Cosm

Rating:
Summary: The Universe and Universities
Review: 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)

Rating:
Summary: Create a Universe in Your Own Basement
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Create a Universe in Your Own Basement
Review: 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.

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: 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: 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.