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The New John Connor Chronicles #1
Dark Futures
Following the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Sarah Connor and her son, John, had thought they9d been able to alter the future so that neither the artificially intelligent SkyNet nor its Terminator killing machines would ever be created. But if they were so successful, why, then, are they now being hunted by yet another Terminator that9s traveled back in time to ensure that John never grows up to be the charismatic leader of the few humans who survived Judgment Day? And when a band of human warriors from an alternate timeline make an unexpected appearance, have they come to help John?or the killing machine . . . ?
Told from the perspective of John himself, The New John Connor Chronicles provides insight to the thoughts and fears of a young man who already knows what Fate has in store for him?and the burdens he has to bear along the path he must travel to become humanity9s future savior.
336 pages, Paperback
First published July 30, 2002
About the author
Russell Blackford
58 books33 followersRussell Blackford is an Australian writer, philosopher, and critic, based for many years in Melbourne, Victoria. He was born in Sydney, and grew up in Lake Macquarie district, near Newcastle, NSW. He moved to Melbourne in 1979, but returned to Newcastle to live and work in 2009.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
August 8, 2023
Alright, this one started out a bit rough and I had some worries. But by the end I didn't want to put it down. I really believe this book was the framework for the movie Dark Fate. However, this book was successful in many of the ways that the movie failed.
It plays with the idea that no amount of going back in time is going to alter the future. It will merely create a diverging time line. So, it starts us off with 2 different perspectives. One time line follows John and Sarah after they blow up Cyberdyne and DELAY judgement day.
The other time line follows John and Sarah if they decided to bunker down and AWAIT judgement day. This time line shows us the future war we all wanted from the jump. John Connor fulfilling his destiny and such and it feels like the real deal.
The other time introduced a lot of new characters and different types of terminators so it can be confusing to keep jumping back and forth and trying to keep the story straight with all the new faces and such. But by the end it all comes to an exciting cliff hanger to set up part 2 of trilogy.
I love the way it handled paradoxes and expanded on time travel, as terminator films always gloss over that part despite it's importance. However, it misses when comes to exploring the conscious thoughts of Skynet or the individual terminators. For instance the "uncle Bob" 101 is still alive in the time line where John and Sarah decide to bunker down, but we don't get to explore his "humanity" like the movie T2. Instead hes reduced to empty catch phrases from the films like "I have detailed files and no problamo".
Anyway, I'm excited to read the next 2 books in the trilogy. Any one hungry for some terminator action, id rank this higher than anything that came out after T2!
My video review for this book.
https://youtu.be/PdchTr1LxwU
It plays with the idea that no amount of going back in time is going to alter the future. It will merely create a diverging time line. So, it starts us off with 2 different perspectives. One time line follows John and Sarah after they blow up Cyberdyne and DELAY judgement day.
The other time line follows John and Sarah if they decided to bunker down and AWAIT judgement day. This time line shows us the future war we all wanted from the jump. John Connor fulfilling his destiny and such and it feels like the real deal.
The other time introduced a lot of new characters and different types of terminators so it can be confusing to keep jumping back and forth and trying to keep the story straight with all the new faces and such. But by the end it all comes to an exciting cliff hanger to set up part 2 of trilogy.
I love the way it handled paradoxes and expanded on time travel, as terminator films always gloss over that part despite it's importance. However, it misses when comes to exploring the conscious thoughts of Skynet or the individual terminators. For instance the "uncle Bob" 101 is still alive in the time line where John and Sarah decide to bunker down, but we don't get to explore his "humanity" like the movie T2. Instead hes reduced to empty catch phrases from the films like "I have detailed files and no problamo".
Anyway, I'm excited to read the next 2 books in the trilogy. Any one hungry for some terminator action, id rank this higher than anything that came out after T2!
My video review for this book.
https://youtu.be/PdchTr1LxwU
August 10, 2022
I find myself feeling torn about this book. There's a lot of interesting ideas here but the book just never quite ended up being truly enjoyable for me.
The story is divided into two parts in two different timelines, labelled John's World and Skynet's World. The former picks up right at the end of Terminator 2, depicting what happens to Sarah and John as they escape from the cops who swarm the steel mill and decide to head down to Argentina to stay with some friends. From there, the story spends a while establishing that Judgement Day was only delayed, not completely averted, as some notes and information survived, and there are enough other employees of Cyberdyne to continue the Skynet project.
The Skynet's World timeline also picks up during Terminator 2, but shows an alternate version where John and Sarah decide to bug out south with the T-800 rather than attack Cyberdyne. It's clearly meant to be the original timeline that leads up to the first Terminator, as it splits time between showing the development and birth of Skynet and the way John develops into a leader after Judgement Day and starts to unify South American militias into the human resistance. This is a pretty cool idea, because aside from a few scenes in the first film and some material in the novelization of the second, the future war hadn't really been depicted. Terminator Salvation would later try to do something similar, but I liked a lot of what this did better.
