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Cowl
With Cowl , Neal Asher, acclaimed author of Gridlinked and The Skinner , has created a powerful time-travel novel for the 21st Century, a violent thrill ride that will leave you breathless
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 near-future, Tack is one of U-gov's programmable killers. When a scale latches onto him, his doom seems inevitable, but the Heliothane have other 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.
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 near-future, Tack is one of U-gov's programmable killers. When a scale latches onto him, his doom seems inevitable, but the Heliothane have other 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.
320 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2004
97 people are currently reading
944 people want to read
About the author
Neal Asher
139 books3,064 followersI’ve been an engineer, barman, skip lorry driver, coalman, boat window manufacturer, contract grass cutter and builder. Now I write science fiction books, and am slowly getting over the feeling that someone is going to find me out, and can call myself a writer without wincing and ducking my head. As professions go, I prefer this one: I don’t have to clock-in, change my clothes after work, nor scrub sensitive parts of my body with detergent. I think I’ll hang around.
Source: http://www.blogger.com/profile/139339...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews
January 29, 2022
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, post-war dystopian Earth but the core conflict is actually a vast time-war 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 bio-mechanoid 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 well-known for in his later books. Cowl himself, for example, is like a vast time-like 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 old-school SF and eldritch horror, all wrapped up nicely in survival adventure. :)
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, post-war dystopian Earth but the core conflict is actually a vast time-war 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 bio-mechanoid 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 well-known for in his later books. Cowl himself, for example, is like a vast time-like 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 old-school SF and eldritch horror, all wrapped up nicely in survival adventure. :)
July 10, 2021
If it were not for the existence of the Back to the Future trilogy, Cowl would be the coolest time travel story ever, IMO. This was one of the fastest paced books I've ever read and Asher gets a lot done in multitudes of times and places with it all coming together in a huge mind-blowing conclusion. Way confusing in places but everything is explained and it all eventually makes sense. Fantastic beyond words.
June 25, 2025
Before Asher began cranking out endless novels set in the Polity universe (starting with Gridlinked), he tried his hand on other science fiction genres, and with Cowl, we have 'fun with time travel'. To be honest, I have never been a big fan of time travel fiction and supposed paradoxes such as 'what would happen if you went back in time and killed your father before you were conceived?', but Asher brings his panache and flair here to craft an intriguing tale.
Cowl starts circa 2200 or so and features two characters that play a role throughout the novel. One, Polly, a teenage prostitute and junkie in England and the other, Tack, a hit man for the U-gov, some sort of planetary government, or at least in Europe. Polly's best friend (who died of some super new virus) has a brother who is some kind of agent. The brother approaches Polly one day and tells her she can make a bundle of cash by helping him out. The deal? The brother has something the U-gov wants very badly and he wants to use Polly to help with the transaction. The object is a Tor, a crazy semi-organic means of time travel, although neither Polly or the brother knows that. In any case, the exchange goes badly, Polly gets the tor stuck on her arm (it is a parasite) and jumps back in time, managing to take Tack though a few jumps as well.
Asher gives us quite a romp here to say the least. First, we have Polly jumping back in time, meeting all kinds of interesting people (kings, Roman emperors, etc.), but this comprises just the starting point. Sometime in the distant future (say, 4000 AD or so), two rival sects/organizations dominate humanity, which has settled the solar system. They have warred amongst themselves for hundreds of years until both sides discovered time travel and now take the battle backwards through time, all the way back to the beginning of life on Earth. Seems Polly and Tack got emmeshed in something way more than they could ever imagine!
While fun, I think Asher tried to do a bit much here and the tale got a bit confusing at times. Trying to make sense of the motivations of the two future warring factions made my head spin a bit, as did the attempts to explain the tech behind time travel itself. Asher is no slouch when it comes to tech, but still, this pushed it. Also, his characters, as usual, are not as nuanced as they could be to really draw me into the story; he improved on this to a degree in his later works, but it is fairly glaring here. Still, quite a romp, but perhaps not the best intro to Asher's fiction. 3 jumpy stars!
