Cosm

Rating:
Summary: Benford once again humanizes science in his glowing 'Cosm'.
Review: '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'.

Rating:
Summary: Thin plot, thick science
Review: ...and tons of ideas. Academic politics, competitive science, media madness, diversity and race, law and ethics. But the big one is cosmology, so it is also inevitably about faith and frailty. Perhaps Benford's craftmanship is uneven, but much of the prose has far more precision and poetry than the average science fiction novel. The plot has drive -- what next for that mysterious sphere -- even though much of it turns out to be a distraction, and the ending is predictable. The characters are a bit typed but are lively and sympathetic. After writing this book, Benford went on to non-fiction work. Cosm feels like a completion--a place to stuff things he wanted to do before moving on, a passionate expression of some big ideas he didn't want to loose. I haven't read Benford previously, but he is clearly a first rate and creative mind. I'm going to look for some more of his work. Oh...and the physics is tough, but as near as I (a dilettante at best) can tell, it is well-founded. Even if you don't understand it, it can easily be accepted as a glimpse into something awesome.

Rating:
Summary: One neat idea wrapped in an uninteresting novel
Review: Benford's Cosm has exactly one thing going for it: it's the first (as far as I know) fictional treatment of the idea, from speculative cosmology, that universes might "reproduce", by budding off little "daughter" universes. People have (inevitably) taken off from there, to the idea that universes might "evolve" over time, be subject to some analog of natural selection, and so on, and that this might even help explain why this universe has properties that enabled it to give rise to us. I think this idea is wrong and/or incoherent in various ways, but it's still interesting, and might eventually lead to something firmer.

Unfortunately, this idea has a role in only a tiny fraction of Cosm, and the rest of the book has nothing to recommend it, and quite alot to make me wince.

Much of the book is about the personal life of the protagonist, a black female physicist and professor. This would be good reading if it were unusually well-written, or gave interesting insights into what it might be like to be that person, or described an unusually interesting life, or if it were written by someone in a similar position who had real-life experiences to relate to. But the prose is pedestrian, there are no particular insights, the character's life isn't very interesting outside of the immediate plot, and Benford is not a black female physicist. The conflicts in the book are superficial, the emotions are simple, and the love story is completely straightforward.

Benford is a professor of physics. But the parts of the book that might have given interesting insights into that life have been contorted in unconvincing ways by the demands of the plot. The protagonist is an untenured junior professor; but when she discovers an object with the obvious potential to revolutionize the entire field from particle physics to cosmology, her University is content to leave her in charge of it (because that's necessary to Benford's plot).

In real life, she would certainly have been given a junior courtesy position in the institute that would have been set up to study the object, headed by the most prestigious members of the department and the relevant government agencies. In the book, she and one post-doc are left with sole acccess to it, and she is able (for instance) to forbid important alumni (but not, not quite, the President of the U.S.) from being allowed to see it. The only theoretician she allows near it is one that she randomly encounters (and eventually falls for) at another University.

Now maybe my idea of how university physics departments work is just completely wrong, and Benford's is right. That seems utterly unlikely, though, and Benford does nothing to convince me of it.

Anyway, I could rail on for some time, but it's not really worth it. This book might have made a decent short story, but as a novel it's unremarkable, and not a really good use of time.

Rating:
Summary: Very enjoyable sci-fi
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Not the usual Science-Fiction fare....
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: One neat idea wrapped in an uninteresting novel
Review: Benford's Cosm has exactly one thing going for it: it's the first (as far as I know) fictional treatment of the idea, from speculative cosmology, that universes might "reproduce", by budding off little "daughter" universes. People have (inevitably) taken off from there, to the idea that universes might "evolve" over time, be subject to some analog of natural selection, and so on, and that this might even help explain why this universe has properties that enabled it to give rise to us. I think this idea is wrong and/or incoherent in various ways, but it's still interesting, and might eventually lead to something firmer.

Unfortunately, this idea has a role in only a tiny fraction of Cosm, and the rest of the book has nothing to recommend it, and quite alot to make me wince.

Much of the book is about the personal life of the protagonist, a black female physicist and professor. This would be good reading if it were unusually well-written, or gave interesting insights into what it might be like to be that person, or described an unusually interesting life, or if it were written by someone in a similar position who had real-life experiences to relate to. But the prose is pedestrian, there are no particular insights, the character's life isn't very interesting outside of the immediate plot, and Benford is not a black female physicist. The conflicts in the book are superficial, the emotions are simple, and the love story is completely straightforward.

Benford is a professor of physics. But the parts of the book that might have given interesting insights into that life have been contorted in unconvincing ways by the demands of the plot. The protagonist is an untenured junior professor; but when she discovers an object with the obvious potential to revolutionize the entire field from particle physics to cosmology, her University is content to leave her in charge of it (because that's necessary to Benford's plot).