The main issue is that it feels like it's rushing through what could make for a fun trilogy of novels all on its own. By the end of this book the story has already reached the eve of the final battle in 2029. There's a lot of time skips and in general the story moves faster than I'd like. This is also true of the Skynet side, as while seeing Skynet's birth is pretty cool, things then jump to it creating the first Terminators far too quickly. It makes me worry what the series will do with this part of the story in the next two books, since it seems to have used up most of its material already.
Rushing is also a major flaw of the John's World story. The book opens with a prologue showing a more advanced liquid metal Terminator and a group of augmented humans both getting dropped into Mexico City in 2001. About halfway through the book, things finally catch up as the humans rescue John and Sarah, who've been living in Mexico City and running an internet cafe, from the new TXA Terminator. What follows is a series of action heavy chase sequences culminating in another raid on another Cyberdyne facility. It's too derivative of the film this is acting as a sequel too, and it also suffers from introducing five augmented humans and then offing half of them, giving the reader no time to get invested in any of them. The advantage of the classic Terminator twosome trope the movies usually use is it allows the audience to focus on getting really invested in a few characters. Also, this augmented humans concept is interesting, but I liked it better in Dark Fate where it was clearly cybernetics and an interesting twist on the man machine conflict, while here how the augments work is vaguer and doesn't thematically resonate as well.
I'm also not sure how to feel about the changes to time travel this story has. Terminator, in the first two films, has the question of whether time is fixed or changeable, with the first movie being a time loop and the second potentially breaking the loop. This book instead introduces the idea that the only options are loops and branching timelines. Some travel can create a stable loop, and if it doesn't, as is the case with the T-800 in T2 and the augments here, it creates a new timeline. It's not inherently a bad idea, and I feel like the Terminator franchise is best approached with a multiple futures mindset if you want to even remotely have things past the first two films make sense, but somehow knowing that going back in time just branches off a new timeline doesn't quite work for me. It's partly changing the rules from the films and partly the "only the main reality counts" issue with multiverse stories.
Overall, there was some fun stuff in this book. I think I enjoyed at least half of it, though even if the parts I liked I found the writing a bit of a letdown compared to the novelizations I've been reading. Also, the parts I didn't like made up the climax of the novel, which definitely hurt. . There is an interesting twist at the end of this book, so I'm left curious to continue the series but hesitant as I'm not sure if it will improve.
The story is divided into two parts in two different timelines, labelled John's World and Skynet's World. The former picks up right at the end of Terminator 2, depicting what happens to Sarah and John as they escape from the cops who swarm the steel mill and decide to head down to Argentina to stay with some friends. From there, the story spends a while establishing that Judgement Day was only delayed, not completely averted, as some notes and information survived, and there are enough other employees of Cyberdyne to continue the Skynet project.
The Skynet's World timeline also picks up during Terminator 2, but shows an alternate version where John and Sarah decide to bug out south with the T-800 rather than attack Cyberdyne. It's clearly meant to be the original timeline that leads up to the first Terminator, as it splits time between showing the development and birth of Skynet and the way John develops into a leader after Judgement Day and starts to unify South American militias into the human resistance. This is a pretty cool idea, because aside from a few scenes in the first film and some material in the novelization of the second, the future war hadn't really been depicted. Terminator Salvation would later try to do something similar, but I liked a lot of what this did better.
The main issue is that it feels like it's rushing through what could make for a fun trilogy of novels all on its own. By the end of this book the story has already reached the eve of the final battle in 2029. There's a lot of time skips and in general the story moves faster than I'd like. This is also true of the Skynet side, as while seeing Skynet's birth is pretty cool, things then jump to it creating the first Terminators far too quickly. It makes me worry what the series will do with this part of the story in the next two books, since it seems to have used up most of its material already.
Rushing is also a major flaw of the John's World story. The book opens with a prologue showing a more advanced liquid metal Terminator and a group of augmented humans both getting dropped into Mexico City in 2001. About halfway through the book, things finally catch up as the humans rescue John and Sarah, who've been living in Mexico City and running an internet cafe, from the new TXA Terminator. What follows is a series of action heavy chase sequences culminating in another raid on another Cyberdyne facility. It's too derivative of the film this is acting as a sequel too, and it also suffers from introducing five augmented humans and then offing half of them, giving the reader no time to get invested in any of them. The advantage of the classic Terminator twosome trope the movies usually use is it allows the audience to focus on getting really invested in a few characters. Also, this augmented humans concept is interesting, but I liked it better in Dark Fate where it was clearly cybernetics and an interesting twist on the man machine conflict, while here how the augments work is vaguer and doesn't thematically resonate as well.
I'm also not sure how to feel about the changes to time travel this story has. Terminator, in the first two films, has the question of whether time is fixed or changeable, with the first movie being a time loop and the second potentially breaking the loop. This book instead introduces the idea that the only options are loops and branching timelines. Some travel can create a stable loop, and if it doesn't, as is the case with the T-800 in T2 and the augments here, it creates a new timeline. It's not inherently a bad idea, and I feel like the Terminator franchise is best approached with a multiple futures mindset if you want to even remotely have things past the first two films make sense, but somehow knowing that going back in time just branches off a new timeline doesn't quite work for me. It's partly changing the rules from the films and partly the "only the main reality counts" issue with multiverse stories.