Cowl starts circa 2200 or so and features two characters that play a role throughout the novel. One, Polly, a teenage prostitute and junkie in England and the other, Tack, a hit man for the U-gov, some sort of planetary government, or at least in Europe. Polly's best friend (who died of some super new virus) has a brother who is some kind of agent. The brother approaches Polly one day and tells her she can make a bundle of cash by helping him out. The deal? The brother has something the U-gov wants very badly and he wants to use Polly to help with the transaction. The object is a Tor, a crazy semi-organic means of time travel, although neither Polly or the brother knows that. In any case, the exchange goes badly, Polly gets the tor stuck on her arm (it is a parasite) and jumps back in time, managing to take Tack though a few jumps as well.
Asher gives us quite a romp here to say the least. First, we have Polly jumping back in time, meeting all kinds of interesting people (kings, Roman emperors, etc.), but this comprises just the starting point. Sometime in the distant future (say, 4000 AD or so), two rival sects/organizations dominate humanity, which has settled the solar system. They have warred amongst themselves for hundreds of years until both sides discovered time travel and now take the battle backwards through time, all the way back to the beginning of life on Earth. Seems Polly and Tack got emmeshed in something way more than they could ever imagine!
While fun, I think Asher tried to do a bit much here and the tale got a bit confusing at times. Trying to make sense of the motivations of the two future warring factions made my head spin a bit, as did the attempts to explain the tech behind time travel itself. Asher is no slouch when it comes to tech, but still, this pushed it. Also, his characters, as usual, are not as nuanced as they could be to really draw me into the story; he improved on this to a degree in his later works, but it is fairly glaring here. Still, quite a romp, but perhaps not the best intro to Asher's fiction. 3 jumpy stars!
August 10, 2017
An amusing time-travel novel, based on the "many-worlds" 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 time-travel, 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!
October 15, 2012
Having been used to reading tales within Asher's polity Universe, this one is a bit of a change. The main theme is time travel and a war between 43rd-century humans, or what they've evolved or been engineered into, as it effects others down the time line.
The Cowl of the title is one super-engineered human who has travelled back to the beginnings to time and, from there, sends organic time machines out to collect and return with human gene samples from across time. Trouble is the samples are usually live people, which the uncaring Cowl disposes of once he's finished with them but when he "collects" a prostitute and a bio-engineered assassin from the 22nd century his plans go a little awry.
Cowl is good, hard science-fiction that tries a different tack on time travel and the probability of possible timelines. The trouble I had with it is that, of all of the characters, none of of them are in any way likeable and I never really cared who got killed by whom and eventually I didn't care why either.
Good sci-fi but not his best work, regardless of the critical acclaim it achieved.
The Cowl of the title is one super-engineered human who has travelled back to the beginnings to time and, from there, sends organic time machines out to collect and return with human gene samples from across time. Trouble is the samples are usually live people, which the uncaring Cowl disposes of once he's finished with them but when he "collects" a prostitute and a bio-engineered assassin from the 22nd century his plans go a little awry.
Cowl is good, hard science-fiction that tries a different tack on time travel and the probability of possible timelines. The trouble I had with it is that, of all of the characters, none of of them are in any way likeable and I never really cared who got killed by whom and eventually I didn't care why either.
Good sci-fi but not his best work, regardless of the critical acclaim it achieved.
May 12, 2010
Revisiting an old favourite by a favourite author. Cowl is a time travel novel with the usual Asher twist (it's bloody, intelligent, often blackly humorous).
When teen prostitute Polly and brainwashed government hitman Tack get caught up by an organic time machine that will only travel backwards, to the point before complex life on Earth arose, they're due to be genetic samples for Cowl, a genetically modified future human. Things get a bit sticky and it doesn't work out as planned, things get blown up and shot up, people get chased by extinct animals and rampaging future humanity who are hopping backwards and forwards hoping to push their enemies down the entropy slope and trap them in time.
Asher is an excellent SciFi author, British with a sense of understated irony and black comedy which segues off into almost-splatterporn, then hard science, well researched extremely down to earth history, and a lot of big guns and big explosions. A huge amount of fun - one of the very few authors I buy in hard back, as I know I'll just keep reading them over and over again.
