After an accident in a brilliant young physicist's most ambitious experiment, it appears: a wondrous sphere the size of a basketball, made of nothing known to science. Before long, it will be clear that this object has opened a vista on an entirely different universe, a newborn cosmos whose existence will rock this world and test one woman to the limit: the physicist who has ignited this thrilling adventure.

Only the author of the landmark novel Timescape could so plausibly take the reader behind the scenes of major scientific research, so boldly speculate about the consequences of paradigm-shifting discovery, and so vividly capture the intense human drama as the forces of academia, government, theology, and the mass media battle for control of a mysterious new reality. COSM is Gregory Benford at his provocative best, exploring ideas at the frontier of mankind's understanding, and posing profound questions about Creation, human destiny, and the riddle of godhood.

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.


Hard core physics in fast paced credible SciFi thriller   July 8, 1999
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

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!


One neat idea wrapped in an uninteresting novel   March 14, 2004
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

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.


The Universe and Universities   July 19, 2004
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

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)