Uranus". [Which joke I like for the additional reason that for the joke to work, you have to pronounce 'Uranus' correctly , not in the newfangled way.]

Panel: The Women of Babylon 5

• JMS: Someone pointed out to me that Sheridan's three wives: Anna, Lochley, Delenn, are Worker, Warrior, Religious. That was not intentional!
• JMS: writes roles to be gender-neutral if possible, then tells casting to hire the best person who walks through the door.

Harlan Ellison: GoH talk

• Anything not nailed down is mine. Anything I can pry up is not nailed down.
• Story: holding off 4 hoods with a gun, whilst dressed in a towel.
• Story: mailing the dead gopher to the publisher. [I first heard this story 13 years ago at Albacon '85 , and as far as I could tell, it was identical. Harlan claims that "I never lie, but I exaggerate like mad". Well, impressively, the exaggeration doesn't seem to increase with time!]
  • It is not my intention to fight City Hall. It is my intention to level City Hall!
  • If you can't hurt them in a game that they set up with their rules -- change the rules.
• Phil Dick was to paranoia what Disney is to diabetes.

Joe Straczynski : A Work In Progress

• Blooper tapes from all 5 seasons of B5 (including Londo singing Me and My Shadow with a life-size cardboard cutout).
• CGI views of the Crusade ship design.
• Description of Crusade 's premis (a 5 year mission to find a cure for Earth's plague) plus some clips from the first episode. Looks good! (Described as an "action adventure with some drama, where B5 was drama with some action adventure".)
  [ 2 Jan 2001 : The series did not deliver , unfortunately.]
  
• Preview viewing of the B5 TV movie The River of Souls , with Martin Sheen and Ian McShane. It takes place on Babylon 5 several months after the end of the Arc. It was great -- but more than that, I will not say yet, for we were sworn to secrecy :-)
  [ 27 Feb 99 : it is now officially out on video, so I can review it at last .]
  

Jack Cohen : Credible Aliens...

• Intro: "Jack has very many talks -- but only one set of slides!"
• There are 32 good ways to make life, that we know of.
• Chemistry isn't simple; school chemistry isn't true , and isn't typical . There are about 16 intermediate steps in turning hydrogen and oxygen into water, and it's autocatalytic.
• The oldest proteins we know are 'boiling water' proteins: there was life almost as soon as possible.
• The animal liberation lie: 14 starlings die (are eaten ) for each 2 that breed; 9998 tadpoles/frogs die for each 2 that breed; 3999998 cod eggs are eaten and cod die for each 2 that breed. Most lab, domestic and agricultural animals have better lives, and much better deaths, than in the wild.
• Nearly all species go extinct without evolving into new species.
• During evolution, some things have happened independently many times, and are Universals :
  • Photosynthesis: there are still 4 different kinds, and many more have gone extinct
  • Fur: mice, bumble bees, plants
  • Flight: insects, fish, birds, bats
  • Sex
  • Horns: beetles, rhino
  • Eyes
  • Trunks: elephant, giraffe. (The giraffe has long front legs for running, and a long neck as 'a tube to drink through without kneeling'. The giraffe has its face at the front of the tube; the elephant has its face at the back of the tube.)
• Running evolution again would give universals, but not Parochials :
  • chordates/vertebrates from a particular ancestor
  • The particular fish that came out of the ocean had its airway crossing its foodway. If a different fish species had come out, we wouldn't choke.
  • Also, it had its reproductive and excretory systems mixed up. If it hadn't, we wouldn't have 'dirty' books -- we'd have different kinds of hang-ups.
  • Pentadactyl limbs are particularly parochial.
• Is intelligence universal or parochial?
  • Octopus and mantis shrimps seem very intelligent
  • Dolphins seem to have people inside
• Is 'extelligence' (keeping some of what would otherwise have to be in telligence outside ourselves: culture, libraries, etc) universal or parochial? That's a different matter.
  • Captive meerkats have invented new 'posts' (such as getting the food from the keeper) that are appropriate for a zoo environment.
• The Flintstones have got into our heads and given us lots of hidden assumptions about prehistoric people.
• For credible aliens, we want to know what could plausibly happen if we ran evolution again. We want to explore the universe of possibilities around the actual. We need to know the rules, so that we can generate other instances.
• Most animals bring themselves up. We are 'complicit'. Babies train their mothers to pick things up by rewarding them with a smile.
• The progression "1, 2, 3" is inbuilt in our culture:
  • Straw, wood, bricks.
  • 1st king's son fails; 2nd nearly succeeds; 3rd succeeds.
  • Throwing items on "1, 2, 3 "
• We learn 'cunning' and 'sly' from what the fox does in our stories. There are different icons in different cultures. It's 'sly and cunning is the fox', not 'the fox is sly and cunning'. But animals form a very specific part of all our cultures.
• We find some animals cute . We have a pathological love for children that extends to these animals. No other animal does this.
• We domesticate animals, including ourselves. Various social rituals, especially puberty rituals, exclude some people from breeding.
• What kinds of creatures do we use for aliens in our stories? In SF, we invent particular kinds of aliens because of who we are. We use things ready in our imagination, but that wouldn't occur on another planet, or here if we ran evolution again.
  • Big cats are enormously potent symbols to us, and so crop up everywhere as SF aliens.
  • Greys cannot possibly be aliens -- they are far too anthropomorphic -- and so must be from our minds.

