T2: The Future War

Rating:
Summary: Good series, but weak ending
Review: "T2 The Future" is the third book by S.M. Stirling. This books starts right before Judgement Day though years of battling the Skynet. While this might have be good idea for the third teminator movie, it just didn't work well for this series. The writer left many details that would have explain the action of his characters. I believe that Mr. Stirling could have given the characters more emotions, like he did in the first two books. Also since the book had alot on jumping in the future, its clear that the reader lost alot that could have made the book better. As I said before, this have been better if it was a movie and not a book.

Rating:
Summary: Weak Finish for a great series!
Review: ...The first two books in this series were great!, this one was not! I was very disapointed with it. I felt the author didnt have is heart into this book and it heavily lacked in imagination and it was apparent that the writer was rushed through writing this book to get it published within a deadline.

Many of the character building plots were weak, underdeveloped, and worst of all, completely irrelevant to the story. This book really should have been broken down into a couple of books because the first 3/4 of this book cover a 6 month span of events then all at once you are left hanging at a major event at the end of a chapter and then next chapter the author sling shots you 3 to 7 years from that point of the story. It leaves you desperately trying to figure out what the heck happened. This book is very difficult to follow and I found myself having to re-read several areas of the book to figure out the details of what happend and why. Also I found the events of Judgement Day to be totally ridiculous. It was obvious that the author knows little to nothing about computer technology and I found it laughable that computers are taking over cars, tractors, and lawnmowers are driving themselves wildly in attempts to mow people down. Come on, the time line for Judgement Day is our present time. I feel that a more plausable set of events could be developed. This was primarily where I felt imagination was misplaced and not well thought out.

Other problems that bugged me: The book never explained why the Terminators are cloned after Dieter. I felt Sarah was too super human and larger than life. I expected her character to die in battle. Also I expected Dieter to be captured and cloned and his clones used to infiltrait the resistance like they did in the previous books. Its almost like a completely different author wrote this book without reading the first two books in the series. There were so many holes in this story line that it left me completely irratated after finishing the book.

However if you have read the first two books, you must read it just to go along for the ride. I hope the last Movie will make up for it.

Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: For those working in the field of artificial intelligence, it is perhaps disconcerting that this field has been represented in stories and movies in the fashion that it has. It might be difficult to sell a book or a movie ticket though if one were to guide its plot with what is currently being accomplished in artificial intelligence. There is no doubt that robotics still remains a focus of research, and many identify the field of artificial intelligence with the development of robots. However, there have been major advances in artificial intelligence in the last decade in areas such as financial engineering, Ecommerce, bioinformatics, music composition, and network engineering. Artificial intelligence has thus found practical application, but these applications don't make for nice plots in movies and books of fiction.

That being said, it is still fun to read the stories and attend the movies that engage in the pure fantasy of robot armies and humanity's attempt to engage themselves in a "war against the machines." Viewing these stories or movies as entertainment though results in high expectations in their ability to thrill readers or fill them with dread. At least for me, this book did not do that. I personally cannot think of anything more terrifying than to be engaged in a confrontation with entities that do not sleep, have no conscience, and whose sole function is to see me and other humans dead. This story though did not fill me with any apprehension or any type of disquieting feeling when reading it. The machines did not occupy enough space in the story, but instead were merely lurking in the background. There were conflicts of course between them and the human resistance led by John Connor, but the battles, as described in the story, were not very exciting. The numerous scene changes in the story exacerbated this I think. The author wanted evidently to emphasize that the war against the machines was a global conflict, and so the story kept switching between various geographic locales. A few concentrated, intense battles in a few locations would better do the job of capturing the reader's attention and motivate empathy with the characters.

