ome 200 years beyond our present era, a shattered Greenhouse Earth is run by the omnipresent and hard-nosed U-gov. Despite dire social conditions, technology has not stagnated, and the citizens of this time take many wonders for granted. But poor pitiful Polly, teenage prostitute, is hardly privy to such a privileged existence. All she can focus on is her next drug fix, a home-rolled cigarette and a roof over her head. Little wonder, then, that when a killer-soldier named Nandru, brother to Polly's dead best friend, comes calling with weird tales of time-beasts and government conspiracies, Polly just zones out on him. When she awakes, however, she finds that Nandru has outfitted her with a powerful AI prosthetic through which he can control her, and set her out as a stalking goat for U-gov agents on his tail.
Sure enough, some heavily boosted U-gov assassins soon come calling, looking for Nandru. Polly is forced to lead them to a rendezvous where Nandru kills them all except the most robotically canny, a fellow named Tack. But at the instant of Nandru's triumph, chaos erupts. The torbeast—a voracious and malign time-spanning entity—erupts into existence. Nandru is slain (but uploaded digitally to Polly's AI, where he will hereafter serve as a mental companion). Polly and Tack are infected with shards from the torbeast that equip them for a forced, one-way time journey back into the past. And then the two victims are off to the Nodus, the origin of existence.
The torbeast, it turns out, is the creation of the entity known as Cowl. Cowl, in turn, is the manufactured offspring of the Heliothane, one of the two dominant factions of the 43rd century. (The other faction is the Umbrathane.) Rebelling against his creators, Cowl and the Umbrathane fled back chronally to the Nodus. There Cowl is attempting to restructure the multiverse to his satisfaction, eliminating the Heliothane, who conversely are roaming the timestreams seeking to preserve their existence and to kill Cowl. Tack is quickly enlisted by the Heliothane (in the form of a fellow named Saphothere), while Polly remains a free agent, but one who must struggle to overcome her ignorance and helplessness.
Can a 16-year-old whore, however resourceful, and a programmed government wetworker seeking to understand what free will means outthink and outperform supermen from the future, in an attempt to save the multiverse for the common man? Maybe so, if they have hundreds of millions of years in which to mature.
Good old stuff made new again
How many times must the lesson be taught, before naysayers get wise? No major science-fictional idea or trope—"power chords," as Rudy Rucker refers to them—is ever fully used up in our genre. All that it takes for classic riffs to be reinvigorated is the arrival of a talented author, well versed in the field, who pours his or her heart and soul into a concept, rethinking the accepted wisdom, keeping what's valid, discarding what's stale.
Neal Asher is such a writer. In this, his third novel, the new British author shakes the dust off time-travel conceits. He takes the whole hoary notion of chronal factions battling for dominance of the timestream, rethinks its underpinnings, adds state-of-the-art gadgetry and attitude, straps on a supercharged prose module, and sprints out of the starting gate at hypersonic speed.
Asher has clearly absorbed his predecessors. This book is a distillation of, and homage to, such writers as Charles Harness, Ian Wallace, A.E. van Vogt, Keith Laumer, Poul Anderson, Jack Williamson and Fritz Leiber. But there's no heavy-handed allusiveness or borrowing. Asher's superstructure, all his own, rests on a well-concealed but strong foundation. (Perhaps the most overt reference Asher makes is to the torbeast's habit of snatching only those people who are already at the point of death, so as to minimize temporal paradoxes. This is of course the main conceit of John Varley's famous story "Air Raid.")
Employing a kinetic, honed but poetic prose rich in cinematic vividness, Asher wisely alternates between Polly's story and Tack's, thus allowing us to glimpse events both from above (the Heliothane level) and below. Polly's story, though packed with danger, features some humor as well, even recalling Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits (1981) at points. Additionally, in his depiction of the torbeast, a creature of myriad fanged mouths and guts and tentacles that sprawls obscenely throughout all time, Asher layers in some primo Lovecraftian/Hellboy funk.
Nor does he scant the traditional frissons of the time-travel tale (although major paradoxes such as are featured in the classic works by David Gerrold and Robert Heinlein are deliberately eschewed). At one point, Polly briefly encounters a kind of stranded Ancient Mariner figure named Thote, who's still fairly young and vibrant. A few pages later, Tack lands in Thote's era as well, but now the man is 50 years older, and Polly's arrival and departure is a distant memory. This kind of whipsawing of time provokes a heady pleasure for the reader.
Unrelentingly inventive and generous, pop-fizzy as the best comic-book scenarist, sympathetic even to his villains, Asher provides the field with a future classic.