Mary Talbot: Aliens and 'Otherness'

• This is "English Alien Centennial Year" -- War of the Worlds is 100 years old. This features the first aliens in English literature, probably written due to Well's fear of German invasion. Ironically, the previous year, an alien invasion story was published in Germany, and that story has a peaceful resolution.
• Aliens classified as
  • Evil Adversary: plastic, or shiny, or creepy crawly monsters, or ugly
  • Benevolent: divine helper; kindly big brother
  • Hero (usually male)
  • 'Racial Other': such as the Star Wars bar aliens; there just to be 'different'
• The B5 aliens poke holes in the god/demon stereotypes
• In SF TV and films, sexual attraction crosses species boundaries. Our male/female categories are so firmly set that the improbability is not that apparent to us. Also, the aliens don't actually represent other species , but rather other cultures and ethnicities. These are social constructions, not biological constructions.
• The cultures of earth map on to the cultures of B5. We need to draw on our human culture to make 'credible' alien cultures. In B5, all the humans are 'native English speakers', whereas many aliens have 'foreign accents' -- a way of emphasising their alienness.
• What is 'ethnic'? Although they are, we wouldn't describe the Womens Institute as an ethnic group, or fish and chips as ethnic food, or bowler hats as ethnic headgear. A Home Counties civil disturbance would not be described as an ethnic riot.
• 'Human' is used as a gradable adjective: "he smiled, and was suddenly more human".
• The humanisation of Delenn (who is then subject to racial intolerance from fellow Minbari). When Minbari, she is full of dignity and authority. As a human, she smiles more, has hair problems, and becomes 'bendier'. Is she just being groomed as Sheridan's mate? [I'm not convinced by this: she might look more 'feminine' on the outside, but she's pure unyielding steel on the inside. Just think of the "Be somewhere else" scene from Severed Dreams .] If a male Minbari became human, what changes would he undergo to become 'more human', that would reflect male stereotyping?

Morgan interviews Harlan Ellison

• He has 250,000 books at his home.
• Conceptual Consultant role: he was bothered by one episode, it took him ages to figure out the problem, then he realised the bamboo wasn't moving in the biosphere scenes. He'd read somewhere that the bamboo dies in Biosphere 2 because it needs movement. But B5's biosphere had no breeze, no insects, it was just a set. Joe agreed to have a wind machine for the next scene: it made so much noise it was a disaster and they had to reshoot!
• TV: it is arduous, demeaning, backbreaking work. They have no loyalty, and they don't care what they fill the hours with.
• "Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle"
• When something good happens in TV/films, it happens by chance. It is an art form run by businessmen.
• Money is what they give you if you do your job right.
• The person who designs the house is the architect; the person who builds it is the carpenter. (It should be the same relationship between scriptwriter and director.)
• Two pieces of good advice he was given about Hollywood:
  • "Achieving success in Hollywood is like climbing a pile of cow shit to pluck a perfect rose -- and when you get to the top you discover that you have lost the sense of smell."
  • "Keep writing the books, else you won't be taken seriously in Hollywood."
• I told a director he had "the intellect of an artichoke" -- and he repeated that to Variety ! Only someone with the intellect of an artichoke would do that.
• TV/ film can be Great Art: the test is if you can't not watch it.
• TV art: An Englishman's Castle (BBC drama of alternate history Britain after Germany wins WWII [find a copy, send it to Harlan, and earn his undying gratitude!]), the occasional episode of LA Law and Hill Street Blues , [others]... But the medium has less potential for greatness, because of all the random factors.
• I was a clue on Jeopardy . I got more calls about that than anything else!
• World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award: I had won the award because my work was so good they couldn't not give it to me, even though they wanted to.
• Story: (not) dropping the Chandelier
• I will tell you all . That way I can never be blackmailed, not by you, and not by me .

