Greg Cox is one of the most prolific, and successful, authors of media tie-in novels, and he's won a loyal following for his many Star Trek books, including a trilogy filling in the backstory of much-loved villain Khan Noonien Singh. He's also written tie-in novels based on Alias, The 4400, Roswell, Underworld, Fantastic Four and Iron Man. He's also novelized the movies Ghost Rider, Daredevil and several others, plus DC Comics' big crossovers.

We talked to him about his new Terminator Salvation tie-in novel Cold War, out now from Titan Books, plus some of his other recent projects.

Cold War uses the same timeline as McG's recent movie, but only includes a couple of characters from the film: The main character is Losenko, the Russian general who appears briefly in the film, mentioning that Skynet is looking for Kyle Reese, and we learn all about Lysenko's backstory. Says Cox, "When I watched the movie, I was probably the only person who was mentally hanging on every scene with general Losenko," watching for every detail about the character to include in the book. Also in the book is General Ashdown (Michael Ironsides), the resistance leader who lives on a submarine. John Connor only pops in the book as a sort of mythological figure, giving inspirational speeches over the radio.

The new book takes place in Alaska and Russia, in two different time frames: 2003, right after Judgment Day, and then 2018. In 2003, the survivors are coping with the aftermath of the nuclear war, and Skynet is attacking them with really primitive Terminators, and the technology is close to what really existed in 2003. And then in 2018, Skynet has all the same tech it has in the movie — plus snowmobile Terminators, to navigate those frozen northern areas. It sounds like Cox had a lot of fun with the frosty settings:

My big gimmick was snowmobile Terminators. There's also a giant Terminator train. The trick is to try to find stuff in the [same] universe, that's slightly different. What haven't we seen yet? We haven't seen a Terminator train. The main reason for setting it in Alaska [was to include things like] dogsled chases, grizzly bears, avalanches, volcanos... We've seen so many chases on California highways, with fire trucks and emergency vehicles. I was looking for a whole different environment, not just recapitulating what people had done before.

Cox is somewhat surprised that the Terminator/grizzly bear fight has been the main thing people have talked about in his novel. "You can't have a Terminator in Alaska and not have him fight a grizzly bear. Okay, it's gratuitous, but how can I resist having a grizzly bear fight a Terminator?" And now that people have been so excited by it, "from now on, I put a grizzly bear in all my books." Spoiler alert: The bear doesn't stand a chance against a Terminator, says Cox.

There's also a Western-style train heist and loads of detail on a Russian submarine, plus lots of gritty war-movie-style action. Cox watched tons of World War II movies on TCM, read every Tom Clancy novel for the submarine details, and did loads of research on the world right after a nuclear war.

Cox says he watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles "religiously," but Titan Books and Halcyon were adamant that his book couldn't contain any references to T:SCC continuity. So don't expect Cameron to show up, but if anyone ever green-lights SCC novels, Cox will be first in line. The Terminator people were very keen to make sure Cox's book fit in with their vision of the universe, including making sure Skynet wasn't developing high technology too early after Judgment Day — and that meant loads of conference calls, notes and intensive feedback at every stage of the process.

Wrapping up The 4400

The amount of feedback you get from the licensors on a licensed property depends heavily on whether it's an ongoing concern, says Cox. With The 4400, for example, Cox wrote one tie-in novel while the series was on the air, and went through four different drafts in response to feedback. But when Cox wrote the first of two novels wrapping up the series after it ended, Welcome To Promise City, he got a more-or-less free hand. (The other novel, available now, is written by David Mack.) Cox, Mack and their editor cooked up an ending to the series together.

Except for tons of feedback from the fans. Cox says as soon as it was announced that he was writing a 4400 novel explaining what happened after the show's cancellation, he was bombarded with emails from fans all over the world demanding to know what he was going to do with their favorite subplots and characters. "I can't claim we wrapped up every loose end, but we tried to wrap up the important one," says Cox. He and Mack debated with their editor whether to tie up the end of the series with a neat bow, or leave a few things slightly open-ended in case they ended up doing more novels. They settled on the second approach, so if the books sell amazingly well, you might see further continuations of the story.

Novelizing Final Crisis

Cox novelized Infinite Crisis, 52 and Countdown for DC Comics, and now he's novelized Final Crisis, Grant Morrison's narrative-shredding uber-crossover starring the evil Darkseid. How on earth do you take Morrison's loopy storytelling and convert it into a single novel?

