Enjoy Cowl Developed By Neal Asher Contained In Copy

some ways, COWL hits the classic time travel tropes Henry VIII, England during the Blitz, Roman legionaries, dinosaurs, Neanderthals, etc, but weirdly stays away from the usual "time wars" strategy of messing with famous historical events even though pretty much everyone's motivations concern a million years conflict mostly fought by two groups of time travelling ubermenschen who are, for the most part, huge assholes.
The book starts in a cyberpunkesque dystopia and things get weird from there, Ultraviolent. I was good on the POV shifts up to the lastof the book, when they felt like they were coming too fast, to the detriment of the individual scenes.
.stars. If you've ever read a time travel novel and thought "The convoluted plot is nice but what would really hit my sweet spot would be a plethora of angry characters, a less personable Darth Vader and enough extreme violence to make Quentin Tarantino think it's all a bit over the top" then the book for you may finally exist and Neal Asher has made it possible.
You might be surprised that it doesn't exist already and maybe it did and I just missed it somewhere along the line I've read a decent amount of time travel books but not enough to teach a course on them or anything but if nothing else Asher gets credit for injecting a very high dose of caffeine perhaps mixed in with something else into the genre and not caring how it splatters all over the walls.


Most time travel type stories invariably focus on either causing some predetermined event to come about or preventing a temporal paradox from occurring and thus dooming everyone to a dystopian future where everyone has insect heads or takes pictures of themselves all the time but Asher takes a slightly different approach here and focuses mostly on the weapons and advanced science that would be required for people to make repeated attempts to kill each other across time and then proceeds to give them as many chances as he can to do just that.
And honestly, on a gut action movie level, it's mostly entertaining,

It doesn't start out very promisingly, as we're treated to scenes of Polly, a girl of the streets going about girls of the streets in the future so often do, which is get addicted to drugs and then proceed to sell their bodies to anyone with lust in their hearts and a fistful of money.
If that isn't enough, the kicker comes a few pages later when we find out she's about sixteen, Before long she's like most teenage prostitutes and involved in a scheme with a deceased friend's brother to barter a mysterious device that might be from the future.
Of course it goes wrong, the government's programmed assassins show up, as does a weird timebeast and the device winds up attached to poor Polly, who is then subsequently sucked back in time.


Fortunately the book is not ten pages long and she survives, as does the programmed government assassin, Tack, who falls in with someone from a far future human race called the Heliothane, who are engaged in a war with the Umbrathane and are led by the aptly described Cowl, who is attempting to wipe out human history through the use of his "tors" one of the scales that is now attached to Polly and his monstrous torbeast, which while it sounds like something Conan would have beheaded in about five seconds, turns out to be rather difficult to kill.
Before long Polly is jumping back further and further in time, Tack has been reprogrammed to kill a different group of people who he hangs out with a Traveller and everyone gets involved in a far flung war that keeps telling us it has high stakes but seems to come down to "don't get killed".


The action movie comparison I made earlier is really quite appropriate here, We are very far away from the urbane explorations of HG Wells or even the poetic ruminations of Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder", from the getgo we're treated to scene after scene whose message boils down to "stuff just got real".
He throws out futuristic concepts that seem only vaguely based in science and uses them in a constant game of oneupmanship that would make Doc Smith blush, as everyone is only a few seconds away from coming up with a more sciency violent concept or pulling out another rabbit from the Hat of Mysterious Science.
The story barely stops to take a breath, which is good because the quieter moments tend to make the story drag somewhat as it gives you a chance to think about what everyone's motivations are and once you get beyond the aforementioned "don't get killed" it tends to get a bit murky.


Yeah, it's a bit shallow, despite the story seeming to think at times it's anything but, When the high octaneness of it throttles down slightly, you find it suffers a bit from having both too much and not enough going on, There are number of plots happening all at once but most of them seem to be occurring without any relation to each other, whether it's Tack and Traveller bonding throughout time, Polly bumbling her way through various historical eras or the remaining Heliothane being mostly interchangable he gives us a traitor and then, as if playing with us, gives us a second traitor just to make it harder to identify who is who.
Occasionally Cowl himself or his torbeast shows up to make everyone's lives briefly miserable but neither has really enough presence to hold the book together, We're told in hushed tones how advanced and clever and evil Cowl is but when he's not around he barely seems to exert any influence on the atmosphere and when he shows up he's a generic heavy dressed all in black whose claim to fame is killing people in extraordinarily violent ways.
But since most of the cast has that ability it turns out to not be that special,

The characters very rarely take hold and even when they start to the book shifts gears to someone else so none of it really has a chance to stick which may be the biggest problem with the book, none of the concepts, torbeast included, has a scene long enough to really acquire any real weight.
Polly doesn't have a heart of gold thankfully but her stone skipping through various eras mostly gives us a chance to enjoy the somewhat snarky dialogue between her and an involuntary computer implant and marvel at how Asher makes every single era of human history, even the parts without humans in it, feel exactly the same.
Tack is a tough guy learning how to live beyond his programming while Traveller is your usual wizened soldier that would probably be played by John Hurt and while there's some spark to their conversations as they grow to have begrudging respect for each other, most of their dialogue is taken up with explaining what the heck is going on.
And then Traveller becomes absent anyway,