The enormous psychological pressure on humans that would be engaging in a machine war is not brought out in the story. Interestingly though, the author portrays the anti-technological Luddites as being tricked by the machines in supporting their war against humanity. The Luddite voices are being heard all over the globe now, not only against machine intelligence but practically every technological advance, and it is perhaps a carthasis to see them protrayed as they are in the story. Whatever their motivation to be engaged in an anti-technological crusade, it is doubtful that their efforts will reach a level of fruition that is satisfying to them. With faster processing, more sophisticated software, and with increasing applications that are driven by the needs of industry, business, and the military, the field of artificial intelligence continues to advance. One can easily imagine scenarios, based on these applications, where thinking machines play a dominant role in human affairs, and perhaps may get to the point where their autonomy becomes a threat to humankind. It is doubtful though that artificial intelligence will be discontinued as a technology. Stories like the one in this book will continue to entertain with various degrees of success. The real story of machine intelligence is much more interesting though...indeed much more.

Rating:
Summary: Finally the book that ties it all together!!
Review: I have read every Terminator book written and all of them are pretty but this book connects all the movies and all the other books together.

I don't want to give away anything in this review, but if you were ever wondering what happened just before Judgement day, during, and after, this is the book for you.

It does NOT just jump around and leave alot for you to guess at. It goes into all the things you wondered about.

How did Skynet build and progress after J-Day without human help....or did it?

How did Kyle Reese grow up to be the man that he is?

What were his parents like?

What happen to many of the military personal that were NOT near major cities during the first wave of the attack?

How did the resistance start? Who was for and against it?

It ties into the movies RIGHT till the very start of T-1.

The only bad thing about the book is that it is only 375 pages!! I wish it was longer.

Now that they filled in ALL the gaps, I am wondering where it will go next.....

I just hope where ever it goes that S.M. Stirling will write the book!



Rating:
Summary: Not up to expectations
Review: I just finished reading this book and was very disappointed with it over all. The quality was not equal to the first two books in the Triliogy. I feel like there was an entire book missing. At the end of Rising Storm we were in Paraguay and "little Sister" Alissa had found the Conners. Suddenly in this book we are in Alaska and absolutely no mention of her as if she never existed. Feel it was written in a hurry to get it released at the same time as the movie.

Rating:
Summary: The Future War is now
Review: I picked this up on Monday morning and finished it later that evening. This is a must for a terminator collector and fills in a lot of the gaps of the movie series. This goes over the major engagements and events of the future war and it is quite impressive to read.

There are parts in this novelization that are a little slow, but it gets made up for toward the end. I enjoyed reading about judgment day itself and it was an interesting thing to read about. I like how, in parts, this section seemed both humerous yet still frightening. I also enjoyed reading the final battle in the time displacement lab, it was quite enjoyable.

I also like the way this ties up a lot of the mysteries of the movies and the other novels in this series. The novel itself is a wonderful addition to the terminator mythos and I hope that the new movie is just as good as this novel series has been.

What I liked the most had to be seeing humanity come together to rise against the machines. This was, perhaps, the moral of the story: That we need to come together as people and the continuing narration on the triumpth of the human spirit. I enjoyed how well this was captured.

I gave it 4 stars out of 5 because there are a few parts to it that are unnecessary. It does repeat itself at some points but it is still a great read. I recommend this book and the others of the series. This is a great prequel, in my opinion, to Rise of the Machines, and a sequel to Terminator 2 as it was intended to be. Be warned though, some of it is only understood if you read the previous two novels but they're just as good as this one.

Rating:
Summary: Too stupid to imagine
Review: In reading science fiction, the reader automatically assume a healthy dose of literary license - futuristic technology, space flight, incredible inventions, amazing biotechnology, etc. Here the trouble is the plot.

First there is the idea that with sentient Skynet all these various groups operate under the radar. The social analysis is on par with a high school freshman. For starters, we meet a new heroine in Alaska, named after Lenin. For at least twenty years Marxism has been taken seriously only on university campuses and maybe North Korea but for some reason we must read twaddle about this "social movement." More ridiculous is the group setting up Nazi-like concentrations camps (they even talk like the Gestapo) for the rest of poor humanity which makes zero sense.

Why in the world would intelligent, killer machines go to the trouble of recruiting human allies to round up stragglers, build concentration camps, release deadly viruses and, when they get sick, send those unfortunates to ANOTHER camp to be killed. None of this action is in any way related to logic or rational thinking. All the machines had to do was build a few copies and start killing folks or let them starve to death. It is just so absurd.

