Cowl

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.

The setting here is superb - a well thought-out time travel story with both historical and prehistoric settings. Given my own interests, I liked the range of prehistoric animals (mammals in particular) that feature in the story, and the 21st century setting that we see at the beginning of the book is also quite atmospheric.

Unfortunately, this is let down by the warring factions that turn out to be behind events. In particular, just too many of the viewpoint characters just aren't likeable, and it's rather difficult to care about any of them. This doesn't kick in until the last third or so of the book, but that means there's no pay-off for the story up until that point. Random and largely indistinguishable unpleasant individuals fighting one another just does't create an interesting plot, for all the quality of the setting.

Not one of Asher's better novels, unfortunately, despite a lot of promise.