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Babylon 5, To Dream In The City Of Sorrows
By Kathryn M. Drennan
FINAL COUNTDOWN
"Stay in formation! Hold the line. No one gets through, no matter what!"
"Alpha leader! You've got a Minbari fighter on your tail! I'm on him."
"No! Mitchell! Stay in formation! It might be a-"
The shadow of the massive Minbari fighter fell across Sinclair's Starfury. "Oh, my God. It's a trap!"
"Mitchell! Break off! Break off!"
Too late. Starfury after Starfury blown to bits, exploding like miniature suns around him. Every ship of his squadron gone. Every Earth ship in his field of view destroyed.
"Not like this! Not like this! If I'm going out, I'm taking you bastards with me. Target main cruiser. Set for full-velocity ram. Afterburners on my mark... Mark!"
Sinclair was thrown back in his seat, his craft hurtling toward a collision with the Minbari cruiser. Ten, nine, eight, seven...
Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
Babylon 5: To Dream in the City of Sorrows is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Del Reyо Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright й 1997 by Dell Publishing
Babylon 5, names, characters, and all related indicia are trademarks of Warner Bros. й 1996.
Copyright й PTN Consortium, a division of Time Warner Co., L.P.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.delreydigital.com
ISBN 0-345-45219-4
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Ballantine Books Edition: August 2003
OPM 10 987654321
This book is dedicated with love
to Mom and Dad
INTRODUCTION
MISSING MOMENTS AND MIDNIGHT THOUGHTS
J. Michael Straczynski
MY friend Harlan Ellison has, from time to time, engaged in a bit of performance art. He will sit in a bookstore window and write a short story. As each page is finished, it's taped to the window for people to read. He can't backtrack, can't change it; it is what it is.
That trick is probably the closest available comparison to what has been done with BABYLON 5 over the last four years.
BABYLON 5 is a novel for television, with a definite beginning, middle, and end. It is also a work in progress, with its fair share of sudden turns caused when the real world impinges upon the writing process, or when better ideas are stumbled upon. Yes, one may plan to have Ivanova kick several Drazi senseless and escape from the trap they've set for her . . . but if Claudia Christian breaks her foot the day before you're to shoot that sequence, you adjust.
You keep going, and you never look back. Because unlike a print novel, where after the first draft is finished you can go back and smooth out the bumps in the road, you can't change what went before. It's out there, transmitted into the ether at approximately the speed of light. You cannot go back, you can only go forward,

broadcasting episodes as they are finished like pages taped sequentially to a window, for all the world to see. For the most part, this particular example of performance art-telling the BABYLON 5 story in front of fifteen million viewers in the United States and countless millions more in scores of other countries around the planet-has been very successful. Most of the bumps and subtle adjustments are barely noticeable.
But they're there. And over four years, with the real world a constant random factor in the making of BABYLON 5, there are a lot of them. Small, annoying, but there. They lurk in threads that fall by the wayside, or are mentioned but not explained in as much detail as they should be, and can thus seem like logical contradictions. It's all pretty much there ... it just takes a very logical and precise mind to put the pieces together and make sense of it all.
Which makes the book you hold in your hands all the more extraordinary.
Imagine someone coming to your house with a box containing eighty-eight jigsaw puzzles, all jumbled together, and dumping the contents at your feet, saying "Here ... all the pieces are there, all you have to do is make sense of it." That is essentially the task undertaken by Kathryn Drennan in To Dream in the City of Sorrows.
While all of the BABYLON 5 books operate, to one extent or another, within series continuity, this is the first real attempt to stitch together massive amounts of continuity from the series itself into one book ... to pull together the pieces dropped here and there over eighty-eight episodes and four years, ironing out the seeming discontinuities, explaining what was not explained previously, and tying together seemingly unrelated threads into a beautifully defined tapestry, all the
while telling the one story that viewers have been asking for since the first season: "What happened to Jeffrey Sinclair after he left Babylon 5 and before he returned in War without End!"
How difficult a task was this? Job would've packed it in, Hercules would've retired, and Orpheus would've decided that his days spent in Hades weren't really that bad after all.
We're talking here late-night conversations, too many to number, that began with, "Okay, now when you wrote this in season one, what did you really mean and how the heck does that tie into what happened over here in season four? You spent four years talking about the Minbari warrior and religious castes but you hardly even mention the worker caste, how do they tie in? And how the hell was an entire Minbari fleet able to sneak up on Sinclair's squadron at the Battle of the Line right out in open space?!"
Kathryn is not just rigorously logical, she is relentlessly logical. Things have to make sense, and there can't be any loose threads lying around. But there were a number of loose threads surrounding the story of Sinclair's development into Entil'Zha, the head of the Rangers . . . Marcus's months being trained for his own duties as a Ranger ... the fate of Sinclair's fiancee Catherine Sakai. . . and the ceremonies that prepared Sinclair to take up the role of Valen, one of Minbar's greatest leaders, a Minbari not born of Minbari.
All those threads have now been tied up in this one book.
And I'm just as astonished by this as you are.
It's a remarkable achievement. A breathtaking accomplishment, if for no other reason than we both
somehow came through the experience without killing each other.
Relentless. Trust me on this one. Re-fragging-lentless.
To Dream in the City of Sorrows is not simply a licensed book set in the BABYLON 5 universe. While most of the Dell books to date have contained some elements that are considered canon, this is the very first one that is considered canonical in every small detail.