Cosm (1998)

It's a great book if you are an excremental particle physicist.. ( )

http://www.amazon.com/review/RJ0QYUHNSOJ0Q/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm ( )

Not really gripping but an interesting read. The idea of having a pocket-size universum is neat, though, and kept me wanting to find out more about it. The characters didn't "do" it for me however. Especially the main person, Alicia, didn't quite ring true to me. ( )

Miniverse.

A scientist makes a bit of a discovery. This provokes a lot of competition and conniving when this tiny new cosmology becomes available for people to work with, or try and make money and weapons out of. Academic and real world politics to be dealt with, and a bit of loving on the run.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/06/cosm-gregory-benford.html ( )

Alicia Butterworth, a physicist from U.C. Irvine, discovers a strange metallic sphere during an ill-fated experiment using Long Island’s RHIC. Enlisting the help of one of her students, she steals the object and begins in-depth studies of what she will eventually call Cosm.

I like sci-fi, but I tend to prefer space operas and dystopic visions of the future rather than near-future yarns that go into scientific detail. I’ve never read anything by Gregory Benford before, and it turns out he writes the latter. Being an actual physicist obviously colours his sci-fi writings and in Cosm he is generous both with scientific details and the intricacies of academic bureaucracy.

Though stylistically well-written, I was bored throughout most of the book and not because of the science… I found the concept of a scientist not only stealing such a valuable object, but getting away with it too, somewhat hard to swallow. The entire cast was made up of dull and annoying characters, none more so than the protagonist, Alicia. She is one of the least believable female characters I’ve ever read, and I wound up hating her. There is such a thing as subtlety, however not in Cosm. Constant and heavy-handed reminders of her sex and skin colour kept interfering with the flow of the novel. It felt as though Benford researched the female psyche by reading books like Bridget Jones’s Diary, and just didn’t get it…

If you read hard sci-fi purely for the science, chances are that you’ll love Cosm. If, like me, you’d like a little fiction to go with the science, it might be best to check out something else… ( )