When teen prostitute Polly and brainwashed government hitman Tack get caught up by an organic time machine that will only travel backwards, to the point before complex life on Earth arose, they're due to be genetic samples for Cowl, a genetically modified future human. Things get a bit sticky and it doesn't work out as planned, things get blown up and shot up, people get chased by extinct animals and rampaging future humanity who are hopping backwards and forwards hoping to push their enemies down the entropy slope and trap them in time.
Asher is an excellent SciFi author, British with a sense of understated irony and black comedy which segues off into almost-splatterporn, then hard science, well researched extremely down to earth history, and a lot of big guns and big explosions. A huge amount of fun - one of the very few authors I buy in hard back, as I know I'll just keep reading them over and over again.
August 29, 2012
About the most gonzo, space operatic time-travel tale I have ever read. Awesome villains, dark heroes, crazy science. Sort of reminded me of Richard K. Morgan's novel, Altered Carbon, where he takes a killer high-science idea and then drives the story forward at a blistering pace with it, looking at it from a dozen different angles.
The killer idea this time is a unique theory on time travel that involves multiple time streams, quantum paradoxes, probability slopes, and takes place over a time span of hundreds of millions of years, from a post human society to before the Primordial Sea. It can be as confusing as heck at times, but it still feels like it hangs together even when I don't quite understand how.
And hey, it makes for some very trippy fight scenes by the end.
The killer idea this time is a unique theory on time travel that involves multiple time streams, quantum paradoxes, probability slopes, and takes place over a time span of hundreds of millions of years, from a post human society to before the Primordial Sea. It can be as confusing as heck at times, but it still feels like it hangs together even when I don't quite understand how.
And hey, it makes for some very trippy fight scenes by the end.
December 8, 2012
I'll start off by saying that I found the basic premise of this book to be really fantastic. The approach to time travel and alternate histories and such was really well thought out and not like anything I'd read about before. Or perhaps, he took the concepts further than anything I've read before.
The pace was good. I didn't ever really find myself bored. Inherently with books involving time travel and such, you're invariably going to end up having to think a bit harder about what things are happening when, but some of the limitations the author placed on that helped keep it manageable. I think I would have been better served reading this one in larger chunks. I was reading this in roughly 30-60 minutes chunks over a month or so. I found myself having to go back a few times and familirize myself with characters that were mentioned previously. That continuity wouldn't have been an issue if I'd read it with fewer interruptions.
I like authors that aren't afraid to focus on bad guys. Or even, have protagonists that are, like everyone, flawed in one or many ways. It feels more natural and real to me, and allows me to suspend disbelief less often. The characters developed well, and in ways that made sense. There were a few bits that made were choppy that could have been handled more slowly and deliberately, but that is probably nitpicking a bit.
I think I would have liked a bit more time spent on some of the Heliothane characters to give more context once their story starts to get threaded in. The author does make an effort to explain some of that history, which was fine... but I found myself suddenly dealing with a few more main characters that were never really introduced well. I think that might have been intentional, given the overall plot, but it was a bit jarring.
An excellent read overall, and I'm looking forward to digging into this author more in the future.
The pace was good. I didn't ever really find myself bored. Inherently with books involving time travel and such, you're invariably going to end up having to think a bit harder about what things are happening when, but some of the limitations the author placed on that helped keep it manageable. I think I would have been better served reading this one in larger chunks. I was reading this in roughly 30-60 minutes chunks over a month or so. I found myself having to go back a few times and familirize myself with characters that were mentioned previously. That continuity wouldn't have been an issue if I'd read it with fewer interruptions.
I like authors that aren't afraid to focus on bad guys. Or even, have protagonists that are, like everyone, flawed in one or many ways. It feels more natural and real to me, and allows me to suspend disbelief less often. The characters developed well, and in ways that made sense. There were a few bits that made were choppy that could have been handled more slowly and deliberately, but that is probably nitpicking a bit.
