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I just finished reading Cowl (2004), a science fiction novel by Neal Asher. Of the seemingly endless supply of books he’s written, I chose “Cowl” because A) it is a stand alone novel where most of his works are bound to series and B) it was available through my local public library system.

Okay, the third reason is that it is specifically a time travel story, and I’m a sucker for time travel stories.

Most of the books of Asher’s I’ve read thus far (the reviews are elsewhere on my blog) are set off Earth, well outside the solar system, and so far in the future that anything that even vaguely refers to Earth is incredibly removed.

So it was odd to start out with the protagonist Polly, a teenage prostitute and drug addict in the 22nd century. Through an association with the sister of a soldier who had access to odd technology, she ends up in the crosshairs of a “U-gov” assassin named Tack. She sees the soldier Nandru killed by something called the Torbeast while Tack is trying to kill her.

The military AI Nandru fused inside Polly’s chest receives Nandru’s personality as an upload after he dies and Polly receives a scale from the Torbeast, an all mouths and claws living feeding machine sent into the future by the monster Cowl.

This begins Polly’s and Tack’s (and Nandru’s) inexorable journey, leap by leap, further into the past toward the inevitable rendevous with Cowl at the point just before life began on our planet.

Where did all this begin? Far in the future where two competing people groups have harnessed power directly from the Sun to make time travel possible. Cowl was created to be the ultimate life form, but has become a menace whose sole purpose is to end life. The overall mission is to find and kill Cowl, who everyone believes is in the past to halt the evolution of all living things (especially human) except for himself. The Torbeast he has created feeds, slaughtering scores of humans in its travels, to leave behind scales that attach to people like Polly. They then are summoned across history by Cowl as “samples.”

Much of the first half of the book is a chronicle of Polly’s and Tack’s separate adventures in time. Tack is captured by one of the futuristic time travelers and reprogrammed which isn’t that difficult. All of Tack’s life, from childhood on, was as a programmed servant of the government. He kills with no more empathy than turning off a light switch. He also is compelled to obey whatever he is programmed to do, even as the human side of him objects.

However, there are plots and counterplots, and layers of subterfuge that mask almost everyone’s motivations and in the end, neither Cowl nor anyone else is precisely as they seem.

As with Asher’s other works, there are plenty of “medical atrocities” to go around, along with unhuman beasts, and deadly, messy violence. The word “caprice” occurs more or less frequently as Asher has an apparent fondness for crab-like creatures. Perhaps written more for UK readers, the word “hoover” is used two or three times when people on my side of the pond would have said “vacuum.”

His method of presenting time travel and its problems is sufficiently complex, making it heinously expensive in terms of energy cost and highly plastic in how “probability slopes” can make such travel more difficult and even impossible. This is what Cowl is trying to do with his enemies, putting them at the bottom of such a slope where no amount of energy will help them escape.

At the end of time, Polly and a now very different Tack reunite along with several other hapless tor travelers, all rescued from Cowl’s brutality by his sister Aconite. She has very similar abilities to Cowl, and is trying to blunt if not undo Cowl’s plans.

Before it is all over, multiple plot twists reveal that just about everyone got it wrong, including Cowl, and life begins anew on our world through a means no one saw coming. Tack and Polly return to their time, but as wholly changed people and with a new mission.

There were parts of the novel that were confusing and some of portions of the text tended to drag, but it’s well worth the read. As with Asher’s other stories, the climax is an adrenaline-fueled, catastrophically action packed blitz worthy of the very best cinematic summer blockbuster and then some.

As with some books, I make note of a favorite quote or two. The one from this book is:

Of course all the official news organizations decried that as hysterical rubbish, but then they had to if they wanted to stay in business.

Exactly.

Since I also review books, TV, and films relative to their “progressive” presentation, I’m pleased to report none of that is found in “Cowl.” Asher tells a story without any of that as a matter of course, which is always a delight.

I had a blast.