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Dining on Babylon 5: The Ultimate Guide to Space Station Cuisine
AUTHOR'S NOTE (from Amazon.com)
"Here's how the idea for the book came up ... The folks in WB Licensing were sitting around trying to come up with ideas for B5-related products to license, as B5 was taking off in the ratings and becoming somewhat of a hot property. They'd recently licensed a cookbook based on "Friends," so someone jokingly added a B5 cookbook to their list of ideas.

To their shock and horror, someone actually showed an interest, a U.K. publisher called Boxtree.

I'd written for other B5 licensees, and had a good working relationship with B5 creator Joe Straczynski, so the Licensing folk gave me a call to ask if I could write it.

"The only way it will work," I said, "is if we go over the top."

While I knew B5, I didn't know squat about cooking. WB hired a "food consultant" who designs recipes for food chains. She knew cooking, but didn't know squat about B5.

So we began by my going through all the aired episodes to date. I compiled a clip video with any scenes I could find showing or referring to food, e.g. the infamous flarn dinner prepared by Lennier for Sheridan and Delenn, and Garibaldi talking about his pop's bagna cauda. I gave her the dishes, both human and alien, to concoct, while I went off to write the rest of the book.

I decided that this book was to be firmly rooted in the B5 universe. I chose late third season, in the lull before the alliance defeats the Shadows who then send Anne Sheridan to B5. (You might recall the recently enlightened G'Kar was a bit loopy around that time, so I wrote him that way.)

We'd seen Fresh Air, the true five-star restaurant at the end of the universe, so I came up with the idea of Emerson Briggs-Wallace, a rather arrogant, pompous gossipmonger who owned the joint. (As I said, he's loosely based on Basil Fawlty.) Viewing himself as a man of importance on the station yet clueless that he's generally disliked by the command staff, he approaches Sheridan with the idea for the cookbook, who as a practical joke sends him off to see Ivanova and the other characters in the book. (The joke is lost on poor Emerson, but the others suspect they've been set up.)

If you pay close attention, you'll find some cross-references in the book. For example, G'Kar quotes a "wise Human who said: Stuff it." If you look at Garibaldi's recipe for Cannelloni, he writes, "Just prepare your filling, and stuff it."

When the recipes came back, I came up with alien names for some of the ingredients. If you look throughout the book, you'll find the alien names are totally consistent. Beeba (olive) oil is beeba (olive) oil anywhere it's listed as an ingredient.

The food consultant worked with WB Licensing to take the photos of the prepared dishes. I helped pull the slides and screen-grabs taken from the episodes you see in the book.

Is the book canon? Obviously, anything that came from the show is canon. But the stuff I made up? If you watch the fifth season episode "A View from the Gallery," there's a scene where the maintenance workers Bo and Mac are waiting out an alien attack in a shelter. You'll see one of them pick up a book lying on the floor, flip through it, and toss it aside. That book is a mockup of "Dining on Babylon 5" which hadn't been published at the time of filming.

I didn't know Joe was going to do that, and only found out when the episode aired. (I think I peed all over the floor when I saw it ...) So far as I'm concerned, if it airs on the show then it's canon. If you assume the book was published in late third season, then by the middle of the fifth season it would make sense that this book made the rounds for its semi-tabloid nature and was quickly tossed aside. Finding it lying about in an air raid shelter seems entirely appropriate.

Joe did tweak the spoo recipes, because he had a reference to it in an upcoming episode, so he wanted to be sure the book was consistent.

The Boxtree license only allowed the book to be published in the U.K. and I think a couple other European countries. Del Rey, the U.S. publisher with the rights to the B5 novels, showed no interest at all in the cookbook, which is why it never surfaced here in the States. Any copies in the U.S. were shipped from the U.K.

It's a shame it never got a reprint, here or there, because it's a fairly unique, if not bizarre, piece of B5 spinoff merchandise. I'm still surprised it was ever published in the first place -- but then B5 always had its unique bizarre sense of humor, so I guess the cookbook fits in just fine."

1998 ... Steve Smith ... 128 pages ... ISBN 0752211439