Customer Reviews

Cowl

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Neal Asher has, in his Polity series, developed a reputation for writing well crafted, hyperviolent stories. In Cowl he ventures into the time travel vein. Time travel stories very often can't sustain enough believability to be immersive.
Asher manages to keep the storyline from devolving to this point although there are portions later in the novel when the time travel theme becomes a bit muddled. I particularly liked the concept of a probability slope where timelines that diverge from the main line require ever increasing amounts of energy to escape from.

In terms of the characters in Cowl, much of the humor found in Asher's other novels is missing. The world of Cowl is even grimmer than the Polity universe and it comes through in many of the characters. Because of this, I felt detached from the characters and for this reason Cowl gets 4 stars.

A number of reviewers have commented that they found the story line very difficult to follow in this book. But, it's a story about time travel, where things change based upon what will happen in the future or will happen in the past. So of course it's tough to follow - that's the whole idea. I liked the book a great deal. I haven't found an Asher story yet that I don't like. And for those willing to work their way to the end, it does all come together.

I've read a couple of Asher's previous books, Gridlinked and Skinner, and enjoyed his rather vicious characters and settings. Cowl follows in these fine steps with an even harsher, indifferent future and a "survival of the fittest" world.

This novel involves progressive time travel from a near future back through to a time when life on earth was beginning with machinations by forces whose goals and intentions are unclear but gradually revealed. The historic times encountered are very interesting but tantalizingly brief as they left me wanting more.

My only criticism might be that the author could've created more human interest in these characters for me. I can't say I warmed up much to any of the characters, who remained rather cool and distant, but I suppose in some ways this added to the indifference of this book's universe to the individual character's existence and that of all life. I was at all times however curious to their fate and eager to follow their journeys.

The best aspect of Asher's novels to me are the great ideas and original plots. Most books have some echo of another book but I can definitely say that I've never come across the likes of Asher's stories anywhere else. The story's pace is fast and the plot wraps up very satisfactorily. All in all it's a very good book.

I loved both The Skinner and Girdlinked (with The Skinner being the superior book), but am disappointed with Cowl. Time travel and the various paradoxes caused by time travel always makes for tricky sci-fi that never really works. Asher makes a valiant attempt, but I did not find myself engaged by the story or the characters in this setting. Read The Skinner.

Cowl is my sixth Asher novel to date and the only one to not be a part of either the Spatterjay series of the Ian Cormac series. However, Asher still weaves in his trademark weaponry, carnage, wide vocabulary and twisting plots into this standalone novel.

Asher's luxurious niche in the world of sci-fi makes his novels predictable in some ways. Firstly, the sheer amount of weaponry is always staggering. Cowl is no exception to this rule, where there are hand-held missile launchers, rifles, daggers, grenades, displacers, beam weapons and the always user-friendly/enemy-unfriendly nuclear weapons. This arsenal is unloaded upon the foe like manure on a corn field. There are numerous headshots, blown off kneecaps, chest-burrowing penetrations, brain oozing batteries and the pleasant exchange of hello during a torturous de-limbing. These are the action sequences which are present in all Asher novels that I've read and it's also why I keep coming back to Asher- no one quite like him can make me giggle as characters slosh through each other's gelatinous disembowelments.

Amongst the splattered brains and swift decapitations, Asher lets his vocabulary get the best of him. His word choices, while impressive, are entirely out of place in a novel which doesn't seem to merit the usages. I rarely need to consult a dictionary (maybe once each book) but Asher had me reaching for mine about a dozen times. The names of some ancient species didn't interest me much so I typically just ignored those Latin-prefixed names of animals which only appear in obscure non-fiction. Among the best words Asher used: thixotrophic, adipocere, promulgate, entelechy, pellucid, sylph and exigent. Fellow Brit Alastair Reynolds outshines Asher in this regard and Iain Banks takes the cake by masterfully weaving in fun/obscure English words like pulchritudinous.

Finally, what everyone wants to know is why Cowl only received three stars, besides because of Asher's creative predictability. The anti-chronological scene of Cowl unfolds fairly smoothly from epoch to epoch, all the while leaving the reader in an arboreal gloom with its fauna-of-era. That's all fine but it gets repetitive as animals from every epoch seem to be hell-bent on the time traveler's destruction. There's death around every corner. The characters themselves seem like temporal flotsam amidst the changing epochs of geological and evolution tide. All the good guy mature, sober up and get a grip on reality as the pages are turned and the enemy is less and less liked.

It took me three attempts to get into this book, and then i picked it up everyday until it was done. I enjoyed it, but would still say Skinner is the best i've read by the author.