As for the rest, . . they're present. Asher has one decent idea, in that as you slide down a probability curve you have to expend more and more energy to get back to the main timeline but he gets so caught up in making stuff explode and that the decapitations are suitably epic that instead of an escalating arms race to see who controls time we get people mostly beating each other up over and over again, and then retreating so they can plot how to do it all over again.
The book itself even points out that the Heliothane and the Umbrathane aren't that much different, except that one side has Cowl and there seems to be no better way to put it.
A last ditch effort toward the end to imbue some character depth winds up being an improbable stab at romance between two people who have barely been in the same room for most of the novel, but at least its a chance for some selfreflection in between all the talk about high level future science.


And yet, despite being unnecessarily convoluted, possessing few memorable characters, vague stakes and a villain whose menace rarely causes shivers in excess of the feeling of nearly missing the bus, Asher does his best to make it as entertaining as possible.
He keeps the ideas coming in a rapid fire style and to some extent that alleviates the fact that we barely linger on anyone long enough to really get to know and care about any of them most of them aren't all that likable anyway and he manages to keep what amounts to a fairly thin and simple plot i.
e. a combination of "let's not mess up time" and "let's not get killed" going for far longer than the bones of it would dictate, A sense of wonder would help, a sense of humor would really help apparently this is unlike Asher's other books in that respect and there's a couple good oneliners that suggests he was holding back for some reason but if you're looking for all out science action that won't leave a residue or much of anything at all when it's done, this is as good a candidate as anything else.
I didn't hate it and in fact enjoyed the breakneck pace of it, but

it felt a little empty overall and there's a good chance that if I spot it filed away on my bookshelf in a few years I'm going to have to reread this review to remind myself that I even read it.
Well, now, this was a fascinating ride, I've been into Neal Asher's works for a while and didn't really expect to see a novel set outside of the vast worldbuilding structure he has since written, but here we are.


And his penchant for grabbing a big concept and torturing his characters with it is completely intact,

Here's the awesome bit: it takes place on a future, postwar dystopian Earth but the core conflict is actually a vast timewar with two sides going back in time to screw up the chances of the other.
The chaos is potentially unimaginable, Fortunately, Asher goes ahead and imagines it, making it even more fascinating by including things like a biomechanoid beast of burden or symbiotic shards of consciousness set up as traps for future biological samples that kidnap them and send them, forcefully, back in time.
Back VERY far in time,

We get to see a vast stretch of the Earth's past, And what's more, the characters and big bads are quirky and unique in the ways Asher is wellknown for in his later books, Cowl himself, for example, is like a vast timelike spider pulling in its prey from all across the future, Getting out of this mess while getting dragged back in time is a truly fascinating story idea,

So, is it worth it to pick this book up I think so! But some of the characters fall short of being actually likable, But that's ok. It's still a fun SF, like a hybrid between oldschool SF and eldritch horror, all wrapped up nicely in survival adventure, : An amusing timetravel novel, based on the "manyworlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics an interpretation for which there is no evidence or requirement, Asher has the wit to steal Heinlein's answer to the question, "How come I end up in the same place on Earth when I timetravel, despite the Earth's orbit, rotation etc" and modify it only slightly.
It is also fun to get away from Asher's "Polity" setting in this novel: may his publishers allow him to do so more often! In the far future, the Heliothane Dominion is triumphant in the solar system, after a bitter war with their Umbrathane progenitors.
But some of the Umbrathane have escaped into the distant past, where they can position themselves to wreak havoc across time and undo their defeat, The most fanatical of them is the superhuman Cowl, more monstrous than any of the creatures outside his prehistoric redoubt,

Cowl sends his terrifying hyperdimensional pet, the torbeast, hunting through all the timelines for human specimens, It sheds its scales each one an organic time machine where its master orders, Anyone who picks one up is dragged back to the dawn of time, where Cowl awaits, Then the beast can feed, growing ever larger, . .

In our own nearfuture, Tack is one of Ugov's programmable killers, When a scale latches onto him, his doom seems inevitable, but the Heliothane have other ideas: they can use Tack against Cowl, Tack is no stranger to violence, but the Heliothane, hardened in their struggle for humanity's very existence, have much to teach him, He will need it all for his encounter with Cowl,

Once one of Tack's targets, Polly escaped with her life when a torbeast scale snatched her, Now, like Tack, she must learn fast as she is dragged back to Day Zero, To cheat death again, she will have to help him save the human race,

With Cowl, Neal Asher, acclaimed author of Gridlinked and The Skinner, has created his most powerful novel yet,
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