In real life, she would certainly have been given a junior courtesy position in the institute that would have been set up to study the object, headed by the most prestigious members of the department and the relevant government agencies. In the book, she and one post-doc are left with sole acccess to it, and she is able (for instance) to forbid important alumni (but not, not quite, the President of the U.S.) from being allowed to see it. The only theoretician she allows near it is one that she randomly encounters (and eventually falls for) at another University.

Now maybe my idea of how university physics departments work is just completely wrong, and Benford's is right. That seems utterly unlikely, though, and Benford does nothing to convince me of it.

Anyway, I could rail on for some time, but it's not really worth it. This book might have made a decent short story, but as a novel it's unremarkable, and not a really good use of time.

Rating:
Summary: Commits the ultimate literary sin
Review: Benford is one of those writers who wax hot and cold. He is acclaimed to be a science fiction writer's "scientist" in that he deals with a lot of "hard" science. In this case, the result is pedantic and - the ultimate sin - boring. The main character was not exciting nor interesting - just smart. The great experiment and the result were so-so. I kept waiting for something - ANYTHING - to happen but soon realized that this was it..a globe that was tested, studied and explored. I am reminded of the poem..."this is how the world ends - not with a bang but with a whimper."

Rating:
Summary: Is Benford Becoming Another Heinlein Crank?
Review: I've been a long-time fan of Gregory Benford's hard sci-fi, ever since ACROSS THE SEA OF STARS. I love the Galactic Center space operas, all of which should be reprinted, and TIMESCAPE is one of the 4 or 5 best science fiction novels ever written. But COSM isn't worth reading. It bombed as badly as Robert Heinlein's later diatribes and for the same reasons.

The science in this book seemed unlikely, and the endless university chicaneries grew boring (maybe because I have some experience with university teaching and was married to a physicist for 20 years who was for a while a university professor), but chiefly I found the people entirely deficient. Alicia's characterization was implausible and even embarrassing. Perhaps it's too much to ask a male white man who's spent much of his life south of the Mason-Dixon line to develop an African-American female protagonist adequately, and Benford shouldn't bite off more than he can chew.

Primarily it seemed that Alicia was merely a mouthpiece for Benford's increasingly erratic political balderdash. Does Benford REALLY believe that Republicans are more likely to be friendly to scientists than Democrats??!! Hasn't he noticed the astrologers, pseudo-scientist "creationists," and Second Coming true-believers who have been running around the White House in every Republican administration since Reagan's? I blame these power-hungry free-marketeers, with considerable help from fuzzy-thinking New Agers, for the pathetic and dangerous demolition of rational thinking in the U.S. over the last 25 years.

I began to think: The author of TIMESCAPE gave us one of the most intelligent novels ever written about real scientists, worthy of C.P. Snow, and a plot expressing profound knowledge and sensitivity about the dying world that Benford's Republican "friends" are currently devolving us into. How can Gregory Benford have descended into such drivel as the political notions in COSM? This is as tragic as Bob Heinlein's Ayn Randian (in other words, brain-dead), militaristic late novels. Fortunately Heinlein gave me all those wonderful early idea-brilliant stories from 1939's BEYOND THIS HORIZON to all those "juveniles" I devoured as a high school girl, inspiring me to be the best and most grown-up woman I could become, starting me on an undeviating path toward rationality, a passion for knowledge and social responsibility.

I know that Benford's TIMESCAPE did the same for young people who came along after my day, because several have told me so. I can only hope that they recognize this author's slide and fall from common sense. Reading the other reviews of this worthless novel, COSM, I am convinced that many of them do.

Rating:
Summary: good modern hard science fiction
Review: I liked this book a lot. I think it's a modern update of the hard science fiction I grew up on in the 50s and early 60s; that is, it has the developed characters we have become used to in modern fiction, but the science is central to the story and is kept plausible and interesting.
I thought the author's view of the daily life of a university physics professor was pretty much on the money (no surprise, he's in a position to know).
Not a real cosmic shaker like Ringworld, but a good read anyway.

Rating:
Summary: Too much Drama
Review: I really like the physics in this book but there is too much drama around the life of the main character. I find it hard to believe that upon the discovery of a possible sphere leading to other worlds, the physicist would be out at a singles bar while the sphere sits in her lab. I also have a hard time believing that it isn't swiped out from under her nose as soon it is discovered. I don't believe it is possible to hide that well. I don't mind the detours into life at UC Irvine but I think that I could have done without all the pages on the physicist's social life. In its praise though, the discovery and inquiry into the sphere is very interesting.. you just may need to skim through less interesting drama drool to get to it.