There was a lot of condensing involved, Cox admits:

There's not a lot of connective tissue in that series. [There are] a lot of scenes that jump from place to place. I've got to admit, the book is probably a bit more linear than the comic book, especially issue seven, which was jumping all over time. I actually just tried to tell it a bit more in chronological order, and maybe simplify it a bit.

The biggest problem with novelizing one of these sprawling DC crossovers is figuring out what subplots and tie-ins to leave out. The first week Cox was working on the Infinite Crisis novelization, he was trying to include all of the spin-off issues, including things like Rann-Thanagar War One-Shot, and every other miniseries and crossover issue, "and I realized this book is going to take me ten years, and it's going to be the size of The Wheel Of Time." So he began paring things down. Similarly, the Final Crisis book ignores a lot of tie-ins, sadly including the 3-D Superman tie-in series. "I apologize if your favorite scene is not in this book, but there's no way I can get in the 3-D tie in superman issue and the Batman issues and the special tie-in issue of Secret Six."

With novelizations of comics crossovers, "it's all about streamlining." It's the opposite of novelizing movie scripts, which is all about fleshing out the story and characters and adding new stuff to turn a 90-page script into a 300-to-400-page novel. "The script for Ghost Rider was not a terribly long script," notes Cox. He recalls coming across the novelization for Snakes On A Plane and marveling that Christa Faust had managed to get 400 pages out of that film. He felt like sending her fan mail.

Should Khan Come Back?

As the author of three Khan books, Cox is conflicted about whether Khan should appear in the next Star Trek movie. On the one hand, recasting Khan seems almost impossible, given how much Ricardo Montalban put his stamp on the character. On the other, Cox might have said the same thing about recasting Kirk, Spock and McCoy — and J.J. Abrams and crew pulled that off. The real question is, "do you do Botany Bay Khan, or crazy burned-out Wrath Of Khan Khan? There's the young virile but not quite crazy Khan, and then there's the obsessed spent-15-years-in-Hell Khan. And then there's the whole messy [subject of the] Eugenics Wars — when exactly did they take place? Did they take place during the Bill Clinton years?"

Cox is writing one of four new novels that take place in the movie's continuity, picking up where the movie left off. He's written a draft of his novel, but hasn't gotten feedback from Paramount yet, so everything is subject to change. But at least for now, his novel takes place six months after the end of the movie, and follows Captain Kirk and his crew on a stand-alone adventure. And he hints that, if Paramount approves, the fact that the Vulcans are refugees scattered across the universe will play a part in his novel's plot.

Note: This is not a history of novelizations of existing movies or TV shows — just original novels and story collections set in those worlds. And for the sake of sanity, we're not going to touch on non-SF tie-ins like the amazing Shaft and Starsky And Hutch novels of the 1970s. (Even though Starsky And Hutch: Kill Huggie Bear and Shaft Among The Jews have pride of place on my shelves.)

Also, I'm not even going to pretend this covers every tie-in novel ever published. Feel free to chime in in comments with stuff I've missed!

The early years:

Doctor Who didn't get its own tie-in novels until the early 1990s (although there were annuals that included short fiction published almost ever year from 1964 through to the show's cancellation in the late 1980s.)

But Who's 1960s rival The Avengers had a slew of books. Berkeley-Medallion put out nine books, including The Moon Express and The Magnetic Man, both by Norman Daniels. And star Patrick Macnee himself co-authored two novels for Hodder and Stoughton: Deadline and Dead Duck. The 1960s also saw a ton of novels based on Get Smart, Man From Uncle and Mission Impossible, over in the U.S.

There were also a handful of novels tying in with The Prisoner — most notably, Thomas M. Disch wrote a Prisoner book called The Prisoner, in which Number Six finally tracks down Number One — and she's a female robot whose hand falls off. Hank Stine also wrote a demented novel called The Prisoner: A Day In The Life, in which Number Six falls through a succession of loopy, acid-trip realities designed to undermine his sense of self.

Fawcett also put out one novel tying in with the 1970s TV show The Invisible Man, called simply The Invisible Man by Michael Jahn.

Jahn also wrote one of a half dozen Six Million Dollar Man novels that Warner Bros. put out in the mid-1970s. The Six Million Dollar Man, of course, was based on an original novel series, Cyborg by Martin Caidin, but the television show was drastically different and the later novels had more in common with Lee Majors' portrayal than anything from the original books. (Update: Jahn wrote to us and explained: "I wrote five "Six Million Dollar Man" books (one under the name Evan Richards), not just one, and about 15 other tie-ins including "The Invisible Man" book that you know about. The pseudonym was required because Caidin was afraid he was losing Steve Austin to me, which is a bizarre concept.")

