Cowl
category: science fiction, author:Neal Asher
original copyright 2004,read in December 2010
Agamedes' opinion: 7 out of 10
Time travel... Going back in time to affect the present... Multiple timelines, all possibilities exist somewhere, so who really cares... Asher has overcome the pointlessness of these battles through time. Sort of...Sure, every possibility has happened. If you think that you have won -- another timeline exists where you have lost. Asher adds another dimension to time travel: Some (most?) timelines will slip down the probability slope and eventually fade away. So -- in Asher's time travel tale -- there is a definite benefit to being on the "winning" timeline.
Thank goodness for that!
So we have a book about a battle across time. A book which does have a point, because the winners can actually win. And there are interesting characters who fight and grow and survive. All up -- a good book, well worth reading.
With an interesting insight into technique and the way in which a writer develops technique.
Cowl is published just two years before the other Asher books which I have read. (Follow the author label below this post, or jump straight to Prador Moon or The Voyage of the Sable Keech.) In Cowl, the adventure is there, the excitement is there, the plotting is there. The everyday acceptance of improvements to the basic human, already there. But there is an occasional stilted phrasing, occasional explanation where demonstration would have been better.
Cowl reads -- occasionally -- like an author's early book. Perhaps it is? I'll check, once my uninfluenced opinion has been written.
I do hope that Cowl is one of Asher's first books. I will then be correct in saying, this book is good -- and the author will be even better, once he has mastered some of the more subtle techniques of effective writing...
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4 comments:
Fourth book with a professional publisher. Voyage was my sixth and I'm on to my sixteenth right now...
I blog for fun and it's extra fun when someone seems to have read a post... To have an actual author take the time to post a comment! Wow!! Thank you Neal Asher!!
And Cowl, you might be interested to know, was shortlisted for the PKD Award. Cheers.
Thanks to Google and Wikipedia I now know that there were six nominees for the 2005 PKD (Philip K Dick) award. Thanks to an online catalogue I also now know that, of the six, only Cowl made it into our local library system.
A dedicated reviewer would now do a comparative analysis of all six... Ha! You wish :-)
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