Cosm, by Gregory Benford
One neat idea wrapped in an uninteresting novel
(Review posted 13 Mar 2004 16:04:17)

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.