But probably the most significant stand-alone media tie-in of the 1970s, in retrospect, was the Star Wars novel Splinter Of The Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster. Splinter quickly became non-canonical thanks to its climactic battle scene in which Luke manages to lop off Darth Vader's arm — not to mention its incestuous embrace between Luke and his sister Leia. According to some reports, Foster wrote Splinter to be a low-budget sequel to the original movie in case it bombed — hence the fact that it reuses many props and sets from the first film, and avoids ambitious locations. It also doesn't feature Han Solo, because they didn't think his character was going to catch on. Han Solo did get to star in his own trilogy of novels as consolation, though, starting with Han Solo At Stars End There were also a handful of Lando Calrissian novels.

The rise of Star Trek novels:

According to the excellent book Voyages Of The Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion by Jeff Ayers, the first original Star Trek novel was 1968's Mission To Horatius, a young adult novel by Mack Reynolds. But the best known early Trek novel was the second, 1970's Spock Must Die! by James Blish, who also wrote adaptations of the original series. Spock Must Die!, which I totally read as a kid, involves an accident which produces two Spocks — and only one of them can be allowed to go on living.

In the 1970s, Bantam put out a series of original Star Trek story anthologies called The New Voyages,, plus a dozen original novels, edited by famed science fiction author Frederik Pohl.

The golden age of Trek novels, though, was probably the 1980s, with David Hartwell editing the Trek line for Pocket Books. Vonda McIntyre, who also did incredible novelizations for Star Treks II, III and IV, wrote two great books: The Entropy Effect in 1981 (ignore the horrible cover) and Enterprise: The First Adventure in 1990 (which would be a good counterpoint to the recent J.J. Abrams film in terms of showing how the crew got their start.) In this interview, McIntyre explains why she identifies with Sulu, and how she gave him his first name: Hikaru. (The publisher freaked out, until someone actually asked Gene Roddenberry and George Takei, who were both fine with it. But you have to wonder what Takei thought of Sulu's porn stache. Probably he didn't mind it.)

Another great author who wrote a couple of memorable Trek books was John M. Ford, who vastly expanded our understanding of Klingon culture in How Much For Just The Planet? and The FInal Reflection. (Ford also wrote Klingon manuals for the Trek role playing game, and was always treated as an honored guest at Klingon gatherings. At the 2009 Worldcon, a panel about the late Ford included a moving tribute from a Klingon audience member.)

Meanwhile, Diane Duane did more than any other author to flesh out both Vulcan and Romulan society, with 1984's My Enemy, My Ally and 1988's Spock's World, among others. The Romulans — who call themselves the Rihannsu in Duane's version — have never seemed as fully realized or believable as a culture on screen as they have in Duane's books.

According to Ayers' book, however, all was not well with the Trek novels — Gene Roddenberry wanted to micro-manage the book line and had his personal assistant, Richard Arnold, read every single book. And Arnold tended to balk at anything that went beyond what had been established on screen. If you want to read a hair-raising account of what it was like to write a Trek book that ran into trouble with Roddenberry or Paramount, here's writer Margaret Bonnano's incredibly lengthy account of her troubles writing the tie-in book that became PROBE. Shorter version: tons of micromanaging, characters being cut out, and calls for Bonnano to rewrite the whole thing in six days.

Other franchises to get tie-in novels in the 1980s included Battlestar Galactica — most of those books were novelizations of episodes, but eventually it looks like they ran out of episodes to adapt and started writing original volumes; and Blake's 7, which got a sequel novel called Afterlife. (There was also a horrendously poorly received B7 novel in the 1990s called Avon: A Terrible Aspect, written by actor Paul Darrow.) And of course, as we detailed in a recent post there were 16 great V novels, which continued the story after the original show went off the air.

Early 1990s: Star Wars and Doctor Who

Two other media juggernauts that had never had a credible presence in the tie-in novel market suddenly started producing in the early 1990s.

Star Wars launched an ambitious series of books set after the events of Return Of The Jedi, with Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy, which followed the exploits of Admiral Thrawn and also the fate of Luke, Leia and Leia's kids. These were the beginning of the Expanded Universe books, which tied in explicitly with the video games and comics, and often seemed to be canonical unless explicitly contradicted by the movies. Eventually, the Expanded Universe gave us a new alien menace to fight the descendants of the Jedi: the monstrous Yuuzhan Vong.

