Yes, I’m a Sci-Fi Fan (But Not a Trekkie)

It amazes me sometimes how clicking on web page links will take you through the strangest internet worm holes, until you find yourself someplace wondering, “How did I end up here?!?!”

Well, I was reading a mommy blog that I like, and clicked one of the interesting sounding blogs in her blogroll. That writer had a post about writing your own obituary, which referenced Wikipedia’s list of recent notable deaths, which in turn led me here.

And I gasped as I read that Andreas Katsulas has died. Most people know him as the one-armed man in Harrison Ford’s “The Fugitive,” but for me, he is G’Kar from the fabulous science fiction series, Babylon 5. G’Kar was the head ambassador representing the Narn, a red-eyed reptilian race that was the long-feuding enemy of the Centauri.

This has reminded me that (a) I want to re-watch this series sometime soon, and (b) I think it would be a hoot to go to a sci-fi convention with Dan.

But back to Andreas Katsulas. He delivered some of the most awesome, poetic lines of dialog on the show. Here are some of my favorite G’Kar quotes:

“There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.”

“In the past we had little to do with other races. Evolution teaches us that we must fight that which is different in order secure land, food, and mates for ourselves, but we must reach a point when the nobility of intellect asserts itself and says: No. We need not be afraid of those who are different, we can embrace that difference and learn from it.”

“But we can’t be free, until we learn to laugh at ourselves. Once you look in the mirror and see just how foolish we can be, laughter is inevitable. And from laughter comes wisdom.”

“Mollari… understand that I can never forgive your people for what they did to my world. My people can never forgive your people. But I… can forgive… you.”

“We are all the sum of our tears. Too little and the ground is not fertile and nothing can grow there; too much, the best of us is washed away.”