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 fe...

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 o...

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.

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...

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 usua...

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 b...

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 mai...

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 s...

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 hap...

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!