Lord of Light

[sawyl]

Despite some having some concerns, I rather enjoyed Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, a interesting blend of SF, fantasy and theology. The action takes place in the distant future on a colony planet where technology has made reincarnation a reality and where samsara is overseen by a group of technicians equipped with mind probes. While the majority of the population live in low-tech servitude, kept in line by the karmic promise of a better life to follow, the original crew of the colony ship live in luxury and, assisted by a combination of technology and strange mental powers that follow them from body to body, pose as members of the Hindu pantheon.

The story begins when Yama, the God of Death, successfully recalls the soul of Great Souled Sam, the Enlightened One, back from Nirvana and into an earthly body. Once back, Sam mediates on his previous encounters with the gods and his attempts to release the gods' strangle-hold on technology by teaching Buddhism: how he humiliated Brahma and broke free of the masters of karma; how he defeated the demons, the planet's original inhabitants and bound them to his cause; how he cheated death at the hands of his enemies; and how ended up being cast into the heavens to prevent him from interfering any further. I particularly liked the account of the death of Sam's disciple Sugata, whom Sam claims is the true Buddha and who dies so that Sam may continue to live — the explanation for Sugata's apparent break with the principle of ahimsa is particularly nicely done, although I'm not sure whether it is theologically valid or not.

Even though I liked the book more than Jo Walton, I share some of her concerns about the setting and the motivation of the main characters. I feel somewhat uncomfortable with the way that Zelazny has his main characters, who, it is implied are largely western first worlders, co-opt the myths and traditions of Hinduism in a rather unflattering way — the gods having dedicated themselves to decadence and the maintenance of power regardless of the misery they cause to the rest of the human population — without providing any back story that might justify their behaviour. I struggled to reconcile my (admittedly poor) knowledge of Buddhism with Sam's Accelerationist doctrine, which I thought might been more interesting had it been expressed as tension within the trimurti, and I also felt the lack of female characters.

However I'm willing to accept and embrace these quibbles on the grounds that the book was written in the late 60s and that it is probably unfair to judge its cultural sensitivities by current standards. Overall I found the book compelling, and thought that the best of the stories felt genuinely mythic.