Then there's Sarah, heading off to South America like we'd take a ride to the mall (and this is after a global nuclear holocaust). How John rises from Alaskan back-woodsman to Grand Martial of Humankind is never fully explained (how can it be?) We also learn that the reason all this is happening is that John misinterpreted / misunderstood the final words of his former love as "enter" instead of "erase". Now THAT makes a whole lot of sense, right?

I had real hopes for this but when we read about Nazis and Commies and Luddites and people killing survivors it's just too much. Skip this one if at all possible.

Rating:
Summary: Too stupid to imagine
Review: In reading science fiction, the reader automatically assume a healthy dose of literary license - futuristic technology, space flight, incredible inventions, amazing biotechnology, etc. Here the trouble is the plot.

First there is the idea that with sentient Skynet all these various groups operate under the radar. The social analysis is on par with a high school freshman. For starters, we meet a new heroine in Alaska, named after Lenin. For at least twenty years Marxism has been taken seriously only on university campuses and maybe North Korea but for some reason we must read twaddle about this "social movement." More ridiculous is the group setting up Nazi-like concentrations camps (they even talk like the Gestapo) for the rest of poor humanity which makes zero sense.

Why in the world would intelligent, killer machines go to the trouble of recruiting human allies to round up stragglers, build concentration camps, release deadly viruses and, when they get sick, send those unfortunates to ANOTHER camp to be killed. None of this action is in any way related to logic or rational thinking. All the machines had to do was build a few copies and start killing folks or let them starve to death. It is just so absurd.

Then there's Sarah, heading off to South America like we'd take a ride to the mall (and this is after a global nuclear holocaust). How John rises from Alaskan back-woodsman to Grand Martial of Humankind is never fully explained (how can it be?) We also learn that the reason all this is happening is that John misinterpreted / misunderstood the final words of his former love as "enter" instead of "erase". Now THAT makes a whole lot of sense, right?

I had real hopes for this but when we read about Nazis and Commies and Luddites and people killing survivors it's just too much. Skip this one if at all possible.

Rating:
Summary: Great idea...poor deliverance
Review: It's the same old song and dance. The left-wing revolutionaries fighting against the right-wing Nazis. Leninist/Marxists versus concentration camps. Science fiction is especially plagued by this utter lack of creativity, and sadly so. The T2 series is no exception. If you want to know who is evil I can tell you ahead of time they have blue eyes (sometimes "piercing blue eyes") and/or blond hair. If you want to know who is good, just check their skin color. If they are non-white then they're fighting for justice and freedom. This is not to say that we should be rooting for whites over blacks. I don't mean that. But this predictable politically correct dogma that Stirling serves up is so by-the-book that it lacks fire and imagination. Stirling has done better in the past and I hope he'll do better in the future.

Rating:
Summary: great action packed doomsday thriller
Review: Sarah Connor, her son John, and her lover Dieter felt destroying Clea before she activated Skynet had given them victory, but soon learn otherwise as the organic terminator managed to feed the discs to Skynet. Almost immediately Skynet concludes that humanity poses a threat to its survival and must be eradicated. Instead of complacency, Sarah and Dieter become concerned when the Pentagon announces Skynet will run all its weapon systems.

Skynet begins experimenting to prepare for Judgment Day, when the advanced computer system fires all the nuclear weapons in its arsenal. Skynet starts the nuclear end run as Sarah and her loved ones hide in a fallout shelter. With human collaborators and terminator robots with advanced weapons on its' side, Skynet seems on the verge of victory. Only Sarah as a rallying point and her two cohorts lead a weak resistance that over the years is becoming stronger against a god-like enemy.

T2 THE FUTURE WAR is a great action packed doomsday thriller starring three long time favorite heroes, but also provides well-rounded personality traits to Skynet so the audience knows this is an independent sentient essence. Sarah seems so much more than she was in past books and movies as she has turned into a profound leader, who recognizes she is an icon to the resistance. John has matured from his previous feelings of resentment and disbelief into the hope of the future. This finale (loosely put - need to read to understand why) is a winner as S. M. Stirling terminates the series with a triumphant doomsday thriller in which humanity fights to survive against a killing machine.

Harriet Klausner