I think I would have liked a bit more time spent on some of the Heliothane characters to give more context once their story starts to get threaded in. The author does make an effort to explain some of that history, which was fine... but I found myself suddenly dealing with a few more main characters that were never really introduced well. I think that might have been intentional, given the overall plot, but it was a bit jarring.
An excellent read overall, and I'm looking forward to digging into this author more in the future.
February 11, 2016
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 time-beast 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 tor-beast, 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 get-go 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 tor-beast 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 self-reflection 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 one-liners 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.
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 time-beast 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 tor-beast, 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 get-go 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 tor-beast 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 self-reflection 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 one-liners 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.
October 12, 2025
Glad that's over. The first half is alright, two people separately hurtle back in time, one is intercepted by a member of an advanced civilisation, while the other passes through historical periods (including the ever popular Romans) and samples various prehistoric beasts, in an effort to stay alive. Engaging, despite Asher's slightly clumsy writing and even more awkward dialogue. Most of said dialogue is exposition anyway, so there's no opportunity to be too awkward. But then after the male main character reaches the future-human's base and is informed more fully on the conflict, an interminable bogus technobabble begins. I lost interest at that point, and by the time the last act talked about in the blurb rolled around, I was skimming. The action scenes interspersed with the technobabble made it worse, instead of better. It was hard to care about the humans plucked from several points in history, much less the two futuristic factions' conflict.
January 31, 2025
Sf classique et survitaminée façon fleuve noir de mon enfance. Au début, on s'amuse bien et puis ça part dans le grand délire et je ne suis pas sûr que l'auteur lui-même comprenne toute son histoire.
January 30, 2013
“Andrewsarchus. You've just evaded the largest carnivorous mammal ever to roam the Earth. Don't you feel privileged?”
Though Asher seems to have a thing for siblings, I enjoyed this work far more than the first book of the Owner series. Maybe because everything happens in one book here and I'll come to like Owner more later on, I don't know.
One thing that I also liked with this book vis-a-vis Owner was that you got to know the characters, together, before they go splitting off into their own parts. Because of that, you sort of care a little more about what happens to them and don't have that disparate sensation of them not mattering to each other.
The twists and turns of who's betraying whom and who's on what side are of course wild fun, the technology is different; positively organic, and the whole ethos of a time war, though not new, works well here. I felt the ending was a little limp, but then it's hard to tie everything up neatly when you've got so many different points in time and powered forces to put together into a cohesive whole.
September 23, 2012
Cowl is a truly inventive and refreshingly invigorated novel.
I disliked the main character, Polly, at first, but she slowly grew on me. The supporting character, Tack, introduced as a heartless villain, transforms a greatly. Into a character I actually cared about. The morality the book builds is remarkable. Moving elegantly from black and white, to no side actually being the good guy.
The sci-fi elements are excellent. The main villain is actually terrifying because he's intelligent, a rare element in any book. Most evil geniuses have advanced means, but rampage in a straight line, taking no real initiative. Asher's villain breaks this tedious mold masterfully. Cowl's tactics remain enigmatic and unpredictable through out most of the book.
With the exception of the first chapter, the book is a true classic in my opinion.
I disliked the main character, Polly, at first, but she slowly grew on me. The supporting character, Tack, introduced as a heartless villain, transforms a greatly. Into a character I actually cared about. The morality the book builds is remarkable. Moving elegantly from black and white, to no side actually being the good guy.
The sci-fi elements are excellent. The main villain is actually terrifying because he's intelligent, a rare element in any book. Most evil geniuses have advanced means, but rampage in a straight line, taking no real initiative. Asher's villain breaks this tedious mold masterfully. Cowl's tactics remain enigmatic and unpredictable through out most of the book.
With the exception of the first chapter, the book is a true classic in my opinion.
November 4, 2010
Interesting story based around time-travel and long exhausting war that spreads millions of years starting from the future backwards - yup you read it well, backwards :)[return][return]Characters are great - maybe not too fleshed out but nevertheless very well portrayed. Main characters seem to be of the Asher's favorite type - good person forced to live at the edge of society and do things that others find awful and distasteful and the brutish merciless one, perfect killing machine bred for war, assassinations and combat who finally discovers himself to be a person - not a robot. Now mix this with the most unexpected sort of time travelers and you are in for a treat.[return][return]Great read. Recommended.