And once the Star Wars prequels were out, we saw more books and other tie-ins set in the era long before the original series — the Old Republic novels take place an an era long before the prequels, when the Jedi were plentiful and kept peace throughout the galaxy. Meanwhile, other series of novels take place during the Clone Wars, like Karen Traviss' amazing Republic Commando/Imperial Commando novels, and still others expand the stories of Han Solo's kids Jaina Solo and Jacen Solo.

The really breathtaking thing about the Expanded Universe novels, starting with the Zahn books, is the fact that they're the only continuation after Return Of The Jedi we've got. Most people, in George Lucas' shoes, would have insisted that only they should be allowed to tell the authoritative story of what happens to Luke, Leia and Han Solo after the third movie of the trilogy — but Lucas seems to be totally content with letting the novels be the final word on those characters' fates, reserving for himself the right to go back and annotate the stuff that happened before Luke came of age in increasing detail. At times, it feels like Lucas' Star Wars movies and Clone Wars cartoons are occupying the space that's normally reserved for tie-in novels — filling in backstory — while the tie-ins forge ahead answering the question, "What happens next?"

These days, it seems like a month doesn't go by without at least one or two new Star Wars novels coming out, from the Fate Of The Jedi series to the more esoteric volumes, like the zombie tale Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber.

Meanwhile, after Doctor Who went off the air in 1989, Virgin Publishing got the rights to do a series of novels that were "too broad and deep for the small screen." The New Adventures line was launched, with an odd mix of books ranging from John Peel's bland fanfic to Paul Cornell's bizarre, Vertigo Comics-influenced metafictional odysseys. At their best, the New Adventures were daring, loopy and sacrilegious — and several authors contributed to the line who later wrote for the TV series, including Cornell, Gareth Roberts and Russell T. Davies himself. There was also a lot more explicit sexuality and racy content in these books than the original show had allowed.

Unlike the Star Wars novels, the New Adventures novels don't tell the official story of what happens to the Doctor after the series ends — I'm pretty sure the new TV show has already contradicted them in many particulars. But what the New Adventures books do instead is something just as awesome — they vastly expand our understanding of the Doctor, and give him a new pathos as well as a terrible, Prospero-ish puppetmaster sensibility. Building on little hints from the TV show, the novels give us a Doctor who's much more complex and much more tormented than we ever realized — and also more fallible, on occasion. You could not look at the eternally childish traveler in time and space the same way after reading a slew of these books — and the new reinvention of the show in recent years has built on that reimagining.

The Doctor Who novels are still being published — but after the 1996 TV movie, the BBC took them in house and toned them down considerably. And after the new series came on the air in 2005, they've become much more kid-oriented.

All in all, the twin early 1990s phenomena of the post-ROTJ Star Wars novels and the Doctor Who: New Adventures novels pointed to a greater potential for tie-in novels to be something more ambitious than the simple "adventure too minor to televise" format that book publishers had mostly stuck to. (With a few notable exceptions, like the Duane Star Trek books in the 1980s.) At the same time, Trek books were stretching their horizons a bit, with Peter David's sweeping Troi-Riker romance Imzadi gaining critical acclaim beyond what a usual tie-in novel would expect. If tie-in novels became big business in the 1980s, they came of age in the 1990s.

The mid-1990s: every big series gets tie-in books

By the mid-1990s, tie-in novels seemed to be pretty standard for most TV shows and some movie series as well. There were mostly forgettable novels tying in with Predator, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Alias, Farscape, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, The X-Files, Xena, the BSG reboot, and various other media properties. There were a host of authors who would churn out novels connected to Charmed, Buffy or whatever, like Keith R.A. DeCandido, Christopher Golden, K.W. Jeter, Peter David and Kevin J. Anderson. Two or three women wrote a slew of Star Trek books under the pseudonym L.A. Graf, which reportedly stands for "Let's All Get Rich And Famous."

And of course, William Shatner started writing his own Kirk fanfic with 1995's The Ashes Of Eden, with generous contributions from Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens.

The other interesting thing that happened in the late 1990s was the rise of novels based on comics — Byron Preiss put out a series of novels based on Marvel Comics' characters, and there was a well-received anthology of Batman short stories. Here's a fairly lengthy list of Marvel tie-in novels — the best of the bunch is probably the Incredible Hulk novel What Savage Beast by Peter David, which tells the story of what David would have done if Marvel hadn't 86ed his plans for the Hulk in his comics run. It brings back the Hulk's evil alternate self from the future, the Maestro, as well as an army of Hulks from alternate universes.

