Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 166 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Jay Michael Strzinsky, one of the most popular science fiction writers

in Hollywood.

He is best known as the creator of the TV show Babylon 5, for which he wrote almost 100 scripts,

and he also has countless other writing credits for various TV shows, comic books, feature films, cartoons,

books, and articles.

Together with the Wachowski's, he co-created the Netflix Original Series,

Sens8, which we reviewed in episode 157, and which was just renewed for a second season.

And now here's our interview with Jay Michael

Strzinsky. All right so we're here with Jay Michael Strzinsky. Welcome to the

show. Howdy, thank you. So you said that as a child you would steal science fiction books and read them and then bring them back? Tell us about that.

Well, back when I was a kid, libraries tend to not to stock a lot of science fiction.

They did, you know, the few necessary things they had to do like 1984 or Brave New World, a couple of Bradbury's, but to find anything with more meat to it, you really had to go somewhere else. They didn't

consider science fiction to be literature. I worked at a library when I was in my

teens that found you know some areas of the mainstream section that had science fiction books

and some didn't.

Why 1984?

Well, that's a good book.

The rest of science fiction is not literature. So the limit the options I had for finding

science fiction books were limited. But when I was a kid living in Newark I was

like 12 or so. The liquor stores and corner stores had, you know,

...