Jack Cohen : ...and What They Do to Each Other

• Many things needed for reproduction are the opposite of what is needed for everyday survival. Survival means defensive mechanisms [famous photo of porcupines being very careful here] and camouflage. Putting food energy into a yolk is poor survival behaviour.
• Classification of Tactics of Sexual Congress (as opposed to Vegetative Reproduction)
  1. Tactics of Assimilation: Assimilate the business of sex into everyday life: herring lay sperm/egg cells every night, whether or not the other sex is present.
  2. Tactics of Separation: separate reproduction and survival completely
     • Royals: separate the feeding/breeding into different animals: queen bee + workers; wolves (one female does all the breeding)
     • Alternation: breeding seasons
     • Terminal: breed at the end of life: mayflies; salmon
  3. Copulation
     • Amplexus: occurs over an extended time period, a very dangerous time: dogs
     • Rapid transfer of sperm into female, who is then independent.
• We cannot say what aliens will be like, only what they will not be like: they will not have Parochials. (Cartoonist Gary Larson puts parochials into the mouths of creatures for whom it is inappropriate.) Sex is a Universal: it has been invented at least 20 times on Earth. Some fungi and plants have more than two sexes. But what parts of sex are universal, and what parts are parochial?
  • Parochial: humans look after their children and anything else 'baby', like cute animals. Chimpanzees eat the babies during wars -- there is nothing 'sacred' about young to them. Also -- lots of animals eat the male!
  • Universal: embarrassment about genitalia, because it is 'unphysiological'. Many animals want to "do it somewhere where I can't be seen".
  • Parochial: self-mutilation, like body-piercing
  • Universal: pornography. We have images of all sorts of things we are 'turned-on' by, such as food, cars.
  • Parochial: incest. It is probably taboo in our culture, because of the dangers of inbreeding. But gerbils, lemmings and teepee mice (and the Egyptian Pharaohs) mostly breed brother-sister. After a few generations the bad genes have gone, and it's a good way to stay mostly the same.
  • Universal: overproduction of young, with lots being eaten before they breed
  Warning: universals that have happened lots of times on this planet might be parochial to this planet. But they probably aren't.
• "Put the genes for the pouch of a kangaroo into a stork -- and get air mail!". But the genes of a kangaroo won't work in a stork -- they might give the same proteins, but those proteins won't do the same thing in the different environment. The same sodium pump gene makes 'vestigial wing' in one fly, and 'fat feet' in another.
• 7 blind men and elephant story:
  • Original: One insists its a rope, one a snake, one a leaf, one a wall, ... Each sees only a part, and none can see the 'truth' that it's an elephant.
  • Twist: Picture of a brick wall with a snake, rope etc dangling from it, and the blind men insisting "Yep, it's an elephant all right".
• A lot of things that we don't know, we don't know that we don't know.
  • Bernoulli effect makes aeroplanes fly: so how do they fly upside down, then?
  • Rainbows because water drops are like prisms: no they're not!
  These are all 'lies', or simplifications; things that don't work. In particular, they often don't work when you try to put them together into a bigger theory.
• Stick insects lay eggs that look like seeds. Victorian explanation: "if you look like a plant, your eggs will look like seeds". But things eat seeds! After recent Australian forest fires, they found stick insects all over the new shoots -- but the eggs take 6 months to hatch. They were coming out of ants nests! The ants store them because they look like seeds.
• Universal: swarming: locusts. Locust strategy is amplexus, taking about 2.5 hours. But they are fairly safe in a swarm. Frogs hide underwater. Stick insects use camouflage (two sticks still look like sticks!)
• Attenborough's Trials of Life : They got 13 different shots of a tarantula wasp breeding (it lays its eggs in a spider, which acts as a food source for the young). Not one of these shots was of a successful breeding: one, the wasp stunned a spider but forgot to lay an egg, another, it got eaten by a bird before it could lay its eggs, ... The system works rarely .
• Puberty rituals, tattooing, scarring, etc, act as a form of selection for obedience to authority: domestication of people by people.
• Handicap theory: peacock: I've managed to develop despite carrying this ridiculous tail. Martial artist drinking paraffin scene in Third Chimpanzee

Morgan: An Overview of B5

This was the 2nd part of Morgan's B5 thesis, the first having been "The Emergence of Arc", which only about half the audience, myself excluded, had attended. This led to some repetition/arguing/confusion.

