The John Connor Bookshelf 

One of the things I couldn’t help noticing in the otherwise (often) excellent ‘Sarah Connor Chronicles’ was the attitude and behaviour of John Connor himself. Played in this instance by Thomas Dekker he’s moody, brooding and unhappy with his destined role as the saviour of mankind. Over the two series he (slowly) 'gets' just how important he is and finally starts to put his back into things – just as the series was cancelled. 

Despite the fact that he spent most of the show in High School you almost never saw him with a book in his hand (so, maybe pretty realistic in that sense) but what was worse – in my opinion – was that he spent ZERO time actually studying for his future role. Now, personally, once I’d actually accepted that, through no fault of my own, my future was already laid out in front of me and that I was going to save humanity from extinction at the hands of our own technology, I’d most probably want to do a half decent, rather than a half assed job in that regard. 

OK, sure he had some training from Sarah and, a little later from Derek Reese (Kyle’s brother) in things like weapon use, handling of explosives and basic small unit guerilla tactics but that’s only going to take him so far. It might make him a competent, even a good, fighter but it's not going to make him a ‘great military leader’ that people would follow into the fire – even with his apparent spooky foreknowledge of future events. No, he needs training in other things too – logistics, strategy, command and so on, with a large dose of military history to give him some theoretical depth to any future decisions – large or small. In other words, he really needs to hit the books a LOT more than you see him doing on screen. I mean, he can’t spend all of his time being grumpy and mooning over his very own pet cyborg, Cameron. 

Being the (somewhat) strange kind of person who thinks about such things, I’ve created a label (logically called ‘Connor’) that might be useful to all John wannabies out there. The way AI research and drone technology is going we’re going to need you guys (and girls!) to stand up and start reading for the future of humanity. Oh, and if anyone has mad tech skills, I’d look at upgrading the anti-drone EM weapons to something that can disable a robot from Boston Dynamics at 500+ metres. I think there’s going to be a growing demand for that sort of thing.... Although I’m not going to be focusing on this as a future topic no doubt I’ll be reading books I consider useful to the Human Resistance, so keep any eye on the Connor label to see if it upticks.  

Good Luck. You’ll need it.