Cosm [Paperback]

Gregory Benford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 1999

Within an installation of ultra-high-energy scientific equipment, something goes wrong with a young physicist's ambitious experiment. It will soon be seen as a significant historical breakthrough, for the explosion has left something behind - a sphere made of nothing known to science.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Alicia Butterworth is a physicist from U.C. Irvine who's trying to re-create the conditions that existed just before the big bang using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. Something goes wrong during one of the collider runs, and part of the machine explodes, leaving behind a strange metallic sphere. Butterworth sneaks the object back to Irvine, where she and a colleague determine that what they have on their hands is a window into a miniature universe, or cosm. The cosm is evolving far faster than our own universe, giving Butterworth a ringside seat as the history of creation replays itself. Her theft turns out to be just the start of what, at times, is a boisterous adventure as she becomes ensnared in the intrigue of cloistered academic and scientific circles. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Avon launches Eos, its new sf/fantasy imprint, with a bang: a physics professor creates a new universe in her laboratory. Benford, himself a physics professor, has also won the United Nations Medal in Literature.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Orbit (February 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1857237242
• ISBN-13: 978-1857237245
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,385,411 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a promising premise wrapped in a truly poor novel, December 8, 2001

By 

R. Hubbard (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cosm (Mass Market Paperback)

This is the third novel I've read by Benford and certainly my least favorite of the three (the others being Timescape and the Martian Race). As evidenced in Timescape as well, Benford seems to have a chip on his shoulder about portraying scientists "as they really are." So in this novel we are privy to the inner struggles and private life of Alicia Butterworth, a little known particle physicist working at University of California Irvine. However, in attempting to provide a plausible portrait of a physicist at work, Benford seems to have forgotten that people read novels for reasons other than being preached at that scientists are people too. The clunky prose, ludicrous characterization and utter lack of plot ultimately sank whatever good intentions he may have had for this novel.

The worst gaffe, in my view, is the utter lack of a plot. This is a book based on a premise: scientist accidentally creates a new universe on the lab bench. After setting that forth in the opening 20 pages or so the novel then drags on for another 350 pages while we learn how everyone from the scientist's dad to the president of the united states reacts to her invention. This is not exactly riveting stuff. The chapters devoted to the eccentrics who seek Alicia out with their zany ideas about the cosm have been blatantly cribbed from Timescape and literally could have been copied from that novel word for word. Not only is this irritating for readers who have read the previous novel (and I didn't enjoy this bit much in his previous work either) but is only tangentially relevant to Cosm at all and only serves to further extend an already overblown work. And yet somehow, while managing to include long passages like this which contribute nothing to the plot (such as it is), he fails to tie up several significant loose ends, ending the novel at a point which may have been convenient but in terms of resolution is terribly unsatisfactory.

The next failure of this book's high ideals is in the woefully thin amount of science actually contained between the covers. Benford has clearly invested a fair amount of thought in coming up with a plausible scenario for the universe creation event (not actually a new idea in sci-fi, although he seems to think it is.) But once the big experiment has been run (on about page 10) it is all downhill from there as no further science actually occurs. The novel's viewpoint character, Alicia, does absolutely nothing to attempt to analyze or understand the "cosm" that she has (accidentally) created other than the particle-physics equivalent of aiming a camera at it and then sitting around watching it for a couple months. Any attempt to actually synthesize her observations into some kind of understanding is eschewed as "theory" and dutifully ignored. Which brings me to my next criticism...

Alicia. A thinly disguised mouthpiece for Benford's complaints about students, administrators, politicians, reporters, sociologists, non-scientists, you name it. Apparently Benford was trying to bring off this character as a well-rounded human being and not just a two dimensional portrait of a geek in a lab coat, but the resultant mess is a woman who, over the course of 370 pages, manages to do almost nothing besides look down her nose at her students, co-workers, etc. The sole noteworthy actions taken by this "scientist" are coming up with the experiment which creates the cosm (accidentally) and then stealing it. Other than that, she has a collaborator who takes care of all the boring "theory," like figuring out what the cosm is, where it came from etc., a postdoc who takes all the measurements and observations, a best-friend who manages her social life, a father who keeps an eye on the political situation, and a lawyer who handles all the legal ramifications. (Pathetically she doesn't even hire, find or pay for the lawyer herself, dad takes care of all of that.) Overall, Benford has created the ultimate un-character who does nothing, wins no sympathy and is of no interest.

Finally, with a topic no smaller than the creation of the universe itself, Benford has no choice but to confront some of the philosophical aspects of science. But here he does little more than demonstrate the stereotype that most scientists are woefully shallow philosophers. Most of the characters' reflections on the cosm stop at musings on the anthropic principle which, in my opinion, is quite philosophically shallow and even this Benford does an amateurish job of exploring. Alicia does little more than roll her eyes at suggestions from the public that there are ethical issues at stake in creating more cosms, so this aspect of the philosophical situation gets no consideration whatsoever. While devoting quite a few pages to musings on the philosophical significance of the cosm, Benford doesn't seem to cover much philosophical ground, leaving much to be desired in this area.

Overall, I found this a very poor novel indeed which provides a rather immature look at a potentially interesting topic. But others have done this better. For instance, while its science is pure nonsense, Lethem's As She Climbed Across the Table is a much more entertaining look at the passions/obsessions of sceintists and campus politics in the context of lab bench universe creation. If you are more interested in the science underlying "tabletop universe creation" I would suggest going straight to the physics literature and skipping Benford's gloss on it which can do little more than paraphrase the work of others, liberally salted with Benford's unsurprising (and rather uninteresting) opinions on life, the universe and everything.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not the usual Science-Fiction fare...., December 3, 1999

By 

Russell Wild - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cosm (Mass Market Paperback)

An original, believable novel about a small-particle researcher who discovers a strange, new object during an experiment with a particle accelerator. Hell...that sounds like a story-line only a hard-core geek could get off on....but Cosm is a very entertaining book in a genre which...if it hasn't grabbed me in the first twenty pages....I give it the flick. I read the whole 370-odd pages...(and that hasn't happened since Sagan's "Contact") The dialog is a strong point...witty, in parts down-right funny. There are no long winded rambles on the nobility of researchers delving into the unknown for totally self-less reasons etc...but the laboratory techniques of a working researcher are believable (to this reader at least) and some fascinating ideas about the evolution of our universe are conveyed; information on the working lives of the scientific community, particularly those involved in small-particle research is convincing. Greg Benford has put in the hard yards of research before he put pen to paper here. A darn good read.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard core physics in fast paced credible SciFi thriller, July 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Cosm (Mass Market Paperback)

As a woman PhD physicist, who worked in academia and government labs, I REALLY identified with Benford's black superwoman, superhero, hard-nosed but soft hearted physicist, who is too busy teaching and making her name in science to get a love life (which, true to life, comes to her eventually through working on physics with fellow physicists).The science fiction flows smoothly out of science fact, the coast- to-coast settings and characters are all too familiar and true to style in this near-term future, whether it's the UC or Caltech faculty, students and administrators, or whether it's at the Brookhaven accelerator; and federal officials are still the BAD GUYS. As a Benford fan of long standing, I found this novel to have more depth, more character development, more plotline and more fun: it's a good read for all and any science or SciFi lovers...I give it an easy high five!