Babylon 5: The Passing of The Techno-Mages Book III: Invoking Darkness by Jeanne Cavelos
This 2001 novel is an unfocused narrative of mini-polemics that is bewilderingly dull. It’s like bad fanfic you’d find on AOOO - the type put up by SJWs that is full of ‘trigger warnings’. Anna Sheridan does stuff as a slave of the Shadows. Delenn does nothing. Galen broods on the moral implications of what he is something he seems to have got over by the time of ‘Crusade’. This is essentially plotless with Anna doing awkward exposition, the largely amorphous Morden acting like he has burger sweats and Galen obsessing over monstrous devolutions and the price of making a techno-mage. It’s an aberration he overcomes quickly. There is still no explanation for why Justin served the Shadow’s cultural imperialism or why there was a big glass roof on Z’ha’dum or why Lorien was living in a hole on said planet.
The Vorlons continue their fanatical delusions of illusions of purity. This was unmemorable and not wrenching and Galen is a glowering paragon of manpain. We are repeatedly reminded that Something Serious Is Happening but truthfully B5 has faded in significance and this book is just a sour note with no discernable purpose. It’s just boring and turgid beyond comprehension.
Best Lines:
“They carried no emotion or import.”
“She didn’t understand them.”
“You are an abomination.”
“No good can come of you.”
“Anna manipulated them carefully.”
“She must perform gestures as she spoke, vary the tone of her voice, shift her gaze periodically, and convey different expressions.”
“We discovered that the civilization wasn’t dead at all.”
“All of you must die.”
“She couldn’t identify the expression on his face.”
“The code that embodied everything that they stood for, had been written in the alphabet of the Shadows.”
“The rune that the mages translated as good, he had learned in his studies, actually meant useful.”
“Fanatical eagerness.”
“Flesh will do what it’s told.”
“We are all damned.”
“Only then did I realise what the Shadows had given us.”
“Her implacable embrace.”
“Still Morden served them.”