Book review: Cosm

Cosm is a 1998 SF novel by Gregory Benford. I’ve read and enjoyed several other of his novels, including Great Sky River and Timescape. The concept of Cosm intrigued me but when I first picked it up years ago I only got about ten pages in before abandoning it because it’s one of those books that doesn’t jump right into the main plot right away. In fact, the beginning is rather boring.

This year I picked it up again and finished it and I’m left with a feeling of indifference. Cosm is not a bad book but it is perhaps a badly told story. The premise is neat — an accident with a super-collider leads to the creation of a small sphere, the titular cosm. The cosm provides a literal window to a miniature universe growing at an exponentially accelerated rate within it.

The protagonist of the story is a stubborn, abrasive black physicist with an inept social life named Alica Butterworth. After the accident, she claims ownership of the cosm and returns with it to the University of California Irvine where she teaches and researches. The novel follows both the politics surrounding ownership and treatment of the cosm as well as her research into it. The problem is that most of the story focuses on the politics, with rival universities, the government, religious groups and others weighing in on the matter, while the actual study of the phenomenon is handled in a bland, perfunctory manner, as if it’s just another research project to write papers on.

Cosm ends up as more a look into the battles professors face at educational institutions and less a look at a potentially world-changing experiment. As such, it proves to be a disappointment. It does pull off the neat trick of ending with both a bang and a whimper, though. Benford completists may want to check it out but there are better SF novels out there.

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