Babylon 5 also put out a bunch of tie-in novels, and from 1996 onwards creator J. Michael Straczynski was closely involved in the novel line, working to ensure a great deal of consistency with the television show. Gregory Keyes, Peter David and Jeanne Cavelos, in particular, put out a handful of B5 books each that were considered not just canonical, but essential. Cavelos' The Shadow Within has been reprinted a few times, and Dreamwatch Magazine called it "one of the best tie-in novels ever written."

Spin-offs, video-game novels and name authors:

The biggest development of the past decade has been the rise of spin-offs and tangents from established series — David has given us a series of Star Trek novels, The New Frontier, that follow a mostly new set of characters in a sector of space that no Trek ever visited before. The TNF books simultaneously play with tons of obscure Trek references — including characters from the animated series — but at the same time they color far, far outside the lines. With their weird hermaphrodite pregnancies, married captains, and above all their obsession with the dynastic politics of an obscure alien empire, the TNF books often feel like David's own space-opera/soap-opera series, only loosely connected to Trek.

Trek has also given us another spin-off, the Starfleet Corps of Engineers books by DeCandido. Meanwhile, Star Wars has given us the Jedi Academy books and the aforementioned Republic/Imperial Commando books.

And then there are the video-game books, which started as a trickle 15 years ago and are now accounting for a large and larger share of bookstore shelf space. The first Doom novel, Knee Deep In The Dead, came out in 1995, and was followed by several others. The Halo book series started with 2001's The Fall Of Reach by Eric Nylund. Nowadays, many TV shows don't feel the need to put out novels — where's our Fringe book series? — but every successful video game gets a ton of novels, without fail.

And that leads to the other big development of the past decade or so — bigger authors turning to tie-in novels to try and make some extra cash or win new fans, or just have fun with a beloved icon. Greg Bear surprised some fans by announcing he was working on a Halo novel, a sequel to Fall Of Reach. Tobias Buckell also wrote a Halo novel, 2008's The Cole Protocol. Jeff VanderMeer wrote a Predator novel, South China Sea, also published in 2008. And of course, Michael Moorcock surprised everybody by announcing he was doing a Doctor Who novel.

Some professional writers are alarmed at the growth of sharecropping novels, where authors dabble in characters they didn't create for media conglomerates that keep most of the profits. But they're a growing slice of the publishing world — and at this point, you can't claim it's impossible to create meaningful, groundbreaking work in the tie-in novel world. As a whole, tie-in books may look like a shower of drek — but they've helped expand our understanding of some of science fiction's most iconic characters, and — perhaps — helped those big media properties become more interesting and thoughtful along the way.

Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder.

Titan Books, which published the book version of Terminator Salvation, kindly sent out a half dozen copies to some of io9's writers as well as some of our most prolific commenters and occasional posters. So how did the story of Marcus Wright's cyborg angst and John Connor's struggle with tourettes translate into book form? Here's what they thought.

The participants:

Annalee Newitz, io9 editor

Chris Hsiang aka Grey Area, frequent commenter and regular book reviewer.

Hank Hu aka CrashedPC, regular commenter.

Josh Wimmer aka Moff, regular commenter and "Jive Tarkin" columnist

Alexis Brown aka EvlSushi, regular commenter, current intern and regular poster.

Charlie Jane Anders, io9 news editor and occasional leaver of the house.

So in order to maximize the value to you, the readers, we'll try and divide this review up into a few sections.

Does the novel make sense?

It definitely makes more sense than the movie, is the consensus. Maybe because Foster was working from a script that included a lot of scenes that were cut, or trimmed, for the final movie, there's a lot more explanation of what the heck is going on.

As in the movie, it's 2018, and the self-aware computer system Skynet has all but wiped out the human race. John Connor leads the last remnants of humanity in the fight against the machines, while struggling to save his own father, Kyle Reese. And meanwhile, a man named Marcus Wright wakes up years after being executed, and begins to suspect that he may no longer be human.

Says Hank, "The novel, even while reading like a grade-school primer for action movies, had a modicrum of sense. Being able to read someone's internal thought process is extremely satisfying. Connor is not a shouty loud madman like what I've heard about the movie, but he's just too damn emo at times."