Overall, there was some fun stuff in this book. I think I enjoyed at least half of it, though even if the parts I liked I found the writing a bit of a letdown compared to the novelizations I've been reading. Also, the parts I didn't like made up the climax of the novel, which definitely hurt. . There is an interesting twist at the end of this book, so I'm left curious to continue the series but hesitant as I'm not sure if it will improve.
July 18, 2021
Terminator: Dark Futures by Russell Blackford is movie tie-in novel based of the Terminator film franchise, and first of the book of the “The New John Connor Chronicles” trilogy. In “Dark Futures”, There are two major story plots set in different timelines. The first timeline takes place immediately after the events of T2: Judgement Day, and depicts the lives of Sarah and John Connor after the destruction of Cyberdyne the defeat of the T-1000, and brings to light their continued fear for the Judgement Day which may or may not come and their desire for a normal life. Only years later the Connors find themselves back in the fight against Skynet. When a group of resistance fighters from an alternate future of a post-apocalyptic 2040 seek their help against a new type of Terminator called the T-XA. In the second timeline of the book also expertly tells the story of an alternate time line in which Miles Dyson successfully builds Skynet. This time line depicts everything we know happened (how Skynet was built, why a Judgement Day and the Human Resistance) but until now have not had first hand knowledge of (we know of them because of Kyle Reese and the 1994 T-800 Terminator). I can tell both time lines are on a collision course and I am sure complete satisfaction will be the result for the reader. This book fleshes out the various characters and moves in an exciting pace. It answers so many questions and leaves me hungering for more. I am very excited to know that this is the first of a trilogy. Overall, I would recommend this book to any one who enjoyed Terminator movies. I haven't read the sequels yet but this one is well worth reading, and even you don’t read the full trilogy Dark Future acts as a really good stand alone novel.
December 23, 2022
I really wanted to enjoy this book, but it wasn't the best Terminator book I've ever read. It took a while to get used to the two separate timelines aspect of it all, but as it went on I really did enjoy the changing perspectives. I loved reading about John and Sarah running an internet cafe and about John turning turning into the leader he is supposed to be in the other timeline. The action of this book was a bit much and became muddled a lot, and being that it made up a good portion of the story it was hard to maintain the momentum of it all. I felt the mond reading/mind controlling T-XA to be a bit too far fetched in an already far fetched series. Regardless I still enjoyed portions of this book as a whole and am excited to read the rest of the series.
February 12, 2026
Unironically loved this. The first 5% is ever so slightly choppy; but the rest of the book is a love letter to the best action movie ever. First book in a while that I have struggled to put down, and eagerly went back to pick up whenever I had a few minutes.
December 30, 2019
DNF at 20%
August 8, 2021
Really enjoyed this, pity about the spelling and grammar it needed another proof read.
April 2, 2025
It felt rushy in some chapters but man still a good Terminator read
June 19, 2015
I read this years ago and found it to be not quite as good as T2: Infiltrator. I'm not sure what it was. Part of this is that there seemed to be no continuity between the two and they both had "T2" in the title. Of course with time travel fiction, you can always argue something changed the timeline.
If I remember correctly, I did find the origin of Skynet in this book interesting, and actually better than what we got in Terminator 3. I really give this about 2.5 stars. I am teetering on liking it and thinking it was an OK cashgrab.
If I remember correctly, I did find the origin of Skynet in this book interesting, and actually better than what we got in Terminator 3. I really give this about 2.5 stars. I am teetering on liking it and thinking it was an OK cashgrab.
July 29, 2013
My rating is 3.5 stars.
A book based on events right after the movie Terminator 2. This book tells about the further adventures of John and Sarah Connor. There are two different timelines and it switches back and forth from each timeline. This book was a nice read and kept me interested. There were plenty of action and explores what would happen if we did one thing different in our lives. It is part of a trilogy and I will continue with it.
A book based on events right after the movie Terminator 2. This book tells about the further adventures of John and Sarah Connor. There are two different timelines and it switches back and forth from each timeline. This book was a nice read and kept me interested. There were plenty of action and explores what would happen if we did one thing different in our lives. It is part of a trilogy and I will continue with it.
September 12, 2015
I liked this book more than I thought. It's a bit confusing with there being several time lines and points of views but I like it. If you're Terminator fan then you'll like this book. Hopefully I'll be able to find the other two in the series.
November 2, 2011
Decent story, but the different timelines with the same people got a tad confusing at times. Would have been easier if I'd read it straight through.
September 1, 2012
Worth reading.
May 23, 2015
Feels pretty true to the Skynet world. Worth reading.
October 4, 2024
Better than you’d think.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews