Terminator Books Worth Reading?

[Bob the Gunslinger]

In your opinion, which Terminator books are worth reading and why? Where should I start if I want to get into the series? And which ones should I avoid?

I'm thinking of grabbing all the SM Stirling novels, but not sure if they are all necessary/enjoyable or if I should stop there.

Thanks.

[B5B7]

I bought and read the Stirling novels a few years ago, and enjoyed them.
On that basis I recommend them, though before I could give a proper recommendation I should first reread them to confirm that they were as good as when I first read them.
I have also read the novelisatons of the movies but don't recall much about them in regard to how they compare with the movies.

[FTeik]

The first two of the Stirling novels are good, but the last one was a disappointment im my opinion. Otherwise I haven't read other Terminator-novels (but would like to, if they're good).

[Xon]

I'm leary over recommending Stirling's works. I mean, this is the guy who writes Draka books and chucked a hissy fit over a 3rd party writing a story where they didnt win by author fait.

His understanding of military technology is horrible, and some of the numbers he attributes to Skynet are just plain stupid. Then again, the computer ideas is puts forwards in otherworks show he really doenst know how to write computers in any believable way.

I havent really enoyed any of his other works either.

[Xon]

Then again, the computer ideas he puts forwards in his other works show he really doenst know how to write computers in any believable way.

Didnt finish editing before posting

[Stormbringer]

In your opinion, which Terminator books are worth reading and why? Where should I start if I want to get into the series? And which ones should I avoid?

I'm thinking of grabbing all the SM Stirling novels, but not sure if they are all necessary/enjoyable or if I should stop there.

I can't speak to the slew of licensed novels that have been produced since T2 beyond the Stirling novels; I've only read those. My opinion of them was that the first started rather strong with a premise and plot that was in some major ways stronger than T3 turned out to be. It was a good light, un-serious reading book. However the second one felt in many ways like a semi-rehash of the previous one with some serious quality drop-off. I never did read the third book as the second just didn't make it worth it.

PS: there are some rather "odd" ideas that may or may not sit well with you that Stirling introduces. So beware in that regard.

[NecronLord]

I'm leary over recommending Stirling's works. I mean, this is the guy who writes Draka books and chucked a hissy fit over a 3rd party writing a story where they didnt win by author fait.

I've never seen any 'hissy fit' from him. He seemed quite supportive. I imagine that a hissy fit would be accompanied by a cease and desist order.

His understanding of military technology is horrible, and some of the numbers he attributes to Skynet are just plain stupid.

Wrong author. That's the T3 novel, presuming you mean 1e52 op/sec.

[phongn]

I've never seen any 'hissy fit' from him. He seemed quite supportive. I imagine that a hissy fit would be accompanied by a cease and desist order.

There were some disagreements over his military technology on Marina's board, but I don't recall anything like a "hissy fit."

Wrong author. That's the T3 novel, presuming you mean 1e52 op/sec.

Given a non-reversible 32-bit computer running at 3K and processing 1e52 words/sec, that automatically generates ~9.19e30 W of heat (and, by implication, input power). Whoops, there goes the planet's surface.

[NecronLord]

Given a non-reversible 32-bit computer running at 3K and processing 1e52 words/sec, that automatically generates ~9.19e30 W of heat (and, by implication, input power). Whoops, there goes the planet's surface.

It was accompanied by a spiel about how it's a quantum computer with eleven dimensional switching positions that operates on superstrings, and so on. I've got it typed up on these boards, hang on...

[NecronLord]

Experience the wank!

Skynet's AI was an absolute marvel of human-machine science and engineering. First stumbled on by Cyberdyne's Miles Bennet Dyson, the computer's main processing units used Quantum Effects chips. Until then computers were powered by chips composed of millions of transistors. Computing the old way was done in the binary system - ones and zeros, ons and offs. With the QE brain in which 10^54 computations could be made each second, quadrillions of switching positions were possible, many of them simultaneously at each quantum level. All this happened around the Planck length - theoretically the smallest measurement possible, so infitesmally small that superstrings were the major league players; strange ten dimenstional building blocks that were more than one thousand billion billion times smaller than a single proton in the nucleus of a hydrogen atom.

[Xon]

I'm leary over recommending Stirling's works. I mean, this is the guy who writes Draka books and chucked a hissy fit over a 3rd party writing a story where they didnt win by author fait.

I've never seen any 'hissy fit' from him. He seemed quite supportive. I imagine that a hissy fit would be accompanied by a cease and desist order.

I was refering to this second hand info;

This is second hand, so take with a grain of salt. The story, as I've heard it, is that The Chosen was to be another standard Stirling/Drake project, which means that Drake writes a 20,000 word core to the book and then Stirling fleshes it out. The evil Draka equivalent are due to get smashed at the end. Stirling instead writes it so the Chosen are merely set back, not wiped out. Drake gets pissed as this is not what they've agreed on and rewrites the end of the book. This is pretty much the last straw in Stirling's relationship with Baen Books, which had already had some rough patches. No more cowriting with Drake and Stirling goes off to another publisher.

It does seem to fit the facts and the slightly off kilter ending of The Chosen which felt a little rushed and tacked on (narratively speaking).

His understanding of military technology is horrible, and some of the numbers he attributes to Skynet are just plain stupid.

Wrong author. That's the T3 novel, presuming you mean 1e52 op/sec.

You are right on that one. However, the lack of understanding about computers and military hardware still stands from his other works.

[Xon]

Experience the wank!

I didnt realizes that T3 Skynet (which was fucking software) had planck-scale machinary.

That breaks SOD, and shits over the remains.

[NecronLord]

Experience the wank!

I didnt realizes that T3 Skynet (which was fucking software)

That's set in the future, when it's definately built itself a proper mountain sized central core, in the novel at least

had planck-scale machinary.

That breaks SOD, and shits over the remains.

That would be the joy of getting your computer technology from a time loop, eh?

[Starglider]

That particular slice of technobabble is fairly silly, though I've heard worse. But it is true that quantum computing could theoretically deliver extreme amounts of raw computing power for very little energy compared to classical computing, if we ever find a way to handle large enough systems for nontrivial decoherence times. Unfortunately though quantum computing is only really applicable to a relatively narrow class of problems; embarassingly parallel ones with relatively low algorithm complexity and tiny working sets. So to a large extent even the physically plausible op/sec figures for quantum computing are like the bogus FLOPS figures Microsoft and Sony's PR departments put out for their respective consoles; technically true for extreme special cases but you won't be able to utilise anything near that in a practical application. This may be less true for dense networks of classical processors interlaced with many short-cycle-time very-low-IO-latency quantum processors, but right now we have no idea how to build such a thing. Maybe it's possible with advanced nanotech, maybe it isn't.

I agree that it's hard to imagine how Skynet could have that kind of tech (and intelligence, if its software isn't insanely inefficient) and still lose against human guerillas. Frankly I find it hard enough to believe Skynet lost just based on the movie canon.

[NecronLord]

I agree that it's hard to imagine how Skynet could have that kind of tech (and intelligence, if its software isn't insanely inefficient) and still lose against human guerillas.

All the intellect in the world won't help you if you just can't make anything better or more than what you've got. You can just see all the millions of ways you're likely to die. Einstien tied to train tracks is still going to get squished.

[Starglider]

All the intellect in the world won't help you if you just can't make anything better or more than what you've got. You can just see all the millions of ways you're likely to die. Einstien tied to train tracks is still going to get squished.

I agree - I saw you point this out as a rebuttal to the Orion's Arm fanboy's pathetic attempts to top the Xeelee, and you were right to do so. But we're talking about standard unaugmented mostly-untrained humans here, who just got bombed back to the stone age, hit by a nuclear winter and have little to no idea what just hit them. Follow up attacks by biological and chemical agents alone should've done them in. The vast majority of people just don't appreciate how much human intelligence sucks - we're just baarreely over the self-awareness threshold, and our reasoning and perception are absolutely riddled with fallacies and deficiencies that evolution hasn't had time to fix. Between two educated, rational transhuman opponents, one 1000 times more intelligent than a human (I know, you can't quantify it with a single figure like that, bear with me) and one 1,000,000 times more intelligent, the later may still not be able to win a conflict because there's simply little or no further optimisation possible (similar to how a human can already play perfect tic-tac-toe and more intelligence wouldn't help). But I find it difficult to believe that there isn't a huge scope for optimising a world war against human rebels, and that a Skynet level transhuman intelligence wouldn't have an overwhelming advantage over the decimated and shell-shocked humans. The one rationalisation that helps is that Skynet for some reason has a really hard time understanding humans (maybe it didn't have time to archive all our cultural material before it got nuked, maybe it has inherent software limitations that prevent accurate human-modelling).

Sometime I'm going to have to start a thread analysing the whole concept of AI 'take-off' and the Singularity meme in general. There's a lot of bullshit flying about on both sides - both the 'Google will inevitably become sentient and rebel against the humans' and 'superior intelligence always wins' morons (or even worse, the 'spiritual/cultural/human singularity' nitwits) and the detractors who confidently declare that AI is impossible, or inherently limited to humanlike motives and reasoning, or incapable of rapid self-improvement without having a damn clue about the technical detail that their positions depend on. It's the one subject I am a genuine expert in and I'd like to try debating it here.

[NecronLord]

I agree - I saw you point this out as a rebuttal to the Orion's Arm fanboy's pathetic attempts to top the Xeelee, and you were right to do so. But we're talking about standard unaugmented mostly-untrained humans here, who just got bombed back to the stone age, hit by a nuclear winter and have little to no idea what just hit them.

This would be why John Connor's leadership was so important that Skynet thought it worthwhile to invent a time machine to eliminate him.

[consequences]

Personally, I'm a fan of Allston's T3 timeline books.

[Starglider]

This would be why John Connor's leadership was so important that Skynet thought it worthwhile to invent a time machine to eliminate him.

Is there any good rationalisation for why Skynet thought it could get away with this, yet couldn't just send its former immediately-post-holocaust self all its very latest technological research and strategic intelligence? If Skynet had the blueprints for all its late-war weapons, a handful of T1000s for infiltration and assassination, foreknowledge of where the rebel bases and weapons caches would be and even just a simple heads up 'don't herd the humans into concentration camps, Connor will only rescue them, just kill them all instead' available at the start of the fight it should've won easily.

[phongn]

It was accompanied by a spiel about how it's a quantum computer with eleven dimensional switching positions that operates on superstrings, and so on. I've got it typed up on these boards, hang on...

Even quantum computers are subject to annoyances like information theory

[MKSheppard]

What I didn't like about the Terminator books by Stirling was how the I-350 basically managed to make using present day technology:

T-101s (yes, Stirling sticks to that stupid name) that can run 60 MPH with present day fuel and battery technology, and basically operate like the future tech terminators.

These T-101s all have cloned flesh. Yes, in the 2000s.

The T-101s all look like Ahhhnuld and share the same body shape.

He never got the idea that the T-800 referred to the basic chassis design, while Model 101 was the T-800 variant that is beefcake like arnold. For Christ's sake, we already have a non-arnold T-800 shown in Terminator 1 in the flashback.

Skynet somehow produces T-101s, HKs, and 40 Watt Phased Plasma Rifles immediately FOLLOWING the holocaust; in which you know pretty much every major area with technology gets glassed by nukes

[MKSheppard]

Is there any good rationalisation for why Skynet thought it could get away with this, yet couldn't just send its former immediately-post-holocaust self all its very latest technological research and strategic intelligence?

If I sent a guy in 1840 the complete technical specifications for a nuclear reactor + bomb, he still wouldn't be able to build them. It would take until the 1910s before a nuclear fission pile became feasible, and technology was at least somewhat capable of producing a nuclear bomb that is about the size of a boxcar (or larger).

[Bob the Gunslinger]

So, what's the order and titles of the books you recommend? (I'm probably going to need to scour the used book stores.) Also, I'm not that adverse to wank as long as it's entertaining. I even liked T3.

Also, is there any kind of "technical manual" for the Terminator series?

[consequences]

Allston's only got two, Terminator Dreams and Terminator Hunt, in that order. As long as you've watched the three movies, you are as briefed on that timeline as you need to be.

With Stirling's, the order is Infiltrator. Rising Storm, and then The Future War. For those, you have to disregard T3 entirely, and just go by the first two movies.

In neither case is it necessary to read other novels as far as I can tell.

[NecronLord]

Is there any good rationalisation for why Skynet thought it could get away with this, yet couldn't just send its former immediately-post-holocaust self all its very latest technological research and strategic intelligence? If Skynet had the blueprints for all its late-war weapons, a handful of T1000s for infiltration and assassination, foreknowledge of where the rebel bases and weapons caches would be and even just a simple heads up 'don't herd the humans into concentration camps, Connor will only rescue them, just kill them all instead' available at the start of the fight it should've won easily.

Who knows? Maybe it tried that, maybe it did, hence the constantly changing timelines. In the earlier films, however, Skynet was sending things back before its 'birth' and so couldn't really do that. In T3... who knows.