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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
a promising premise wrapped in a truly poor novel, December 8, 2001
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.
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by Robert L. Forward
by Gregory Benford
by Gregory Benford
by Gregory Benford
by Gregory Benford
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