From Publishers Weekly
Adolescents of all ages will have fun with Allston's rock-'em sock-'em riff on the characters and settings of last summer's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. It's shortly before "Judgment Day" (supercomputer Skynet's attempted annihilation of humanity), and cyberwizard Danny Avila is refining the arch-robot Terminator into America's ultimate fighting machine. He dreams ominously of robots gone rogue, destroying their creators. Jump to 2029, and Daniel, now a middle-aged amnesiac fighting alongside human resistance leaders John Connor and his wife, Kate, dreams strange dreams of the past he can't consciously remember, dreams that spill over into the sleep of his fellow guerrillas and draw Skynet's wrath down on them. Caught in a horrible dilemma where he must help produce the very weapon that may wipe out the human race or risk being fired and thus become impotent to help future humanity, present-day Danny tears through one wild and lethal chase scene after another, while in 2029 Connor, supported by his daughter Kyla's Hell-Hounds, takes on wave after wave of advance-model Terminators. Breathless action and unstoppable pace propel both parallel plots to so relentless a denouement that the cardboard human characters, their equally two-dimensional robotic nemeses and their all-too-predictable motivations scarcely matter. Arnold's adventure fans, rejoice; this is the stuff that role-playing dreams are made of.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Despite the heroic efforts of John Connor and Kate Webster, and the ultimate sacrifice of a T-850 terminator, Skynet became operational and mobilized its machine forces in all-out war against its prime enemy: mankind. More than twenty years later the war continues, fought by human resistance forces led by John and Kate, and by people in secret enclaves around the world. Raiding machine facilities, using small guerrilla forces to sabotage and destroy Skynet forces, the resistance is holding its own . . . but it's not enough. The self-aware AI that controls the robot terminators, the hunter-killers, and the rest of what used to be America's arsenal is too smart, too quick, too flexible to be defeated.

Or perhaps the answer to human victory lies shrouded behind the mists of time. Before Judgment Day, Danny Avila was a programmer on the project that became Skynet. In the months leading up to Judgment Day he began to have nightmares involving Terminators rampaging and destroying the world. Then, two days before the holocaust, he disappeared. Found years later by John and Kate, completely amnesiac about events of his life prior to Judgment Day, he became a useful member of the resistance, with an uncanny ability to predict Skynet tactics.

Now he is having Terminator dreams again, dreams of the days when he was on the Terminator design team . . . of the days when the world was on the path to destruction.
Could there be some kind of psychic link between the Danny of today and the Danny of nearly thirty years ago---a mental "wire" through which thoughts and images are transmitted forward and backward in time? Might this one desperately stressed man living in two eras be the time machine the resistance needs to undo the devastation of Judgment Day? A daring and dangerous experiment may prove the salvation of mankind's future . . .



About the Author
Aaron Allston is the author of a number of science fiction and fantasy novels, including the Doc Sidhe books, The Star Warstm New Jedi Order novels Rebel Dream and Rebel Stand, among a number of novels, original and tie-in. An award-winning game designer as well as SF writer, he lives near Austin, Texas.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, John Connor (Nick Stahl) and Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) face the harrowing last day before Earth's conquest by Skynet, and survive only because of the heroic sacrifice of a T-850 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) set back in time by the Human Resistance to protect them from the newest, most lethal terminator, the T-X Terminatrix (Kristanna Loken). But they can't prevent Judgment Day." "Now, in 2029 A.D., they head the Resistance, dedicated to the survival of human life on Earth ... and the destruction of the machines whose sole purpose is the extermination of the human race." "The war with the machines has taken a heavy toll on everyone in the Resistance, especially on Danny Avila. He endured terrible stress, even dreamed of the terrible future, just before the start of mankind's war for survival, then was on the run - a hellish ordeal that lasted for years." Finally he joined up with John Connor and became a vital member of the Resistance, making invaluable contributions to the effort to defeat the machines that stalk mankind. But now Connor is asking Danny to make a sacrifice that only he can make, to help save the world from the robots. By doing something that seems impossible. In a world ravaged by a decades-long struggle, even the impossible is worth trying, if it might end the war. Danny, with memories nobody else can even guess, could help end the war ... but doing so may very well kill him.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly