The Unification Chronicles

As folks have started dig­ging through the time­line and other stuff on the wiki, they’ve noticed par­al­lels to Joe Straczynski’s Baby­lon 5.

1. Two ancient races, one devoted to chaos, the other to order, have been at war for millennia.
2. The war went cold about a thou­sand years ago when the chaos ancients were dri­ven away.
3. One of the ancients is still buried on a for­got­ten world at the edge of the galaxy, wait­ing to be woken up.
4. The most pow­er­ful of the younger races fought in that war a thou­sand years ago, suf­fered hor­ri­ble losses, and reveres the order-​​based ancients as gods.
5. Humans were genet­i­cally manip­u­lated by the order-​​based ancients.
6. Our first con­tact with the most pow­er­ful of the younger races results in a war based on a misunderstanding.
7. The most pow­er­ful of the younger races calls off the war rather than defeat­ing us.
8. The cen­tral human hero is a mav­er­ick mil­i­tary man with a trou­bled past, with ini­tials nearly the same as the author’s.
9. The human hero leaves his peo­ple to go to that for­got­ten world on the rim, seek­ing answers.
10. The human hero, allied with the one of the order ancients, dies fight­ing the chaos ancients.
11. Once the ancient war is over, the younger races turn on each other.
12. The most pow­er­ful of the younger races is nearly torn apart by its own caste structure.
13. The story ends with the for­ma­tion of a new galac­tic gov­ern­ment that should ensure a last­ing peace.

Wow, a baker’s dozen of damn­ing ripoff points. Sure looks like I’m rip­ping off Baby­lon 5. JMS should sue!

Only, really, I’m not.

I’ll admit Baby­lon 5 is a huge influ­ence for me, and UC was, in part, inspired by what Joe was doing on the TV machine. But it was also inspired by Christo­pher Golden’s Shadow Saga, and Asimov’s Foun­da­tion series, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and well, just about every other epic I’ve ever read or watched.

Because if you dis­till the above points down even fur­ther, you’ll see that what I’m really rip­ping off is the Bible. And Gil­gamesh. And the Can­ter­bury Tales. And the Iliad. And the Odyssey. And Beowulf. Because really, when you get down to it, mythic struc­ture is mythic struc­ture. Seri­ously. Read The Hero With A Thou­sand Faces and The Power of Myth by Joseph Camp­bell. The points above seem so famil­iar because they’ve res­onated to us over and over and over again, down through the cen­turies. They’re cen­tral to human sto­ry­telling, so it’s no sur­prise, really, that Joe and I would end up drink­ing from the same well. Let’s look at a few in particular.

Two ancient races, one devoted to chaos, the other to order, have been at war for millennia.

There are only so many fun­da­men­tal dichotomies you can pull from. Order and chaos didn’t start with Baby­lon 5. And if I’d gone with good ver­sus evil — which I find far duller to think about — would I be rip­ping off Lord of the Rings? Harry Pot­ter? Or the Bible?

One of the ancients is still buried on a for­got­ten world at the edge of the galaxy, wait­ing to be woken up.

Golden’s Shadow Saga did the same shtick with Charle­magne. As have count­less oth­ers. And hey, at least in my ver­sion the ancient in ques­tion is actu­ally a dragon. Y’know. Tradition.

Our first con­tact with the most pow­er­ful of the younger races results in a war based on a misunderstanding.

Remem­ber in the King Arthur mythol­ogy how Arthur and Mordred’s armies were poised to fight, but tried one last time to nego­ti­ate, until a sol­dier raised his sword to kill a snake and the other side thought it was an attack? Again, this is a mythic motif that has repeated over and over again in mul­ti­ple cul­tures. Come to think of it, this aspect of UC is really rip­ping off every sin­gle episode of Three’s Company.

The cen­tral human hero is a mav­er­ick mil­i­tary man with a trou­bled past, with ini­tials nearly the same as the author’s.

Okay, the ini­tials thing I’m def­i­nitely rip­ping off from Baby­lon 5. But as for the char­ac­ters of Jack Kil­lian and John Sheri­dan, they remind me a lot of Pat­ton, MacArthur, and count­less other war heroes in human his­tory. This is a clas­sic arche­type, bor­der­ing on cliché, actu­ally. I should be ashamed of myself.

Actu­ally, let’s look some of Joe Straczynski’s answers when he was asked a sim­i­lar question.