July 28, 2011
Whatever incredible vision Neal had in his head when he wrote this, I can only guess at. I'm afraid there was a failure to communicate for me. Already rapidly forgetting what little did register. A bit of a struggle to get through all of the bibble-bobble SF, in the company of muted characters I didn't really care about, culminating in a very unsatisfying ending. Neal Asher is a much better storyteller than this book reveals. Better luck with the next.
June 17, 2016
Well, for an Engineer (at least for me), this book makes no sense. I did appreciate the idea and the characters, but the technical details were too much and made no sense...
May 2, 2023
Cowl of the Wild
Forget Edge of Tomorrow, Cowl is my new favorite time travel story. For who better to concoct a time fiction with such intensity and technological fervor than Neal Asher, the father of the Prador and Golems? No one, I tell you, no one! The action is great, the grasp of physical laws and the theory of time displacement solid!
It’s an early piece, and it starts in London. A hooker and an old soldier get mixed up in an apocalyptic fight for humanity’s future, or past if you will, and drawn in against his will—the unlikely hero—Tack, a government killer with less qualms than a great white.
And then you have the signature elements, engineering feats the size of planets, power generation on a scale few humans today can imagine (hint: it’s not solar panels or wind turbines). Installations the size of moons, and weapons that could vaporize continents.
And the whole story comes together with a nice twist not even I could see coming despite the fact that I’ve read all his books.
Do you need more? Buy the book and start reading!
Forget Edge of Tomorrow, Cowl is my new favorite time travel story. For who better to concoct a time fiction with such intensity and technological fervor than Neal Asher, the father of the Prador and Golems? No one, I tell you, no one! The action is great, the grasp of physical laws and the theory of time displacement solid!
It’s an early piece, and it starts in London. A hooker and an old soldier get mixed up in an apocalyptic fight for humanity’s future, or past if you will, and drawn in against his will—the unlikely hero—Tack, a government killer with less qualms than a great white.
And then you have the signature elements, engineering feats the size of planets, power generation on a scale few humans today can imagine (hint: it’s not solar panels or wind turbines). Installations the size of moons, and weapons that could vaporize continents.
And the whole story comes together with a nice twist not even I could see coming despite the fact that I’ve read all his books.
Do you need more? Buy the book and start reading!
July 18, 2022
In 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 cyberpunk-esque dystopia and things get weird from there. Ultra-violent. I was good on the POV shifts up to the last 25% of the book, when they felt like they were coming too fast, to the detriment of the individual scenes. 3.5 stars.
May 27, 2025
I usually am kind of wary of timey wimey stuff, because time travel is a bitch and can absolutely mess up the coolest story, but this is, as usual, nicely done. The book is super fun, the characters (especially the baddies) interesting and I overall had quite a good time - but that's the usual with Asher, right ?
March 16, 2022
Cowl is time travelling adventure that literaaly spans over millions of years and creates a brilliant mixture of future and the past all rolled into one! The casual way characters do battle while time travellingis brillianlty handled! Tack, Polly and the other all come across brilliantly and their motivations make for a convulted tale of twists and turns that you will not see coming!
Cowl delights in it's various time perieods and it varying inhbitants! Cowl blasts along from the beginning! Asher never hesistates to put his characters through the wringer! It is full of three-dimensional characters and epic wold building! We see technology imposed on the past and the results of time changes and parrallel universe and the conssequences behind them! The pace of Cowl is relentless with none of the characters being given the chance to breath as they never stop from the beginning which give Cowl a breathless sense to it right from the start! Epic in every sense and it will keep your on your toes from the beginning! There is humour throughout as well which ties nealty into the books other toes of heroics and stylized questing! In scenes with Polly and Tack etc it has a similar feel to Indiana Jones there as well!
