he face may be black, the sex may be female, and we may often be
told that the buttocks are too large, but the voice is the voice of
Benford. After quite a few years of Big Concept novels told in a greyish
high-toned voice which bespoke not vastness but vastation, and
after a detour (writing as Sterling Blake) into the silly chill of
cryonics, Greg Benford has come back, very vigorous, oddly accoutered,
but in his own unmistakable voice, to life.
Cosm is set eight years from now, a gap Benford treats as
essentially without content: cars, food, fashion, technology, politics,
sexual politics, jokes about Mr. Right Now, almost everything remains
identical to now; and Benford's comments on California icons and issues
and cuisine (as channeled through his extremely obedient protagonist) are
clearly addressed directly, without any attempts at SF estrangement, to
us in 1998.
(Only real quibble with this: the Cosm cast spends a lot of time
trying to stay in--or avoid--communicating with each other; presumably to
keep the plot-wires taut, Benford makes these attempts rather more
arduous--e-mails and faxes go more ludicrously astray than they do now;
telephones ring in empty rooms like film noir film clips shot in the
absence of Barbara Stanwyck; etc.--than they really should be. It is,
after all, pretty likely that, by 2005, most of us will be far more
reachable than now, through the pending introduction of personal codes,
which will adhere to us like an electronic tattoo, and access to which
will be global.)
Part of the thrill
But it's not quite right to say the 2005 setting is pointless:
part of the thrill of Cosm is due to a sense that the physics it
describes is theoretically postulable right now, and potentially
verifiable (or producible) a few years hence, after the construction of
certain experimental facilities. It would be presumptuous for lay readers
of the novel (like this reviewer) to declare that the relationship it
posits and dramatizes--between theoretical and experimental physics--is
precisely cutting-edge, but it feels cutting-edge. The live wire of Cosm
feels like a body English of real thought. For its aliveness, for its
presentness to the acting of thought, Cosm is a remarkable book.
Alicia Butterworth--a black female experimental physicist at the
University of California-Irvine who thinks her ass is too big--is
visiting Brookhaven, Long Island, home of the newish Relativistic Heavy
Ion Collider (or RHIC), which she is using to explore high-velocity
collisions between stripped uranium nuclei, in order to duplicate Big
Bang conditions by creating "a spitting particle fog called the
quark-gluon plasma."
Something happens.
There is an explosion which blows a rift in RHIC; Alicia finds a
basketball-sized glowing sphere in the debris, and steals it, heists it
back to California, where she (and a theoretical physicist with whom she
eventually solves her love problems) works out that what she has "created" is a
wormhole periscope into a brand-new universe whose time-scale grows
exponentially faster (insofar as our perceptions are concerned) and
which goes through an entire multi-billion-year cycle before the novel
ends (except for an appendix) with another Bang.
Vivid and disturbing
The concept of the "cosm"--Alicia's coining--is what gives Cosm
balls. Benford's portrait of Alicia is both vivid and disturbing. She is
vividly believable for stretches of text, usually those stretches in
which she is doing physics; but for much of the book our apprehension of
her is through an array of likes and dislikes (usually the latter: over
and above her own body, which she does forgive after she falls in love,
she dislikes the media, lawyers, most men, her father's success, her
father's embonpoint, her father's wife, most other physicists, the
Friends of the Earth and environmentalists in general, bureaucrats,
administrators, other women, feminists, gender politicians, gender
studies, academics, parties, sexual advances, being ignored, her
therapist, metaphors, the government, dingbat architecture, and California
cuisine, to begin with) which is so comprehensive, and so remarkable a
potpourri of the blimpish disgruntlements that so tellingly disfigure so
many middle-aged Americans of wealth, that one does rather wonder just
what Benford is up to here.
Clearly, Alicia is possible: almost anybody is. What she is not,
certainly as Benford has depicted her, is remotely probable. The
kindliest thing one can say is that she is the kind of woman Robert A
Heinlein might have liked, and that Benford may have crafted her as an
homage to the Great Man.
Nor is her contempt for the Friends of the Earth--given her theft
of a totally unpredictable "cosm" whose energy potentials are totally
unknown and potentially (indeed, actually) fatal in their consequences;
and her subsequent theft of the rapidly mutating sphere from UCI just
when the contemptible old Feds are about to take it out of her
hands--really very profoundly argued.
Consequences of a wider sort
Benford himself carefully does not take Alicia's side in
describing her various heists, and in tracing her dawning realization
that the cosm might end up transmitting into Los Angeles a black-hole
burn-out sort of thing. But neither does he contextualize her contempt
for the only voices in the text--even though they are only heard from
off-stage--which point to consequences of a wider sort than she is
willing (or able) to take in.
But then, again, that's the strength of the book. Experimental
physicists on the hunt may be loose cannons--certainly that is how
Benford depicts them--and may need even sharper lessons in consequences
than he metes out to his Alica, who escapes with burn marks, gets her
man, gets (it looks like) the chance to make more cosms, and gets famous;
but the hunt itself--as Benford depicts it--is astonishingly riveting.
"Nature," he says at one point in what sounds very much like his
own voice, "is Data in a fine cloth." More deeply than any other SF novel
published in years, Cosm tells us about the weaving of the cloth.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Omni, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Look at the Evidence, was nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award.
