Cowl

Neal Asher

Tor hardback, 406 pages, £17.99

Published March 2004

ISBN 1405001372

Review by Mike Don (2004)

Slick, fast-moving time war thriller which sees rival groups of highly evolved post-humans from the remote future time-jumping back to the Proterozoic to get the drop on their rivals. Cannily, Asher takes as his protagonists two individuals from our own near future, dragged back down the geological column as involuntary participants in the war. His heroes have a hard, ruthless edge to them; programmed human killing machine , streetwise junkie prostitute and renegade elite combat soldier who spends most of the book as a disembodied AI programme in the Dixie Flatline mould. As for the post-humans, their evolution hasn’t changed their essential humanity – they’re still vicious, backstabbing killer apes at heart.

Which makes for a humdinger of an action thriller, taking off from a Peter F. Hamilton start (corporate cybernoir in an environmentally ruined East Anglia) to an exuberant old-fashioned blockbuster finale.