This is another Babylon 5 spinoff book though I believe I never actually read all that many of these books. With spin-off books, as you can see, I did read a lot of the Doctor Who ones (but that was probably because I was missing my daily fix of Doctor Who at the time since they were not releasing any new episodes and I had seen quite a few of the old episodes) but not much of any of the other sci-fi series. This was the 90s so there was pretty much a lack of Doctor Who however a number of sci-fi series were being produced in the United States, the best among them being Babylon 5 and, as I was to discover later, Stargate SG1.
This book is about the Narn homeworld. The Narns are one of the major races in Babylon 5 and from what I can remember they were one of the better ones. I liked the way that Straczynski portrayed his aliens: in a way they always seemed somewhat better than the Star Trek aliens, but then again I found that there were quite a lot of Science-fiction shows that simply outshone Star Trek. I really can't pin my finger on what I didn't like about Star Trek but I guess one of the major things is that they were trying to create a utopia and attempting to still have conflict in that utopia. To me utopia and conflict just do not seem to work together.
Alien races, in a way, can be notoriously difficult to create, especially if we want to try and make them as alien as possible. The problem is that we have absolutely nothing to compare them with. In a way we can try creating alien races out of human cultures, but the problem is that these cultures are still human, and while differing human cultures may have differing ideas and values, deep down they are still human. We may have different coloured skin, different beliefs, and different ways of doing things, but we are still all human. A true alien culture is not human and does not think like a human.
Many people have attempted to create such cultures, whether it be the hard science-fiction of the 50s, or whether it be one of the many spin-offs novels, or even TV shows that we encounter. In a way Babylon 5 alien cultures were still human with a few slight differences. However, the cultures of the ancients we never actually got to see (such as the Vorlons). They were intruding into the world of the younger races, and may even attempt to invade it (such as the Shadow) but we never got to see beyond their intial face, which does create the impression that the race is mysterious and in a way different. As for Star Trek, well, I'm not going to comment. ( )

Not half bad, but not that exciting. Interesting to relive the B5 universe after so long. ( )