Cowl is excellent world building wrapped up in a story that will keep you on the edge of your seat to see what happens! You will be up late seeing what happens! Brace yourself right the start Cowl throws red herrings and plot twists at you that you will not see coming! Cowl is a rlloer caoster ride right from the start, full of daring do, time travel, characters that you would not expect, dinosaurs, robots, three dimensional characters , humour, epic world building, adventure and action! Crisp high five! Brilliant and highly recommneded! Get it when you can! :D
Cowl delights in it's various time perieods and it varying inhbitants! Cowl blasts along from the beginning! Asher never hesistates to put his characters through the wringer! It is full of three-dimensional characters and epic wold building! We see technology imposed on the past and the results of time changes and parrallel universe and the conssequences behind them! The pace of Cowl is relentless with none of the characters being given the chance to breath as they never stop from the beginning which give Cowl a breathless sense to it right from the start! Epic in every sense and it will keep your on your toes from the beginning! There is humour throughout as well which ties nealty into the books other toes of heroics and stylized questing! In scenes with Polly and Tack etc it has a similar feel to Indiana Jones there as well!
Cowl is excellent world building wrapped up in a story that will keep you on the edge of your seat to see what happens! You will be up late seeing what happens! Brace yourself right the start Cowl throws red herrings and plot twists at you that you will not see coming! Cowl is a rlloer caoster ride right from the start, full of daring do, time travel, characters that you would not expect, dinosaurs, robots, three dimensional characters , humour, epic world building, adventure and action! Crisp high five! Brilliant and highly recommneded! Get it when you can! :D
December 10, 2012
This is a fast-paced sci fi story with all sorts of interesting stuff crammed into it: time travel, dystopian future(s), super-evil bad guys and vaguely evil good guys. The plotting is good, though a bit convoluted at times, and I'm not entirely convinced it all hangs together.
The worst part about the book is the writing--there's an almost criminal amount of gerund/participle abuse, and some pretty wonky syntax besides. This hampered my enjoyment of the book, but I was able to ignore it most of the time. If I had been forced to edit this book, I probably would have carved my eyeballs out with a grapefruit spoon.
But, otherwise, good fun. Three and a half stars, recommended.
The worst part about the book is the writing--there's an almost criminal amount of gerund/participle abuse, and some pretty wonky syntax besides. This hampered my enjoyment of the book, but I was able to ignore it most of the time. If I had been forced to edit this book, I probably would have carved my eyeballs out with a grapefruit spoon.
But, otherwise, good fun. Three and a half stars, recommended.
February 7, 2014
Time travel one of the best things about science fiction.
The style of writing, dense for me, like the aroma of the dish being stronger than the taste.
There is nothing wrong with this presentation of a novel, being this way inclined.
Its just that everyone brain is wired differently, and I am more of a straight forward story reader.
This did not prevent me enjoying the book immensely. Skipping through time, to a western style show down, who ends up being the fastest draw!!!
Only the act of reading it, will enlighten you!
The style of writing, dense for me, like the aroma of the dish being stronger than the taste.
There is nothing wrong with this presentation of a novel, being this way inclined.
Its just that everyone brain is wired differently, and I am more of a straight forward story reader.
This did not prevent me enjoying the book immensely. Skipping through time, to a western style show down, who ends up being the fastest draw!!!
Only the act of reading it, will enlighten you!
October 7, 2020
Time travel is hard to do well, but Neal Asher brings his character development and world building talents to bear. Combined with his signature ability to weave theoretical science and fiction, he effortlessly lays out a tale of time travel, trials and terrors, triumph and human interaction on grand and complicated scale that manages not to lose you or drown you in details.
I was invested in the characters and the plot, loved it.
I approach time travel tales with trepidation, it’s a trope that’s over done and rarely done well.
Absolutely recommend!
I was invested in the characters and the plot, loved it.
I approach time travel tales with trepidation, it’s a trope that’s over done and rarely done well.
Absolutely recommend!
March 25, 2012
The concept behind this book was really unique and involves time travel and human mutation. As a hard Sci-Fi book it was really solid. My only complaint was that Asher uses the word nightmare excessively. The book is overflowing with the phrase, "...she looked up and gazed into the nightmare" or subtle variations on that theme. It happened often enough to annoy be by about 1/3 of the way through the book, but not enough to ruin the book overall. Just seemed like lazy writing/poor editing.