Okay, I’ve just read a bunch more of these…okay, I admit it, you got me…I’m doing Philip K. Dick right down the line…and I’m also doing George Orwell right down the line…and I’m doing Lord of the Rings beat for beat…and Chalker…and…and Cherryh…and I’m doing a vari­a­tion on the Bible, and King Arthur, and the his­tory of Baby­lon, and the Idylls of the King.… What?  What’s that you say?  You can’t be doing all of these right down the line, all at the same time?  Sure I can.  Because there IS no B5.  There’s a blank sig­nal that reg­is­ters in your brain, trig­ger­ing the last thing you read, or the most impor­tant thing you read.  It’s a care­fully rigged US Gov­ern­ment psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare exper­i­ment. I give up. jms

And

RE: “B5 is really X in dis­guise” You’re all right, and you’re all wrong. Is it Lord of the Rings? Dune? The Kennedy story? The saga of Camelot? The Foun­da­tion? A brief his­tory of World War II? The Bible? All these and oth­ers have been broached to me by peo­ple absolutely sure that this was the model for the series. (And, as an aside, this kind of dis­cus­sion gen­er­ally hap­pens only to TV writ­ers; nobody here is doing a panel called “Is Star­tide Ris­ing Really X in dis­guise?” This hap­pens to TV writ­ers because some­how it gets assumed that we haven’t got an idea in our heads that we didn’t swipe from somebody’s book. But that’s another topic for another time.) Baby­lon 5…is a Rohr­sharch test. An ink blot cre­ated by smash­ing actors, arche­types, saga-​​structure, myth and lan­guage against a sheet of paper, fold­ing it, and bash­ing it a few times. When you open it up and look inside, what you see is the saga clos­est to your heart and your expe­ri­ence. Because like all the works men­tioned a moment ago, B5 draws upon the same well­spring of myth, arche­type, sym­bol­ogy, and dime store soci­ol­ogy that feeds all sagas, from the Iliad on through to the present. Writ­ers, sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers in par­tic­u­lar, are like the beg­gar in Aladdin, who offered new lamps for old…we seize myths that have fallen out of cur­rency and recast them in newer guise, dust them off and hope a genie emerges. Our myths, the myths of Tolkien and Homer, of Hein­lein and Mal­lory, are eter­nal; they exchange one name for another, cast off one mask and assume the next. If you per­ceive their pres­ence in Baby­lon 5, it is because we have courted the myth, not because we have echoed one of their names from another place. King Lear van­ishes into Londo, Cas­san­dra peers out from behind the eyes of G’Kar, Gala­had answers to the name Ivanova, the Ora­cle at Del­phi is now wear­ing an encounter suit, and Sir Bede­vere is…well, that would be telling. So you’re all right. And you’re all wrong. Because it’s all ACTUALLY based on the 1967 Young Juve­niles novel “The Mad Sci­en­tists’ Club.” And I’m actu­ally chan­nel­ing Eleanor Roo­sevelt. (For­tu­nately, I already have the wardrobe.) Oh, yes…and I am the wal­rus, coo-​​coo ka choo.… jms

And there endeth the lesson.

Let’s hop in the Way­Back machine and head back to 1994. I was still in the Air Force, work­ing at the Pen­ta­gon, and inspired by a renais­sance in SF sagas on TV — Baby­lon 5, Deep Space 9 — I’d been work­ing on my own sprawl­ing space epic, try­ing to get it all right in my head. It was big, and I was try­ing to make sense of it. The back­story went back a long way, dozens of mil­len­nia, involv­ing an ancient race of pro­tec­tors called the Guardians and a sin­gle hive mind of humanoid telepaths known only as the Neme­sis. After months of run­ning in cir­cles, I decided to put it aside and write some­thing else.

I’d recently been turned on to Christo­pher Golden’s Shadow Saga, which I still think are the best vam­pire books out there, and I’d read almost exclu­sively hor­ror in high school, so I fig­ured, why not write a hor­ror novel as a change of pace. I came up with an idea where our myths and leg­ends about angels and demons were based on real, flesh-​​and-​​blood immor­tals that had walked the Earth since the begin­ning of the human race, manip­u­lat­ing human devel­op­ment for their own rea­sons. That devel­oped rather quickly into Between Heaven and Hell, and I was well on my way to writ­ing my first actual novel.

But then, about ten chap­ters into the book, some­thing weird hap­pened. I’d never really given much thought to where the immor­tals came from, why they were the way they were. And as I wrote, it dawned on me I knew exactly where the immor­tals came from. They had been put here by the Guardians after the Guardians altered part of the Neme­sis to sup­press the telepa­thy. Humans were an off­shoot of the Neme­sis, and the immor­tals had been left behind as the shep­herds, installed with the Guardians’ own love of order. After a while, the brain­wash­ing failed in some of the immor­tals, and they reverted to a devo­tion to chaos as the only way to improve, the Neme­sis phi­los­o­phy. And thus explained the angels and demons.

I wasn’t writ­ing a com­pletely unre­lated hor­ror novel as a change of pace. I was writ­ing a pre­quel to my space opera, one set on present day Earth. But it was still sci­ence fic­tion, and still part of the over­all tale.

I want to stress that this wasn’t a con­scious deci­sion. I had no inten­tion of con­nect­ing the two sto­ries, and had set out to delib­er­ately avoid Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles for a while. But the story had a bet­ter idea.

Folks, don’t be afraid to lis­ten to the story. It will tell you itself where it’s going. And in some cases, like I dis­cov­ered with UC, it won’t let you go even if you try to walk away and do some­thing else.