Customer Reviews

Cosm

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

I just finished reading Gregory Benford's COSM. The book was good (as usual) and sort of followed a path similar to that in ARTIFACT in that you have some characters trying to learn about a mysterious object.

An ambitious, young physicist is running an experiment on RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) using streams of elliptic uranium. At first everything is fine but then the readings seem to slow down. Suddenly there is a massive explosion. Amidst some of the wreckage is a reflective sphere about the size of a bowling ball. The physicist knows this has something to do with the explosion and takes the sphere for observation. Unfortunately she is a little too secretive and charges of theft and impropriety are raised.

The sphere is an enigma. It feels solid but doesn't seem to be made of anything. It has no spectrum. Light can penetrate is slightly. It emits photons as if it were at four-thousand degrees. It seems to have a tidal effect near the surface. What is this object? The physicist teams up with a theorist to try and solve the mystery. But as the mystery becomes clear bit by bit, the political and scientific climates intensify. Finally, a theory is arrived at that seems to take into account all of the facts. The object is a pocket universe with an internal time that is accelerating.

Soon the sphere becomes transparent and the birth of galaxies can be witnessed. As time speeds up in the sphere, now called a Cosm, it becomes more and more important to continue observations. But as the experiment demands closer inspection and more time, the charges against the physicist also demand more time. Although the physicist warns against it, the Brookhaven Lab repeats the experiment and creates a much larger Cosm. Unfortunately this one is too big to move and is obstructing repairs to the RHIC. The story's threads all build and collide in an ending that brings about a number of interesting questions about the nature of our own universe.

COSM is a very good novel that Gregory Benford first had the idea for in the late 1980s. A number of theories, studies, and publications are mentioned in this novel and they are all real. Even if you are not a promising particle physicist the story is very easy to follow. The characters all seem to act consistently and I found no obvious flaws that detracted from the novel. If you like hard science that is located right on the edge of current research then I would strongly recommend COSM.

The hard SF sub-genre has a rough row to hoe: these books not only have to have all the normal requirements of fiction, such as believable characters and an interesting plot line, but must also educate the reader in what are frequently some very esoteric theories and some very strange facts that fly in the face of `normal' logic. Benford has been one of the major practitioners of this field for some time, and this book could possibly be the ultimate expression of it, it terms of pure science. The other requirement, to tell a good fictional story, however, is just not on a par with the science.

The scientific point of extrapolation here is a small, silvery sphere that is produced as the result of a sub-atomic particle physics experiment. This result is totally unexpected, and wrecks a good portion of the equipment when it appears, forcing the lead experimenter, Alicia, a black female physicist, to stop any further planned work. On impulse (or gut feeling), she takes the sphere back to her own university, without informing anyone else what she is doing. Upon investigation, and with the help of a theoretical physicist, slowly a theory is developed about what the sphere is - a `pocket' universe budded off from our own, which is evolving at a time rate that is exponentially faster than our own.

The description of the evolution of this sub-universe is based on some of the more current theories of the day, starting from the moment of the Big Bang to points that are far in the future history of our own universe, and are well described and easy to follow. However, I found the university politics that surround Alicia's theft of the sphere somewhat unbelievable, as her institution leaves her, an untenured junior professor, in sole charge of the investigation even after preliminary results indicate that it may be one of the scientific breakthroughs of the century, and one of the side effects of the sphere is the direct cause of the death of one of her students. The bureaucratic quagmire that makes up the university administration is more believable, with individuals who are more interested in having Alicia, as a minority representative, help on committees devoted to such subjects rather than work on science, and others who are clearly out to only hold on to their own positions in the school. The small scene of the President's involvement of using the sphere as one more campaign aid, without any understanding of the real science or its import, is, unfortunately, spot on.

Characterization for the secondary characters (Alicia's helpers and her theoretical physicist) is quite reasonable, but I found myself looking serious askance at Alicia herself. I found it difficult to believe that someone steeped in the methods and doctrine of science would steal and conceal such a find; her reactions to others trying to place her in the `minority' box came off as much too mild; and those scenes where she is on the prowl for a man felt like they belonged to a different person.

The end of the book takes a route that I felt was even more unbelievable than the initial `theft' of the sphere, and did little to really resolve either Benford's character conflicts or the philosophical musings on the fate of the universe and the reason `our' universe is so perfectly `tuned' to allow the production of life. Thus, at the end, though I was left with some excellent cosmological insights, in terms of story and completeness, or any real look at the people who actually do scientific work, this book had little for me.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

Much of what Benford has written over the years has been pretty ordinary -- _Jupiter Project_, _In Alien Flesh_, and so on. (That's just my own opinion, of course.) But every so often, he produces an exceptional piece of work, and this is one of them. Timescape is another. And in both cases, it's because he's focused on the theme of scientist-at-work. Of course, Benford is a working scientist, so he knows what it's all about, but he also does a terrific job of putting you in there with the characters. In this story, the protagonist is nuclear and particle physicist Alicia Butterworth, female, black, intellectually aggressive, and socially a bit inept. During an interesting and innovative experiment with the collider at Brookhaven, there's a small explosion which wrecks her detector and produces an unexplainable object like a shiny, heavy bowling ball. Alicia and her post-doc, Zak Nguyen, basically highjack the thing back to UC-Irvine for investigation -- which isn't entirely believable, inasmuch as she's gotten this far in a professional career. The notion that Alicia and her buddies would all scamper out to the desert in the last chapter seems a bit thin, too. But anyway: The science is fascinating and (to a non-physicist like me) seems believable. Not only she but Max Jalon, the theorist from Caltech whom she ropes into helping her, are nicely drawn and quite three-dimensional, and so is Zak. When he works at it, Benford is very good at both analyzing the humans and humanizing the analysis.