The novel includes a lot more conversations between John Connor and his wife, Kate, about how the timeline may have changed. Connor has actual smart discussions about the supposed "off switch" and whether it's likely that Skynet would really have left such an easy backdoor in its systems. And the Connors talk a lot more about Kate's pregnancy and John's doubts about his ability to save people in this new altered timeline.

As Chris points out, Foster spends a lot of time explaining how Skynet's stronghold in San Francisco is so poorly guarded. "Foster tried to fill in as many plot holes as he could. His explanations for why there was very little security in San Francisco and why the HKs didn't bother Connor's base almost work."

And after the Connors encounter Marcus, there's a much more in-depth discussion of exactly who he might be, and what he represents. At one point, Kate explains exactly how that cyborg infrastructure works, and how it's all wired. This is a huge improvement over the movie, where they just sort of look at Marcus and grunt.

And yet, there are still some plot holes.

Grey Area observes:

The batshit insane sequence where Connor hacks a moto-terminator and rides it to San Francisco across the ruined Golden Gate Bridge was kinda cool but totally batshit insane. That wasn't actually in the movie was it?

Hank wonders:

I still don't understand why Marcus is like, the most advanced 'bot of them all. From what I can tell, he donated his body to science after being punished, capitally. If his brain is still the original organic one, why is he the most advanced one? Shouldn't he be like the beta stage prototype garbage bot that can barely formulate sentences. Instead he's the Incredible Hulk that can formulate complex sentences, albeit broody ones.

Adds Alexis:

And why is John Connor so flippin' special anyway? We have yet to see him do much of anything to justify how important he is to the timeline. The machines seeme to have ultimate control of everything, right? And humans are scattered and living like rats. So, how is this a war and not a complete massacre?

Josh zeroes in on the ultimate plot hole:

And why is saving Kyle Reese so important? So that John Connor can send him back in time so that he gets born? Is he going to disappear Back to the Future–style if Kyle dies? Because I wasn't feeling the impending doom.

At the end of the book, there's no heart transplant. Instead, the characters just escape intact. (You can read the adaptation of the movie's actual ending on the Titan books website.) And then Foster throws in a weird hint that Star, the cute little orphan with the funny hat — may actually be a Terminator. Her eye glints redly... or is it just a trick of the light? We may never know.

How about the characters? Are they more fleshed out?

Definitely. Marcus Wright, in particular, benefits from the novel's ability to flesh out his inner life and give him a stronger story arc. As Alexis points out, the early scene where Marcus meets Serena Kogan and agrees to donate his body to her experiments is much stronger. The kiss between the two of them is described lovingly, although it's made clear it's not a loving kiss — it's a last act of violence from a violent man. And we get an running monologue summarizing Marcus' thoughts and his final struggles as the lethal injection wipes him out. His last thought is about the kiss with Serena, and how he could have done it better. As Alexis says, it's nice stuff.

Grey Area liked the way the novel reveals

the humanity of Marcus, and the whole deterministic fate thingy. A vicious thug becomes more human and sympathetic after becoming cyborged. It's as if Skynet, that notorious softie with its keen insight into human emotion, re-programs Marcus with a better soul. Neat idea, but as I stated before I cannot buy that the cold emotionless Skynet is occasionally Dr. Phil.

Adds Hank,

Honestly, I thought Marcus Wright was pretty cool. Never mind the fact that he knew himself that he was executed and now he's walking around, shrugging off attacks and saving children. He was much more of a sympathetic character than most of the Resistance. Or even surviving nomads. Perhaps he was meant to be the real star of the show?

Even more, Grey Area approves of the way the novel gives us

Connor's realization that he is as programmed as the machines he fights.He's been told since birth that he will become this great leader. He really has no choice and doesn't even seem to have any actual leadership qualities. Hell, his people follow him just because they've been told to.

Hank notes:

One part I did like in particular: Marcus escaping the silo. The Resistance fighters just acted so dense, so naively, that I felt no sympathy for them. It does them no favors when Marcus was described so heroically and positively prior, and then now Barnes is taking potshots at him when he's strung up. I know they hate the machines and all, but jeez, it's like they didn't even bother trying to figure out how such a perfect melding of human and machine came about. "IT'S A TRAP" is essentially all they kept shrieking.

On the minus side, everybody hates Star the cute orphan, in the book as much as in the movie. And one character who gets fleshed out to ill effect is Virginia, the white-haired lady who takes Star under her wing in the movie. In the book, we learn way more about Virginia than we ever wanted, as she tells Star bedtime stories and sings lullabies to her.

