The Cross of Fire by Barry Malzberg

Gregory Benford "enjoyed the hell out of" Barry Malzberg's The Cross of Fire, a novel published in 1982. The Boston Phoenix claimed that Malzberg had the finest prose in science fiction and that The Cross of Fire promised to be the science fiction novel of the year!*  High praise!  I recently purchased the 1982 Ace paperback edition of the novel for a price somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 copper coins, and this week I read it.

In Thomas Disch's "Everyday Life in the Roman Empire" (1972) a middle class woman living in a near future technocratic society undergoes therapy which consists of indulging in elaborate drug-induced fantasies of being an aristocrat in the Roman Empire.  Malzberg uses a similar plot but pushes it to extremes - the protagonist of The Cross of Fire lives 200 years in the future in a even more technocratic and cold society, and in his drug- and hypnosis-driven fantasies he lives the life of Jesus Christ!

Harold (not his real name) is our narrator.  At first, playing the role of  Christ is difficult, and Harold often becomes "depersonalized" or "disassociated."  The therapy is ostensibly a study of religion, and Harold plays other roles, these more comfortably: Job, a rabbi in Brooklyn (spelled "Bruck Linn" in the 2200s), a 21st century Muslim martyr, Moses, even the Almighty Himself.  Most of the book's text is taken up with these dreams.  There are also scenes in which Harold has conversations and sexual encounters with Edna (not her real name), a woman he hooked up with through the government's computer dating service.

Halfway through the novel it becomes clear (it was foreshadowed earlier) that Harold has become obsessed with his religious dreaming, that even outside of the treatment facility he thinks he is in one of his prophet/martyr roles.  The government ceases the treatment, and confines him; poor Harold integrates this real life event into his dreams, thinking himself a Jew being persecuted during a pogrom or a 21st century Muslim prophet being arrested by the authorities.

In true literary/New Wave style the novel has no chapter divisions or headings, and is not told in strict chronological order.

At first, the view of 23rd century life is a little ambigious.  On the one hand characters commonly bemoan the fact that they live in "an unspeakable age" that is "madly technocratic" and where there is no freedom.  The very same characters also admit that the all-embracing state is "benign," and that people in the 23rd century "have more personal freedom than any citizenry in the history of the world."  Sometimes Edna speaks up for the state, saying things have improved, but she discourages Harold's therapy, saying that the treatments are not really to help him, but to "make him more stupid" so he won't threaten the status quo.

The hard evidence about quality of life and government benignity we get includes a scene in a state-run cafe with robot waiters.  An old man who starts throwing fits is immediately sucked down a trap door--the man was a "decompensate," and we learn that such people are common and are "herded to re-education" multiple times each day.  The screams of the "late afternoon detail" can be heard from outside the cafe.  (It is implied that the "decompensates" are killed and turned into food or some other valuable commodity.)  One of the mechanical waiters explodes.  Because of these disturbances, their robowaiter tells Harold and Edna that their meal is "on the state."  This scene, and a brief flashback to Harold's youth late in the book, leave little doubt as to how horrible things really are.

If there is any point to the book it seems to be that religion is a distraction, a delusion.  The sections about Job and Jonah have God breaking his promises, while the sections with Satan stress that God Himself created Satan, that Satan is a part of God's plan.  Malzberg seems to be saying that it is a waste of time worshiping or believing in God, because God will lie to you and when you are in trouble he won't help you; if anything, he has caused your trouble.  Perhaps Malzberg is drawing a parallel between the government and the God of the Bible: both are ostensibly benign and omnipotent, but neither deals with people justly or selflessly.

The Cross of Fire has many interesting elements, but it is too long.  The parts in which Harold plays the role of Biblical figures are good, because it is fun to see famous stories like Jesus raising Lazarus, or Moses parting the Red Sea, told from a different and strange angle.  (Peter, for example, comes across as a PR man trying to manage Jesus and control his public image.)  The stuff about Edna and the oppressive 23rd century state is good as well.  The dreams about fictional religious characters, however, drag; the Muslim one in particular feels repetitious, with Malzberg twice telling us a story of how the prophet's mosque is invaded and his service interrupted.  Why did Malzberg include Muslims anyway, if he wasn't going to include Mohammed?  Compared to the Jewish and Christian parts, the Islamic parts come off as half-assed; better to have left them out altogether.