July 14, 2018
I've just found Neal Asher on Goodreads. I'm not going to leave a review, except to say that I own every. single. one. of his books in paperback. Books are expensive in South Africa, and I *really* don't have a lot of money. I buy them anyway, and cut back on other costs for the month. He's that good.
December 1, 2008
forgettable
August 15, 2019
I have trouble believing the author first wrote 'skinner' also wrote this confused mess of a time travel book. I'd avoid this.
September 19, 2020
Book club choice; I wouldn’t have even finished it otherwise... Long, tedious and lacking substance.
August 26, 2024
Science Fiction Matters - Time Travel as Setting/Time Travel as Puzzle
Cowl by Neal Asher
Time travel has been a distinct subgenre of science fiction since H.G. Wells' The Time Traveler. Wells' book did not explore the fascinating paradoxes that can arise from time travel. It would take years for writers to begin to explore the possibilities of time travel for killing grandparents or stepping on a butterfly in the age of dinosaurs and changing the present. The best example of the subgenre of "time travel as a puzzle" is Robert Heinlein's "All you Zombies" in which all the characters are the same person. [1]
A variant approach to time travel is to use time travel as a setting. H.G. Wells' classic story falls into that category, being more of a morality play about class structure in 19th-century Britain. Another book of this kind is Robert Silverberg's Hawksbill Station, which features the exile of political prisoners to the pre-Cambrian.
Neal Asher's Cowl is very much the latter kind of story. The story begins in the near future when a British prostitute named Polly gets involved in a dodgy deal gone wrong. The MacGuffin of the deal is high-tech equipment from the future. The deal is interrupted by an amoral government agent named Tack. It turns out that the tech is a time travel device that hijacks people to the past.
To the deep past.
The device attaches itself to Polly. Because Tack is in proximity at the time of activation, she and he are dragged back into the past. The pair make a couple of smaller time jumps, but Tack gets lost along the way. Polly's jumps get longer and longer, eventually taking her through the age of dinosaurs to the barren world of the pre-Cambrian.
Tack gets hijacked by a living time traveler heading in the same direction as Polly. Through this hijacker, Tack learns about the future. He finds out that he has been hijacked into a time war involving unleashing vast power against a superhuman mutant named Cowl.
Neal Asher is not concerned with paradoxes. Nuclear bombs going off in the Jurassic do not affect the future. Asher gives some handwaving explanations about probability slopes, but it is mostly bafflegab. The time travel element is purely for the setting. It is cool to see our separated heroes make their way to the essentially lifeless pre-Cambrian by fighting their way through huge mammals and huge dinosaurs. Never mind that the oxygen levels were too low for humans to operate at various eons.
Cowl is an action-adventure with time travel providing different settings. The writing is crisp, the ideas are engaging, and I came to like the characters.[2] Initially, I could not decipher the structure of future society, but eventually, I did and came to enjoy the conflict between one group of posthumans and another.
This may be your book if you are interested in an action-adventure time travel story without paradox.
Footnote:
[1] "The Sound of Thunder" and "All You Zombies" got a movie treatment. Both treatments departed from their respective storylines, although the "All You Zombies" treatment - Predestination - had more of the feel of the novella.
[2] Polly starts as a drug-addicted slut, but she cleans up her act thanks to a bit of artificial intelligence implanted in her as part of her involvement in the deal gone wrong. Tack goes from an amoral, programmed machine to a human with free will and a sense of right and wrong.
Cowl by Neal Asher
Time travel has been a distinct subgenre of science fiction since H.G. Wells' The Time Traveler. Wells' book did not explore the fascinating paradoxes that can arise from time travel. It would take years for writers to begin to explore the possibilities of time travel for killing grandparents or stepping on a butterfly in the age of dinosaurs and changing the present. The best example of the subgenre of "time travel as a puzzle" is Robert Heinlein's "All you Zombies" in which all the characters are the same person. [1]
A variant approach to time travel is to use time travel as a setting. H.G. Wells' classic story falls into that category, being more of a morality play about class structure in 19th-century Britain. Another book of this kind is Robert Silverberg's Hawksbill Station, which features the exile of political prisoners to the pre-Cambrian.