As a black woman, I must say that reading these reviews both disturbed and intrigued me. Many of the reviewers wrote that Mr. Benford does not "accurately" portray a black woman. To this, I must ask, how is a black woman "supposed" to act/think/feel? To say that Alicia is unrealistic is to relegate black people to one-dimensional stereotypes.

After reading so many negative reviews about the author's portrayal of a black woman, I immediately ordered the book so I could form my own opinion. And you know what? I have to applaud Mr. Benford for his truthful-yet-risque comments & observations through the voice of Alicia Butterworth. Do I agree with everything Alicia says? No. Of course not. Does every white reader have to agree with every white character in a book? I think not.

Anywho - I gave this book 4 stars because of the concept, the great science and the questions it raises. I especially like the letters, emails and newspaper titles/blurbs peppered throughout the book because they give points of view from outside of the academic world (i.e., are we playing god? etc).

I took off a star because some aspects of the book were just unrealistic or unnecessary. For example - it makes absolutely no sense that Alicia was the only one with access to the Cosm. What university would allow that? Something of this magnitude would have been taken into the custody of the government. Also - why wasn't the Cosm being video recorded? Yes, they were getting reams and reams of numerical data, but why wouldn't they record it for study afterwards or for others to see (especially since no one else was allowed into the lab)? Completely unnecesary were all the pages dedicated to her failed love & social life. Yes, I enjoy character development and background history, but come on...this is not a trilogy. Why waste space writing about singles bars when there is a MINIATURE UNIVERSE SITTING IN YOUR LAB?

Aside from those points though, I really enjoyed the book. I love how Benford captured the current scientific atmosphere in this paragraph:

"Some felt that the big, solvable issues were largely done, and the unsolved ones couldn't be settled. That left smaller, manageable, naggingly boring science, like sequencing human DNA. Of course, the implications of that knowledge could be vast, but no one expected grand syntheses to emerge. Mostly, it would be endless detail. Fascinating particulars indeed, but smaller in scale than the heroic era that had followed Crick & Watson."

This reminds me of the beginning of Asimov's Foundation series, when the Empire felt that humanity had discovered everything there was to discover, thereby making all new "scientific" ventures purely revisionist. This is an important theme as the academic community struggles to reconcile established theories with the information acquired from the Cosm.

All in all, a good read.

Cosm was a very enjoyable read.. some of the more interesting science fiction I have read in a long time. The story follows a physicist that "accidentally" creates a universe in a laboratory. Benford keeps the story moving by following the development of this universe and exploring how it is viewed from many different angles, including law, religion and politics. Personally I enjoyed just finding out what was happening to the universe itself, but the other angles really added depth to the story. I must say that he paints a pretty bleak picture of academic physics... this certainly won't serve as a good recruiting tool for academia.. :)

Others reviews have suggested the character development isn't very good. I would buy that, though I didn't get that impression while I was reading the book. I'm sure the character development could be better, but I found the book very enjoyable regardless.

It looks like the customer reviews are all over the scale - some hate this book, some love it. I thought it was a good book. As a semi-scientist, I thought the characters were accurate and interesting. However, the physics was hard to understand. I've had classes in modern physics, but it wasn't enough for me to really understand what was going on. I wish the author had spent more words on the physics and less on the portrayal of scientists in action. I think only people with a degree in physics could understand the science in the book, which is ironic since the whole point behind the book was to introduce non-scientists on how real scientists work.

'Cosm' is indeed cosmic reading. Gregory Benford once again displays his mastery at flawlessly merging science fact with fiction while tackling questions that scientists eternally ponder. The main characters live on well after one puts down the book. It is quite easy to identify with Alicia and cohorts as they could easily exist today in a particle physics laboratory . The impenatrable Cosm represents the common view many hold of the cold, selfish, and completely objective to a fault scientist. Alicia and Max are eventually able to peer through the Cosm while at the same time looking inward exposing feelings and emotions that would be dangerous to one's career. Benford is so skillful at his craft that it becomes easy to believe that the reader is involved in an account of a factual event. Only a writer with a firm grasp of cutting edge quantum physics could pull this off. A rating of '10' was considered but I made the mistake of reading Benford's earlier 'Timescape' prior to 'Cosm'. It is difficult for a writer to top a masterpiece, but Gregory Benford comes very close with 'Cosm'.