• Although other programmes now have arcs ( Xena , The X Files , Millennium , ...), B5 is still significantly different.
• B5 has taught us to have higher standards. Your 'best' episode is only so because of all the others stuff. It is sui generis ['of its own kind, peculiar, unique']. It should be judged as a whole.
• It's not a 'big battle, happy ending, all live happily ever after' kind of story.
• 5th season: some people feel that the characters, especially the telepaths, are not as good. Also, there are fewer arc elements early in the season. This may be due to the rearrangement to bring the Earth War forward into season 4 (when it was not certain that season 5 would occur). So instead of one 20'x20' five year tapestry, we got a 14'x14' tapestry, and another smaller one. The telepath story was forced into this separate picture, and may have been the main casualty of the split.
• B5 doesn't give the audience the same thing all the time. There are changes in the arc, so different people will like different parts. But JMS didn't feed this audience reaction to/dislike of the changes back into his creation -- he kept his vision.
• B5 has many of the defining features of (British) soap opera:
  • episodic: a storyline arc across more than one episode, with recapitulation to help new viewers
  • domestic: about the home lives of the characters
  • matriarchal: strong female characters who drive the plot
  • spirituality and religion

Morgan interviews Joe Straczynski

• Had two different stories: one of a spacestation, one of a Galactic Empire. One day, in the shower, realised these were actually one story: the galaxy-spanning story as played out in the microcosm of the spacestation.
• "You are asking a question that philosophers have debated since the dawn of recorded television."
• I write 10 pages a day, every day, regardless. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd still write -- it's how I define myself.
• I hate being a producer. But I do it to get my vision, my words on the page, made. I was a writer on Jake and the Fatman ("He can't run. He can't act. Together, they solve crimes.") I had a villain who says to a cop who has been chasing him for 10 years: "I should be flattered; I've got my own personal Ahab." I had to remove it, because a studio executive, despite an MBA, didn't get the reference . (So I mailed him a comic book version of Moby Dick .)
• The main creative force, the auteur , has become synonymous with 'director'. But it can be the producer, the writer, the cinematographer,... With B5, it's the Executive Producer.
• The quality of the answers you get depends on the quality of the questions you ask. Too much TV asks trivial questions.
• Own Russian background: dour and pessimistic, but not depressed: self-deprecating humour.
• As a kid, moved house every six months. The people kept changing, but the town Library was always the same -- it gave continuity.
• You get to know your characters so well that you know how they will respond when you drop them in a particular situation.
• The ancient Babylonian creation myth has forces of order (Vorlon) and chaos (Shadows).
• Kosh knew the original Valen. The other Vorlon were a bit uncertain of him, he was too sympathetic to humans.
• Both the Shadows and the Vorlon believe equally that they are right , and both believe they are working in the best interests of everyone. The younger races have to 'kill their parents' before they can develop on their own.
• Took advantage of the preconceptions of the audience, and used those against them. Here's the good guy, the bad guy, the comic relief,... It's like karate: using the audience's strength against them. So, no big battle to end the Shadow War.
• The Shadow/Vorlon conflict was ideological, and needed an ideological solution. For the Earth War, who had the biggest guns was important. Different ways of solving conflicts.
• This show is too hard to do, that I would change it to something I didn't want just because the ratings dip a bit. This is the story I want to tell. I do it by saying 'yes' one more time than they say 'no'. Also, we had backing from some in the studio who believed in the show.
• You can never be afraid, else they've got you: if they smell fear, they've got you. Rod Serling wrote Velvet Alley , on how Hollywood can get to own you, by giving you money and fame until you are used to them, then threatening to take them all away. I've kept a relatively frugal lifestyle, and put the money in the bank, so I could any time just walk away.
• I like playing with form, trying new things. The reporters on B5 in The Illusion of Truth : seeing the 'same' events from two perspectives. The 'dreams' in The Long Night of Londo Mollari . And Intersections in Real Time , that has no B story. Some of the scenes in elevators are the best, and I wanted to do 2 people just talking for a whole episode. But I chickened out, and put a B story in Intersections . However, the episode as originally shot was 11 minutes too long, the next episode was 11 minutes too short, and the B story was 11 minutes! The universe was telling me something!
• A propensity for putting people into a small room and trying to destroy them, like the Delenn/Sebastian episode Comes the Inquisitor . Until you have suffered, you do not know your real strengths and capacities.
• The extras playing Narn sit together; the extras playing Centauri sit together. As an experiment, we changed one actor from a Centauri to a Narn. He moved to sit with the Narn after a while!
• No long project survives contact with reality. So there have been some changes to the original idea; but nothing major got missed. A few B stories, such as between Lennier and Vir, were dropped because there wasn't time.
• As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife. My works are my children. B5 is my mark. I believe that B5, through reruns, will still be around in 40, 50 years time.