Terminator Salvation, From the Ashes

Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes is a tie-in novel by Timothy Zahn, published in hardback by Titan Books in March 2009 and timed to appear roughly two months before the film it prepares the ground for, McG's Terminator Salvation. It is, on the face of it, exactly the kind of book that the hardback shelves at airport bookshops fill up with whenever a major franchise has a film coming out: official prequel novelisation, glossy cover, lifted from the film's design book, written to a deadline. It is also, on closer inspection, considerably more interesting than that description should allow, mostly because the name on the cover is Timothy Zahn.

Zahn occupies an unusual place in the tie-in fiction world. He is a Hugo Award-winning original SF writer with a serious bibliography of his own. He is also, more famously to the wider reading public, the man who wrote Heir to the Empire and the rest of the Thrawn trilogy, the early 1990s Star Wars novels that more or less single-handedly established that tie-in fiction could be properly good and that Lucasfilm had a viable book line. Two decades on, his name on a piece of franchise fiction is a signal that the publisher has bothered to spend money on someone who knows how to write a book, rather than on whoever happened to be available. It does not guarantee a good book. It does mean that if the book is bad, the reasons will be interesting.

From the Ashes is set in the months leading up to Terminator Salvation, in the ruins of post-Judgment Day Los Angeles, and continues the Terminator timeline from the third film onward, ignoring the various T3 sequel novels along the way. The world is the familiar one: cities reduced to rubble, scattered human survivors moving between hideouts, Skynet's machines hunting them at increasing scale, the Resistance not yet organised into the thing it will be by the time of the film. The book splits its attention across three plot strands. John and Kate Connor lead a small Resistance cell that has identified a Skynet staging post in the city, the building from which the local Terminators are dispatched to hunt humans, and are planning a brutal assault on it for the window of hours when most of the machines will be out on patrol. A teenage Kyle Reese, not yet the man who will be sent back through time in the original film, lives in the ruins of a broken-up hotel with a small, fragile community of civilians and a young girl called Star, mute and small, whom he has taken under his protection. And a hardened Marine is trying to hold his own rag-tag group together against the same pressures, with progressively fewer resources and progressively less faith that doing so is going to matter.

The strands draw together more or less the way you would expect them to draw together, and the climax of the book is the assault on the staging post and the moment at which John Connor's small operation proves itself sufficiently competent to be absorbed into the wider Resistance command structure. That is the book's real function in continuity terms. It is the book that turns Connor from a freelance threat into a Resistance officer, which is the state the film will pick him up in.

Zahn writes it as military SF, and good military SF at that. The combat sequences are clear, technically literate, and properly weighted: aerial fights, urban skirmishes, the careful kind of small-unit tactics in which getting the order of operations wrong gets the people you care about killed. The Terminators, when they appear, are not monsters of the week. They are an institutional problem, dispatched in numbers, and the Resistance is winning skirmishes only by knowing when not to be there. There is also an emotional centre to the book in Kyle and Star, partly because Star, who does not speak, is the kind of character whose presence quietly raises the stakes of every scene she is in, and partly because Kyle, here in his civilian and pre-history form, is the most identifiable human in the cast.

What the book is less able to do, and this is a limit of its position rather than a failure of its writing, is feel like more than a chapter of a larger story. The Resistance war is unimaginably vast. The book is necessarily local. By the closing pages you have read about one operation in one city against one staging post, and the question of how the wider war is being fought, what Skynet is actually doing on a global scale, how Connor came to be the figure he is supposed to become, none of this is the book's brief. A reader who comes to From the Ashes hoping for the wider scope of the Terminator mythology will close it slightly unsatisfied. A reader who comes to it for a tightly written military-SF novel set in a familiar universe will close it considerably happier.

The other thing worth saying, with the film having since arrived and largely failed to convince anyone, is that this book is the more durable artefact of the two. McG's Terminator Salvation is a competent-looking, narratively thin action film that struggled to do anything interesting with the post-apocalyptic setting it had been given. Zahn's prequel, working with the same setting and many of the same characters, finds rather more to do with both. There is a small irony in the prequel novel being the better story, but it is not the first time tie-in fiction has outperformed the film it was meant to support, and on the evidence of From the Ashes it will not be the last.