There are a selection of main characters, most from the future, and as you'll gather from other reviews, they have the means to travel through time backwards, (some with controlled leaps to a destination, others at the mercy of the device opening the portal), in pursuit of the obligitory big nasty who, by altering the past, is attmpting to create a future more to his liking, and in turn alter probabilities of others existance. Probability and paradox's abound and are explained to a point where hopefully most people without much knowledge of quantum can follow the plot, this being done because the leading lady has to have it explained to her! As with his other books, there is a good selection of violence and realism within character dialogue, which is reflective of how people would react say, to being confronted with a pack of man eating dinosaurs!!

The difference i found between Cowl and The Skinner, in terms of enjoyment, was that i had problems putting the Skinner down, whereas with Cowl it was a book i Found time for, rather than Made time for. It reminded me a little of the Stephen Lawhead books i've read in that aspect. The fact that there are 8 of Lawhead's books in the house says that thats not necessarily a bad thing, as my growing collection of Asher books will testify to that too. But, whereas with Lawhead the read is amiable enough for a slightly younger reader, Asher's is most definately aimed at an adult audience. Which is another plus, at least, from my point of view.

Enjoy!

This is not a book for the faint of heart. Although standing independent from Neal Asher's other books (the Polity series), it shares a few characteristics with them, including graphic (and sometimes gratuitous-feeling) violence. It also has some mind-bending time-travel science, lots and lots of mind games played on the characters and the reader, and (as always with Mr. Asher's books) excellently detailed biology.

The book mainly follows two characters from the 22nd century, Polly and Tack. They are both pulled into a three-way clash of civilizations against their will. The players in the war across time are two civilizations and one very scary individual, the eponymous Cowl. The civilizations are the Umbrathane and the Heliothane, both based in our distant future.

Cowl has set up shop at the beginning of life on Earth, and is pulling sample people back to him from across time. Thus are Polly and Tack ensnared into the plot. Tack is by far the most compelling character in the book. Starting off as a soulless government assassin, he becomes a pawn in many ways and for many people, only achieving rebirth as his own person through lots of pain and experience.

The characters travel through many times, past and future. In some of the near-past scenes, the author can't resist the temptation to randomly plunk his characters near to famous historical personages, an impulse that I wish more authors could resist. But that is quickly over, since the vast majority of our past doesn't contain humans at all. When the characters travel through prehistoric times, into the eras of great mammals, dinosaurs, and beyond, the scenes and scenery are absolutely convincing, a real strength.

Overall the book is an interesting read. It isn't the most fast paced book, and sometimes it becomes very hard to follow the rules of the game and picture how things should be working. Generally speaking, I found it better to go with the flow, trust the author and the characters, and watch the many battles unfold. Some plot twists are predictable, others aren't. As time-travel books go, this is certainly one of the best that I have read recently.

In the distant future, the Heliothane Dominion has won the devastating war against the genetically altered Cowl. However, though defeated in their present time, some of the Cowl escape fleeing to different ages in the past. The Heliothane Dominion knows they must follow suit to prevent changes to the time stream and to their victory.

In the near future (to us that is) in an austere Britain Polly, a drug using prostitute becomes part of the time war when Nandru an AI "enters" her psyche and she touches a tor-beast taking her even further back in time. Heliothane Dominion Government Agent Tack, who previously killed Nandru, follows to stop the Cowl but instead is brought along with the hooker on a journey to pre-mankind. Tack knows he must stop Polly, an innocent who potentially could alter the war's outcome.

COWL is an enjoyable time travel science fiction in which the physics seem plausible enhancing the action-packed trips back through WWII, Ancient Rome, and other stops along the way until ultimately reaching pre-mankind. Intriguingly no one even Polly garners empathy as Neal Asher caustically provides no insight into why the Cowl and the Heliothane Dominion leaderships behave malevolently towards others tossing aside human pawns when expedient; rationales have been forgotten lost to the wells of time. Mr. Asher provides a powerful time military sci fi that reads somewhat like an espionage thriller in which the audience will find it difficult to determine the good vs. the bad guys as both sides have all the time in the world to cause havoc.

Harriet Klausner

This is an extremely imaginative novel with compelling characters that kept me thinking about it long after I finished it.

Asher goes all out in this time travel novel, not being satisfied with going back or forwards in time but going into alternate time pathways as well. He creates mega-villians but his protagonist(s) are themselves flawed people and we watch as greater threats knock them off their fates and into new opportunities, with the "godd guys" not always acting so good. The tale Asher tells is labyrinthian and it takes an effort to track who is doing what to whom but it moves along and keeps you interested, with nuggets about earth's long term history sprinkled throughout.