CowlWriter: Neal Asher
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 422
I read this book on the recommendation of
ambasadora, who-after hearing me talk about my novel-thought it’d be a good companion read due to its focus on genetic manipulation and warring factions.
In truth, this book was difficult for me to get through. Some reasons for this are my own stupidity, while other reasons just knocked me on my ass and left me scratching my head. It’s one of those books that, had I conceived the story, I would’ve written it much differently.
I want to make one thing clear: I adore time travel. I adore time travel loops, where a character is meant to go back in time in order for history to happen the way it should. I adore them so much it’s ridiculous. I also very much hold to the simple truth revealed in Ray Bradbury’s short story, “The Sound of Thunder,” where it’s revealed that tampering with even the most miniscule aspect of the past can have grave consequences for the future. It’s a great short story: I recommend it to everyone who reads SF or likes Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Trust me.
So, my likes and dislikes and expectations for time travel were heavy on my mind when I discovered that time travel was a major element of Asher’s Cowl. In this book you have (in relation to our current time) far-future humans (FFH) and far-far-future humans (FFFH). The FFFH have developed a method of time travel which, from what I could gather, is quite nifty-essentially, the object when carries you through time must be made of living tissue, which is cool and different.
In this book, time exists not as a linear scale, but a kind of sphere, and I’m suspecting, parallel universe spheres at that. So if the circumstances allow and something HORRIBLE happens in one reality, you go back in time, change it, and end up in a new, maybe parallel, different reality (though this doesn’t always work). Perhaps this is the logic that governed Asher’s world-building as he sent his FFFH people back in time to build objects in the prehistoric past, or when he sent humans from all over the timeline through the past to interact with historical figures and kill animals in order to survive. But this bothered me: not only does it take a while for me to figure out the exact rules of time travel (and paradoxes) for this novel, but there seem to be no consequences for the future and the world itself, which is rather ironic, since the whole premise is to kill a FFFH man (Cowl) who’s gone back to the time prior to the Nodus (aka a moment before the Pre-Cambrian explosion) in order to create a future of humans specifically like him (he was genetically created, not conceived).
It’s very possible that this kind of time travel has too many loops for my taste, and I freely admit my own prejudices and expectations get in the way of fully enjoying this as a conceit. By the end of the book, I think I’ve figured it all out, but it’s almost one of those that requires a second read just to make sure. However, I rarely do second reads.
Something else that hampered the enjoyment of the novel, but I realize was totally my own fault: every chapter starts with an italicized section. There’s a person’s name, and then a paragraph or two explaining some situation that relates to the FFFH humans’ immediate past. It took me, and I kid you not, over three hundred pages (the book is barely over four-hundred) to figure out that these sections were NOT unsigned letters (trust me, they look like letters), but rather, the name is the person who is speaking his/her experience. Once I figured THAT out, I went back to re-read those particular sections, which did help my enjoyment of the book quite a bit. Though, stewing on this makes me think that Asher was trying to squeeze too much into one novel: the history of how Cowl was created and how time travel was discovered, etc., would make a full novel in its own right, with this particular book easily being the second part in a duology. So, Mr. Asher: you missed a fabulous opportunity to make Cowl accessible to all readers, and not just the ones willing to put up with the coyness and manipulations of the plot.
And I mean that: it’s rare that I read a book where I feel manipulated by the author, or where the author is being “coy” with me by purposely withholding information. My misunderstanding with the supposed “letters” aside, tell me: why have two or three scenes with a character called “the watcher” watching one of the protagonist’s journeys in time, only to name said watcher as a POV character in the middle of the book? How hard would it have been to simply reveal the world and the technology for what it was all along? My immediate guess, and I’m too lazy to look it up, was that the reader may not have been familiar with the particular setting at that time, so to bring us there, just to show how the FFFH humans can “watch” people travel through time, may have been confusing. But it was coy as hell. When I’m in someone’s POV, I want their name, damn it, not some distant omniscient description of the “the watcher” (which wasn’t even The Watcher, like a title). Sure, you may raise a lot of questions by giving us specific details we can’t put in context, but you lose the trust of your reader by being so coy and revealing something not all that impressive after all (to me).
That’s just the tip of the ice-berg: too many POVs for my taste, though I understand the need to tell the whole scope of the story. Too many twists that in truth, weren’t twists at all. I was an avid watcher of Alias, folks: I know twists. I was never surprised by the so-called twists in this book. And the thing with twists is you should see them coming, but here, the writer is clearly manipulating the story and events in such a way you can’t appreciate the clues for what they are. Not only that, but it makes me question the structure of the story. Was it really necessary to have this ploy of X to happen, only to find out it didn’t have to be a ploy at all? Essentially, by time a twist is revealed at the end of any book, you should not be given new information at that time in order to understand it. Instead, you’ve had the information all along, which is what makes the twist so satisfying: you could’ve figured it out, if you’d tried. Asher gives us new information at the end, so while it helped my understanding of the story at large, I felt cheated.
