This is a pretty amazing book that showed rather than told, and wove a tale half backwards that made perfect sense. I was very impressed, though the first chapters before the first set of flashbacks lag due to you not knowing or caring about the characters. I always remember Zelazny for Chronicles of Amber which is nowhere near the quality of this book. What a treat! ( )

This is a very unique book, the story of a man who became a god, or is it the story of a god who was a god all along? Either way, its quite unique, and features the gods of the Hindu mythos. ( )

(Amy) And herewith, my Catching Up On Things I Should Have Read A Long Time Ago entry for the month.

I don't actually have much to say about this book, and I'm not sure if that's my fault or its. I finished it and then looked up with a profound sense of "Huh". The story was moderately interesting - a bunch of very old colonists with consciousness-transfer technology playing god (with Hindu-themed deities) and lording it over a planet inhabited by their fallen-to-low-technology descendents, and generally engaging in gratuitous assholery. I was not particularly impressed by it, however. But then, I often have trouble putting books in their proper contexts. I suspect that, in 1969, it really was a groundbreaking work, and that I am just jaded.

Of course, the hideous pun didn't really help much in the raising of my opinion of the book as a whole.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ze... )

(Alistair) I think I like this more than I have any of the other Zelazny I have previously read, including the Amber series, so that would be a first good sign, now wouldn't it? (The infamous epilepsy pun notwithstanding.)

Lord of Light is - well, a science fantasy/planetary romance-ish book set in the far future, after "the death of Urath". On the colony planet on which it is set, the colonists have won out over the aboriginal inhabitants (referred to as demons, later on), and have established a functioning society. Except that the colony leadership, or more accurately one faction among it, have set themselves up as the gods of the Hindu pantheon, maintaining control through superior technology, suppressing the technological development of the colonists, and their control of the means of technologically mediated reincarnation.

But that's just the background. The plot follows our protagonist, one of the remaining first colonists, along with renegade gods, in his long slow struggle against this faction of deities - in the process, founding this world's version of Buddhism, traveling into the underworld to find allies among the "demons", and taking arms against heaven itself. And it is, if anything, even better than the background; and notably, it manages to place such a well-crafted and fascinating background appropriately subordinate to the plot.

The prose is, as ever, clever in that inimitable Zelaznian way.

Highly recommended for everyone who enjoys this sort of thing. (And who can tolerate so-called "cultural appropriation"; if you can't, your head will explode within the first couple of chapters.")

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ce... ) ( )

This has to be Zelazny's best work. As usual, there's a superhuman male protagonist waging a lone crusade against others like him who hold a colony world in their grip, setting themselves up as gods of the Hindu pantheon and controlling body-transfer technology by means of masters of karma and suppressing technological advancement beyond a medieval level. Sam, otherwise known as Mahasamatman, or the Binder of Demons, or Buddha, introduces Buddhism as a cultural counter to embolden the people of the world against the gods, and even fights an epic battle against the gods with those among the gods who grew sympathetic to his desire to liberate the suppressed people of the world. The characters are deep and complex, the world cleverly and clearly wrought and vividly described, and the story inventive and brilliantly told. And, as par Zelazny's usual milieu, the battles and betrayals are described better than a World Series radio broadcast. ( )

This is essential science fiction reading. ( )