Cosm

Rating:
Summary: Good SCIENCE fiction for non-scientists
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: a promising premise wrapped in a truly poor novel
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: not so good science and not so good characters
Review: The notion of creating a universe in the lab is fascinating in itself, but the story spun around it must also be interesting. COSM does not present a story that interests me, on the contrary. I found the characters and what they did very boring, the whole plot seems to be centered on issues that are quite trivial considering the weight of the subject (universe in a lab): the heroine's amateur-like struggle and way of plotting to keep the cosm out of reach of the other petty scientists' hands, etc. Wow, that I call true inspiring and visionary science fiction! There certainly are more interesting tales out there that start with less and accomplish more, e.g. Clarke,Cube-McDowell: The Trigger. But maybe one should not blame Mr Benford to much --- how do you make a page-turner out of a book that start out with a major event such as a newborn cosmos in your lab?

Rating:
Summary: The ending ruins it
Review: A sprawling novel perched on the cutting edge of theory, with a heroine built to specification as a plucky fighter, "Cosm" should be a blockbuster. Unfortunately, it runs in to a brick wall in the last fifty pages. It reads as though Benford got bored in the last chapter and just tacked on any ending he could come up with; after a climactic scene in Death Valley we learn the heroine's fate only through random headlines. For a novel which has put us so intimately into her life, this is a grossly unsatisfying ending. I can praise the science all I want (and it is outstanding and beautiful, no question), but a novel is not a science lecture. It's about story, and this one falls flat. Not at all in a class with Benford's outstanding "Artifact".

Rating:
Summary: A look at real-world science
Review: COSM gives the reader a look at the real world of scientific research. In many ways it doesn't read like a science-fiction novel; the characters don't solve all their problems, and are confused and lost much of the time. The premise of the book is stunning: our hero, a black woman physicist, has-- or so it seems-- created an entire universe in a high-energy physics experiment. Unlike a typical science-fiction plot, however, she is not out to save the universe, or even change the world. She just wants to understand what she has found, and what it tells us about physics. Meanwhile, rival physicists want to steal her discovery, and her credit. I loved it; it was a great window into real-world science.

Rating:
Summary: Love it or hate it!
Review: Love it or hate it, everybody who has reviewed this book seems to have had a strong reaction, and I think that's reason enough for you to want to read it and make up your own mind. Speaking for myself, I loved the hard science core to the novel. There is so little intellectually challenging science fiction with big mind-blowing ideas being written at the moment that his one is a real breath of fresh air. I had one or two minor quibbles with the practical details: for example, a body being supported by a permanent ("horseshoe") magnet does not float in space between the poles, it just sticks to the thing, either to one of the poles or across both. To produce the levitation described you would need an alternating or pulsed magnetic field. Also - if you were able somehow to "look" into a system where time was running at twenty or a hundred times the speed it runs on earth, all the light would be so blue-shifted that desk-lamps would emit in the gamma ray spectrum, or higher. I felt that Benford actually glossed-over a lot of minor details, but the overall concept is so awe-inspiring that I forgive him this. The academic politics is also very convincing, and necessary to the structure of the story. The human characters I don't think were the book's strong point. Benford took a chance in making his heroine a young black woman in a middle-aged white male world, partly because it meant sailing a bit close to cliche, but more importantly because he had difficulty getting inside her head and making us believe in her. The race issue also, which is more sensitive in America than in England I think, just served to alienate those readers who have strong feelings about the portrayal of black people in fiction. It was an irrelevancy that he might have done better to leave out of a story of this kind. Really it's the physics and the concepts that are the backbone of this book, and if you don't get high on ideas it probably isn't for you. I think it's this notion of getting high on speculations about how reality is put together that separates off science fiction from other literature. And "Cosm" offers abundant nourishment to this impulse.

Rating:
Summary: Sci-Fi can be good literature, but Benford's hand is heavy
Review: COSM was recommended by a friend who reads a wide variety of science fiction. I grew up reading authors like Heinlein, Dick, Silverberg, Brunner, and Clarke, so from her glowing praise, I assumed this fellow Benford was a writer with similar skills. My assumption was wrong.

Let's just say that characterization, dialog, and creating suspense are areas where Gregory Benford needs a lot of practice. He's a physicist, so the science in COSM is OK, but writing good science fiction requires more than getting a few buzz words and acronymns correct.

With some editing, this novel might serve as a screenplay for an average X-Files episode.

Rating:
Summary: The universe of the university
Review: All university professors (science and otherwise) will like this book. While at times it seems like a catharsis for a practiced researcher, Benford aptly describes much of the life (love, lab, and political) of many research professors. Being in the middle of a Benford Binge (I'm nearly finished with his Galactic series), this was refreshing. Also, as a university professor, I wanted to see how the heroine would win out in the scientific and political warfare of the novel. A good read...

Rating:
Summary: Benford misses the boat on this one
Review: In literary terms this book was a failure. Benford, who is capable of superior writing, appears to have experimented with his writing, but to what end I cannot guess. His main character in this story was black but unfortunately Benford tried to address her color in a manner that only proved how uneducated he is with regards to race. This could be contrasted with Clark's character in the Rama series where the color of her skin was nearly transparent so far as how her race was addressed. White writers have a challenge and a responsibility when making a primary character a different race. There are effective ways of doing this such as the Nicole character in Rama, where the position is taken to treat race as simply invisible. And equally effective, albeit more risky, is to address the color through their culture and mannerisms. But to do this requires education, sensitivity, and real focus in intent. So, to compound the poor literary hackneyed writing, the reader is left to stumble over poor references to race throughout the book. The plot itself was satisfying but would have been more effective if presented as a non-fiction article. To do it in story form would have required deft subplots and awe inspiring events with the spherical cosm itself. This would run the risk of making the story a bit too Hollywood, and therefore implausible. Although the plot was imaginative and real, I got bogged down in the science behind the cosm because I thought Benford explained it so poorly. Again, he is capable of so much more. He knows how to ground his readers with more common analogies to help us understand the physics behind the cosm. I frequently found myself stopping my reading and wondering how it was possible for this to be the same author who wrote Great Sky River, an incredibly believable piece of hard science fiction and wonderful literary prose. Somewhere along the line Benford became lost. I can only hope he will find his way back to writing that was once his. Every author is entitled to a boner now and then. I can't penalize future works by Benford because of this horrific effort.

Rating:
Summary: poorly written
Review: For a physicist, Gregory Benford is a surprisingly indifferent writer. The entire novel, promising as it sounds, is first-draft sludge. I must've counted three places where, in the space of only two pages, a character's mouth "twisted skeptically." This was probably thrown together during a semester between teaching assignments or something, but the author should be frankly irate his publishers didn't subject the book to a rigorous editing job. It's not a bad story. Just a mess in delivery. The characters aren't even wooden.

Please don't tell me Whoopi Goldberg is going to get the lead...!