Neal Asher's Cowl is very much the latter kind of story. The story begins in the near future when a British prostitute named Polly gets involved in a dodgy deal gone wrong. The MacGuffin of the deal is high-tech equipment from the future. The deal is interrupted by an amoral government agent named Tack. It turns out that the tech is a time travel device that hijacks people to the past.
To the deep past.
The device attaches itself to Polly. Because Tack is in proximity at the time of activation, she and he are dragged back into the past. The pair make a couple of smaller time jumps, but Tack gets lost along the way. Polly's jumps get longer and longer, eventually taking her through the age of dinosaurs to the barren world of the pre-Cambrian.
Tack gets hijacked by a living time traveler heading in the same direction as Polly. Through this hijacker, Tack learns about the future. He finds out that he has been hijacked into a time war involving unleashing vast power against a superhuman mutant named Cowl.
Neal Asher is not concerned with paradoxes. Nuclear bombs going off in the Jurassic do not affect the future. Asher gives some handwaving explanations about probability slopes, but it is mostly bafflegab. The time travel element is purely for the setting. It is cool to see our separated heroes make their way to the essentially lifeless pre-Cambrian by fighting their way through huge mammals and huge dinosaurs. Never mind that the oxygen levels were too low for humans to operate at various eons.
Cowl is an action-adventure with time travel providing different settings. The writing is crisp, the ideas are engaging, and I came to like the characters.[2] Initially, I could not decipher the structure of future society, but eventually, I did and came to enjoy the conflict between one group of posthumans and another.
This may be your book if you are interested in an action-adventure time travel story without paradox.
Footnote:
[1] "The Sound of Thunder" and "All You Zombies" got a movie treatment. Both treatments departed from their respective storylines, although the "All You Zombies" treatment - Predestination - had more of the feel of the novella.
[2] Polly starts as a drug-addicted slut, but she cleans up her act thanks to a bit of artificial intelligence implanted in her as part of her involvement in the deal gone wrong. Tack goes from an amoral, programmed machine to a human with free will and a sense of right and wrong.
February 9, 2022
Asher, Neal. Cowl. Tor, 2004.
Neal Asher, an English science fiction writer who cites Roger Zelazny’s Amber series as a major inspiration, is right at home in a complex far-future universe. In his Polity books he detailed a multispecies interstellar war. In Cowl, he has two near-future humans get caught up in a time war waged by two far-future posthuman societies—the Heliothane and the Umbrathane, make what you like of the symbolic names. His humans are Tack, a genetically altered covert ops agent, and Polly, a young drug-addicted prostitute. The time travel technology is creatively nonintuitive, as it takes more energy to travel back centuries than it does weeks. The catch is that the further back you travel, the less probable you and your timeline become. The more unlikely you become, the harder it is to travel in time. At least, I think the way it works, but I stand ready to be corrected. I found the characters from the far future less engaging than Polly and Tack. But there is much action and the plot rolls along at a good pace. Of course, your mind is always engaged in trying to decipher the technologies and social structures into which you become immersed. 4 stars.
Neal Asher, an English science fiction writer who cites Roger Zelazny’s Amber series as a major inspiration, is right at home in a complex far-future universe. In his Polity books he detailed a multispecies interstellar war. In Cowl, he has two near-future humans get caught up in a time war waged by two far-future posthuman societies—the Heliothane and the Umbrathane, make what you like of the symbolic names. His humans are Tack, a genetically altered covert ops agent, and Polly, a young drug-addicted prostitute. The time travel technology is creatively nonintuitive, as it takes more energy to travel back centuries than it does weeks. The catch is that the further back you travel, the less probable you and your timeline become. The more unlikely you become, the harder it is to travel in time. At least, I think the way it works, but I stand ready to be corrected. I found the characters from the far future less engaging than Polly and Tack. But there is much action and the plot rolls along at a good pace. Of course, your mind is always engaged in trying to decipher the technologies and social structures into which you become immersed. 4 stars.
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