How tongue-in-cheek is it?

The novel features some of the purplest, silliest prose Alan Dean Foster has ever committed to paper. You can't help but wonder if Foster, who's a great writer when he wants to be, wasn't mocking the whole story, or at least trying to lighten up the intentionally humorless film.

Grey Area picks out the following choice lines:

pg. 16 "Wright rose from the cot. Standing, he looked a lot taller, a lot bigger."

pg 35 " 'Jericho, come in!', Olsen's fingers tightened on his communicator.
Jericho didn't come in. The communicator's locked frequency was as silent as the grave. A bad simile, the general thought, especially considering his present subterranean location."

pg. 139 "She did not really know him yet, and she did not want him to see the unbridled gratitude that she knew must be suffusing her face."

And, from the very ending:

"How long?"
She tried to shrug but was unable to lift her shoulder.
"Any moment. His heart can't take it." Her eyes met the sergeant's, and she continued. "The Terminators have beat him up and history has worn him down."
Barnes tried to think of something to say. Of the right thing to say.
"It's going to be okay."

Hank's favorite line:

This resulted in even more bits and pieces flying off of the machine. This resulted in a termination of the pursuit.

Annalee picks out a few choice lines as well:

* * * When Dr. Serena Kogan (later to be the Face Of Skynet) first meets Marcus before he's killed, and turns into Bill Cosby:

"How are you?" she finally murmured.

In the troglodytic confines of the cell the query was at least as funny as the paramount punchline of a highly paid stand-up comedian.

* * * When Williams fights off would-be rapists, right before Marcus steps in to help:

That was just enough time for Williams to dart forward and slam the knucles of her closed fist into his throat . . . He dropped like the sack of shit he was.

* * * After Marcus escapes from the resistance camp, John Connor shows off his powers of perception:

He had barely made back into the woods when shapes rose sharply from bush to confront him and he found himself staring down the barrels of three rifles.

"Halt and identify yourself!" the noncom in charge barked.

"John Connor." What a pity, he mused halfheartedly, that he could not be someone else.

But he knew he was John Connor.

* * Marcus hooks up with Skynet in the machine complex - and we do mean "hooks up."

Revealed to his probing gaze was an intricate maze of glowing wiring, silent chips, and busy processing units. He stared at the lambent display, memorizing all that he could.

Finally he gave up and shoved his hands deeply into the electronic wonderland.

The initial contact caused him to spasm . . .

After reading through all these quotes, I can't help but feel that Foster was trying to lighten the tone a bit. And maybe sending up the story, just a tad.

The bottom line:

The consensus seems to be: The novel is held back by having to be an adaptation of such a nonsensical movie, but it's clear Alan Dean Foster was having fun writing it. And as a result, it's a pretty fun read. And if you've been sitting around wrestling with all the dozens of things that didn't make sense in the movie — and wondering exactly what was going through these people's heads as they were running around from action sequence to mopey slow-mo — then this novel may be of great value to you.

Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Novelization [Amazon.com]

According to a press release from Tor Books:

The first novel in this new trilogy will be published in early 2010. An unabridged audiobook edition will publish simultaneously with the new novel.

A science fiction icon and winner of the field's highest awards, Greg Bear has signed on to write three "Halo" novels set in the time of the Forerunners, the creators and builders of the Halos. Almost nothing is known for sure about this ancient race. Worshipped by the Covenant as gods, their engineering relics pepper the galaxy, and their connection to humanity remains unanswered. Devoted fans of both the books and games will finally get to delve deep into the era of these enigmatic beings, and discover for themselves the epic story behind one of the great mysteries of the "Halo" universe: the complete disappearance of the Forerunners from existence. "Greg Bear is truly a living legend of science fiction. To have him at play in the Halo universe will be exciting not just to Halo fans but to science fiction fans on a whole," says Eric Raab, Tor editor.

I've become a huge fan of McIntyre's non-Trek writings, but I first discovered her through her novelizations of the second, third and fourth movies. McIntyre added an extra dimension of awesomeness to her novelizations of TWOK and The Voyage Home, and managed to make Search For Spock seem like an interesting story. In her blog post, she recounts how TWOK was originally called Demon Warrior, and then The Revenge Of Khan (but the producers worried it would clash with the then-forthcoming Star Wars: The Revenge Of the Jedi.) And she talks about taking an actual whale-watching trip to help her research her novelization of Trek IV.