But the greatest mistake in this book was crappy research. And the sad thing is, it could’ve easily been rectified by a single remark by a character “in the know”. Example: in one scene, a character (Tack, a FFH) is observing a tyrannosaurus rex. Another character (an FFFH) explains how when t-rex’s remains were first discovered, it was believed the t-rex was a fierce hunter. Since then, society dampened that violent image to make the beast a scavenger, something that only fed off the dead/dying. The FFFH then explains how history sweetens the brutality of life, and that going back in time has taught the FFFH’s the truth of the matter: T-rex was a hunter after all.
This was done well. It tells the reader that these FFFH humans have access to inside knowledge, and for the sake of the book, we should trust them.
However, you have to do this every time. Don’t sit there and tell me velociraptors had feathers. I won’t believe you. At all. Not unless you make some comparison remark as in the example of the t-rex. And instead of trusting you and reading along, I’ll read the passage five times to make sure I’m reading it correctly, and then I’ll march to Wikipedia and look it up. (Note: I’m not basing my response on Crichton’s work in Jurassic Park and its movie adaptations. I wanted to be a paleontologist once upon a time ago, and did this HUGE project when I was in eighth grade that was thoroughly researched and utterly ridiculous in its thesis. But it was fun. And while I know science has changed since…, oh, 1995…I would think the internet had updated knowledge, yes?***). For the record, there is a particular dinosaur with feathers that's in the same FAMILY as velociraptor, but raptors themselves did not have feathers. Thank you and good night.
Such mistakes, or creative whimsies, will lead to a FIERCE distrust of your representation of the past, including the names of any and all creatures you introduce us to: I don’t believe you any more. In fact, I think you’re MAKING THEM UP. Despite this being fiction, and science fiction at that, don’t pull creative whimsies like that. It comes off as piss-poor research and shoddy world-building.
And speaking of piss-poor research? Word to the wise: miniature horses DID NOT EXIST in prehistoric times!!! Yes, horses have evolved over time and did start out quite small, but they had distinct features with distinct names, and really don't resemble the modern horse. But the character identifying them could’ve said, “Oh, they look like miniature horses” and had the little dictionary in her head name them properly (Mesohippus, thank you very much), and THEN the correct name could’ve been used. But no…they were always referred to as MINIATURE HORSES. That’s not a character mistake: that’s laziness on part of the writer. It’s a creative whimsy: oooh, let’s put miniature horses in the Oligocene epoch! That’s cool! No, it’s stupid. And it’s wrong.
My grandparents raised minis, people. I grew up with my grandparents. Miniatures were BRED specifically for their size and body-type. They did not evolve naturally into their breed.
That mistake pissed me off more than the raptors did, lemme tell ya.
And it was such mistakes that led me to nitpick this book, like questioning why Cowl and his sister were raised in the womb rather than raised completely in a vat. The technology’s there, yet not used to its fullest extent (I guess for dramatic effect?). Also, when you have a character with a name like COWL, never, EVER use that word unless it’s the name of the character. Especially do NOT use that word in the same paragraph as the name. You just don’t do that: it takes away from the effectiveness of the name. Cowl has a cowl. Ha ha. No shit.
Oh, and let’s not forget action scenes, where Asher would not only use long sentences and passive verbs (was running, was being handled), but at a couple of points, jumped right into present tense!! WTF?!?!?!? In a third-person, past tense book, you jump to third person present for the sake of an ACTION scene? Sorry, but that rates on my list of NO-NOs when it comes to POV. You can mess with tense, but in my mind, it should have a greater purpose than making the “action” more “immediate” than it is.
Ultimately, it took me a long time to grasp and enjoy this book. Mostly for many of the reasons I list behind the cut, but the last hundred pages or so, when I’m FINALLY getting the info I needed all along--like Cowl’s true agenda, like the warring factions’ true agendas, and then, of course, some sense of rules for the time-travel--I could enjoy it. Still, up until that point, I spent more time mentally critiquing the novel rather than relaxing and enjoying it. And I’ve said before, I don’t mind having to work out a plot and figure things out, but don’t make it any more difficult than necessary. I never felt sympathetic to the characters, and now that I’m done with the book, I’m still trying to figure out why the one protagonist, Polly, was even there at all. Which is a shame: when I read the first few pages of this, it was her POV and situation that gripped me the most.
It’s not to say there aren’t enjoyable things in this book. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on, but the presentation of said stuff is what personally gives me a problem. I definitely think that Asher should’ve made two books out of this though, because the back story is a novel in its own right.
So if you read this (it’s definitely an adventure-type of story), don’t consider it an example of good writing. There’s a lot of sloppiness in this book, which is a shame, because it could’ve been far more kick-ass than it is.
*** = Edit 9/20/07: Well, talk about your updated research:
Bumpy Bones Suggest Velociraptor had Feathers. How serendipitous for the author.