I'm going to give The Cross of Fire a marginal thumbs up.  I enjoyed it, but I suspect I just liked it because I am curious about Malzberg and his work.  I would only really reccomend the novel to people who are already Malzberg fans, or who are really really interested in the Bible from a secular point of view.  The science fiction reader who is looking for an adventure story, or likable characters, or a vivid and strange world, or an extrapolation of technological or societal trends, you know, the stuff SF readers are usually looking for, is not going to find them here.

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* Despite the Boston Phoenix's bold advocacy, somehow the Hugos and Nebulas for 1983 went to Isaac Asimov and Michael Bishop, while people like Robert Heinlein, Gene Wolfe, Arthur C. Clarke, and Brian Aldiss hogged all the losing nominations.

Hard Science Fiction Flashback: Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity and Gregory Benford's In the Ocean of Night

My copy looked like this.  I sold it.

There's a fun review of Hal Clement's 1953 Hard SF classic Mission of Gravity at the science fiction and fantasy book review blog From Couch to Moon.  Check it out!

I read Mission of Gravity in 2007, and while I can't disagree with any of the criticisms the reviewer at From Couch to Moon levels at the book, I think I enjoyed it more than she did.   On August 30 of 2007 I posted the following review (in which I fall into the its or it's trap) at amazon.com:

I read a 1950s hard cover of this Hal Clement novel, a sort of hard SF archetype well worth reading.

"Mission of Gravity" is suffused with what some might call a naive optimism about science and technology-- its like a love letter to physics and mechanical engineering. Lacking any literary pretensions, it is a straightforward account of how explorers deal with a series of technical challenges on a planet with a very unusual environment. Clement's fascination with science is infectious, and the book charmingly succeeds in accomplishing exactly what it set out to do; unlike some later hard SF novels which get loaded down with incompetent character development or boring philosophical digressions, Clement keeps his book lean and focused, and never tries to do something he isn't good at. A classic.

Someone who liked Mission of Gravity much more than I did is Thomas Disch.  I have been reading bits and pieces of Disch's 1998 book Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of over the last few weeks.  Much to my surprise, in the middle of this book, a book which seems to have been devised to offend every possible type of SF fan, I find Disch praising Mission of Gravity to the skies.  "When I first read Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, which ran as an Astounding serial in 1953, I thought it the best account of alien life on another planet that I'd ever read.  Forty-three years later my opinion has not changed."  Wow! Disch is full of surprises.       

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I think mine looked like this.  Also sold.

Hal Clement set out to write a SF book about science, and did just that, and I praised him for it.  I wrote my positive review of Mission of Gravity still smarting from my encounter with Gregory Benford's 1977 In the Ocean of Night.  I had read In the Ocean of Night in February of 2007, and in my opinion Benford's effort to include a lot of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll in his hard SF tale was a total disaster.  I bitterly assaulted the book on February 18, 2007, on amazon.com thusly:

Entombed in this 420 page novel is a decent hard sf short story about Earth's first contact with robotic aliens. Unfortunately, Benford takes on the ambitious task of marrying his traditional space alien story with a literary story about human relationships and the meaning of life, a worthy project he is not equipped to bring to a successful conclusion. So, the interesting alien encounter plot is buried under hundreds of pages of tedious domestic drama (the main character, a British-born astronaut, has a menage a trois marriage, and one of the women is terminally ill) and political infighting (the astronaut is a Bob Dylan- and John Lennon-loving rebel who refuses to play the dishonest games of the warmongering bureaucrats and religious fanatics in the U.S. government.) Benford gets an "A" for effort as he unleashes literary allusions, unconventional prose techniques, and scads of metaphors and similies, and piles on chapter after chapter about the sex lives, religious beliefs, cocktail parties, drug use, day trips to the beach and vacations of the astronaut and his circle, but the characters are uninteresting and the only parts of the book that really work are those two or three dozen pages in which a character is in the cockpit of a space ship or Lunar craft. Too bad.

Gregory Benford was, from a literary point of view, more ambitious than Clement, but it seemed to me all the sex and other soap opera stuff just got in the way, and I was disappointed.

(For those scoring at home, my hostile review of Benford has netted 26 helpful votes out of 31 total votes, while my kind review of the Clement got 4 "helpfuls" out of 6 votes.)

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It was fun to think about these books again - thanks to From Couch to Moon for inspiring this little space trip down memory lane.