But even better than her movie novelizations are her original novels. McIntyre talks about how she wrote The Entropy Effect as a spec script for the original series, and it got as far as Gene Roddenberry's desk before he left the show.

Years later, the opportunity to write a Star Trek novel came along The folks who invited me to write it knew I'd been fond of the series and they trusted me to treat the characters with some respect.

The deadline was very tight and I never would have been able to manage it except that I'd just bought, with my two housemates, a computer: A tan-case Osborne I with a four-digit serial number. It had 64K of memory and you could fit a whole chapter on a 5.25″ floppy disk - nearly thirty pages! And the disks only cost $10 each!

Thanks to my housemates, who not only didn't kill me for monopolizing the new machine during all my waking hours for six weeks, but also occasionally took me away and fed me and sent me to bed, I hit the deadline for The Entropy Effect. (It was very interesting to collaborate with myself between the age of 18 and the age of 30.)

My editor happened to be coming to a convention in Seattle just before the book was due, and asked me to give him the manuscript there, so I did.

(It was on paper; writers might have begun creeping into the computer age, but publishers hadn't yet, very few people had email, and once rudimentary email did come along, sending anything but plain ASCII that way was a triumph of binhex and encoding and I forget what-all.)

To my surprise (and not a little discomfort), my editor sat himself down in the middle of a small party and started reading. After he'd read fifty pages or so, he said, "Paramount will either love this, or they'll really, really hate it."

She also talks about how her friends and colleagues scolded her for sullying her career with media tie-in books, and suggested she work as a waitress instead. It's well worth reading all of McIntyre's Trek novelization memories. [Book View Cafe]

David was already one of the best known Star Trek novelists when he launched the New Frontier series of spin-off books. His Imzadi was a #1 New York Times bestseller and a rare Trek novel that got taken seriously by readers. But in the New Frontier books, he's managed to create his own soap-operatic annex of the Trek universe, with its own races, politics and dynasties. Over the course of twenty-something books, comics and short stories, Captain Mackenzie Calhoun has married his long-lost love, Elizabeth Shelby (from the TNG two-parter, "Best Of Both Worlds") and various people have gotten together, broken up, had babies and overthrown empires. I have been meaning to do a giant post about the New Frontier books, which I've read in their entirety, but it's hard to explain their appeal to someone who's never read them. Suffice to say, it's Peter David taking enormous liberties with the Trek universe and having a blast in the process. You can get the first four books as one collected volume, which should be enough to let you decide whether you really want to commit to this crazy ride.

UPDATE: Apparently that's not the real synopsis, after all. We'll post the real synopsis as soon as we have it.

So here's the synopsis for Treason, the umpteenth book in the series coming next year:

Three years have passed since the events of the previous New Frontier novel, Missing in Action, and tensions within the New Thallonian Protectorate are at fever pitch following the murder of Prime Minister Si Cwan. Captain Mackenzie Calhoun and the crew of the USS Excalibur face an uncertain future in the turbulent Andromeda Galaxy. The sudden power vacuum will have far-reaching consequences for them all, as lives and the very fate of Sector 221-G are catapulted into utter chaos. In Treason, the New Frontier storyline jumps ahead three years from the events depicted in Stone and Anvil, picking up again at a point of crucial change, where new and old Star Trek readers are at the same level of discovery for the series.

I have to admit I'm a little lukewarm about the idea of jumping ahead three years. Didn't David already pull this trick in between Stone And Anvil and After The Fall? It feels a bit... well... gimmicky. As though he wasn't sure how to move forward with the story otherwise. Also, I'm officially bored with the whole subplot about Si Cwan, the former emperor who returned to power in a new regime (and married Robin Lefler, from the TNG episode about the orgasmic video game) only to be murdered. I wish Mackenzie Calhoun would travel to some other part of his sector, instead of constantly dabbling in Thallonian politics. At the same time, that's sort of what these books are about, and it's part of the whole "David taking liberties" aspect of the storyline. It feels, at times, like a generic space opera with Trek elements grafted onto it. Which isn't entirely a bad thing, since it lets David play with some peripheral Trek characters (Lefler, Shelby, the cat-woman from the animated episodes) while inventing most of his pocket universe out of whole cloth.

In any case, I'm still pretty excited for another New Frontier book to add to the 20 others already on my shelf. It's fun candy for Trek fans who want to read adventures set after the end of the TNG movies.

[TrekWeb]