Cosm by Gregory Benford

(Review by Rupert Neethling, Cape Town, South Africa)

David Brin can do it, Stephen Baxter can do it, Isaac Asimov could do it, and, boy, can Gregory Benford do it. I’m referring to scientists or people with advanced training in science or mathematics who also happen to be highly competent writers. The perfect candidates, in short, to write informed fiction about real scientists.

While Cosm is most assuredly science fiction, therefore, it’s also fiction about "real" science and scientists: The main character, Professor Alicia Butterworth, is a particle physicist on the cutting edge. This often puts her at loggerheads with colleagues and her "superiors", both in academic institutions and in government, which serves to highlight Benford’s secondary concern in this novel: to describe the personal aspirations and relationships, as well as the ruthless politics that colour the lives of practising scientists.

Benford’s primary concern relates to the novel’s title: During an innovative experiment in a new particle accelerator, Alicia Butterworth’s measurement equipment is destroyed. Amidst the rubble, she discovers a mysterious basketball-shaped object; and when tests are conducted, she discovers that it appears to be made of "exotic" matter, which turns out to be a spherical window on a fledgling universe—an entirely new cosmos, which she names a "Cosm".

In the rest of the narrative, Benford skilfully couples the accelerating speed at which the Cosm ages with the increasing pressure brought to bear on Butterworth by religious zealots, the academic world and government. This narratorial backbone makes for entertaining reading, but the real meat of the story is the fascinating speculation about the origins, nature and ultimate fate of universes. As they draw parallels between the Cosm and our own universe, Butterworth and her colleagues are forced to reconsider the miraculous fact that our universe, seemingly against all odds, sustains and encourages life. And this gives rise to a series of revolutionary questions: If a life-sustaining universe can be created and "contained" in a laboratory, what about ours? Would this explain why our universe is so favourable to life-forms like our own - because it was intended to be? And, more flippantly, does God wear a lab coat?

Humour aside, this book is memorable for the excitement it generates in pure science, the insights it provides into the lives of real-life scientists, as well as passages that seek to capture the grandeur of a universe that physicists are privileged to perceive more clearly. Here is one of the numerous passages that offers a glimpse of this monumental grandeur:

Far above the teeming throng of stars and burning nebulae, she and Zak could witness the stabbing lances of jets that poked up and out from the galactic nucleus. These apparently came from a black hole abuilding at the very centre of the bee-swarm rotation. They saw violet beams jut into the spaces between galaxies and carve paths for later ruby flows of hot plasma.

Benford paints a compelling picture of scientists who have a passionate desire to understand the universe, and whose work can produce moments of epiphany: "To peer through the quick stubble of mathematics and see the wonders lurking behind was to momentarily live in the infinite."

Anyone whose interest in science fiction goes deeper than space opera will be the richer for reading this mind-expanding novel.

ORBIT (UK) 1998. PAPERBACK.