Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny (1967)
So this is it, my last sci-fi review for a while. The school year starts up again on Monday, which means I’ll only have time for grading papers and reading big, fat monographs on important historical events. If I can swing using sci-fi as a primary source then maybe more reviews will pop up, but that possibility remains to be seen. Feel free to keep tuned into the blog, though, as I hope to continue posting here about my various academic exploits. Topics this semester include African-American women in the antebellum period, war and remembrance, and the history of mass/popular culture. Lots of fun stuff.
For my last book review of the summer season I chose to read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. Apparently when this book won the Hugo there was a bit of a kerfuffle, as some consider this novel to be more a work of fantasy than one of science fiction. It’s easy to see why that argument can be made. Written in an extremely lyrical style, Lord of Light reads very much like the Hindu mythology that inspired it. That this the novel is more than a creative retelling of this mythology is only hinted at, the most direct discussions coming at the very end of the book. Many of the major events in the book are outright fantastical, seeming to break the laws of the physical universe with no scientific explanation behind them, a faux pas that is considered one of the biggest lines between sci-fi and fantasy.
Kerfuffle aside, Zelazny doesn’t really have much to actively say. It took me a while to slog through this thin book, and every time I picked it up I mentally referred to it as The Most Boring Book in the World. Zelazny is thick on descriptive prose that belabors his narrative, and while he creates an intriguing premise that explores the nature of religion and technology, he gets bogged down in unenlightening character studies of his unique version of the Hindu pantheon.
By the mid-1960s, American culture blossomed along all fronts. The Summer of Love loomed near, civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements all demanded reform and equality, and counterculture eschewed the domestic and consumerist obsessions of postwar America. Exploring Eastern religion fit very neatly into this dynamic of change and exploration, as was most memorably dramatized in a recent episode of Mad Men, when the Hare Krishna made a noteworthy and startling appearance. So it makes perfect sense that Zelazny would write a novel steeped in Hinduism in the 1960s. Science fiction has long led the way in exploring foreign cultures in the present on Earth, and is also a genre ever ready to tackle Big Questions like the nature of technology and religion. In Lord of Light Zelazny combines all of these elements in his sleepy search for enlightenment through science fiction.
Despite its rambling chapters, there’s not really much of a plot to Lord of Light. Ostensibly the book is a story about a war between the Hindu pantheon and a former god who comes to be known as Buddha in one of his incarnations. But slowly the real motivation for the war is drawn out of Zelazny’s mythological trappings: years ago those who became known as gods (men?) came to this planet and used their incredible technological powers to take over and turn themselves into gods, styled after the Hindu pantheon. Their technology not only gave them incredible power, but it also allowed them to reincarnate themselves endlessly by transplanting their personal energy patterns into new bodies. Whether the people that populate the planet are colonists unlucky enough to have missed out on gaining god-like powers or are remnants of the native population isn’t clear. They do, however, live enthralled by their overseers, seeking their own right to incarnation.
The plot centers around a war between Sam, also known as the Buddha among his many incarnations, his followers, and the other gods of the Hindu pantheon. Sam is what is known as an Accelerationist – he believes that all the non-gods on their planet should be given technology so that they can advance society. His enemies believe that the people on the planet should be denied technology so that the gods can maintain their control over them. This disagreement is enough to cause huge and widespread warfare, which also involves legions of zombies, for those of you who are into that sort of thing. The gods prance around and pontificate while a lot of mortals are mowed down with nary a blink.
Lord of Light prompts a lot of important and fascinating questions about the nature of God and religion. For example: what happens when a God doesn’t believe in himself anymore? Where do we draw the line between humanity and God? Can godhood be created with incredibly powerful technology? If there is a God for mankind, is he/she/it just another being hoarding all the good gadgets for themselves? Do scientific advances bring us closer to god? Do we create our own gods? IS immortality possible and if so what does it look like? Is there life after death?
This aspect of the novel really tickled me, and it’s why I kept reading. One review I read online said the “science fiction” aspect would become more apparent toward the end of the novel, and while this plot device did become more prominent, I still put the book down thinking it was The Most Boring Book in the World. There’s absolutely nothing offensive about it, it simply read like an overlong folktale with some veiled technobabble thrown in for good measure. Though it has some timeless ideas, I do think it is also quite a book of its time. I’ll also add that I wish I’d been reading this book with someone, so we could have discussed it together. I feel that Lord of Light is meant to be provocative, but subtly so. Without anyone to bounce my ideas off of, it felt like something was lost on me. The book definitely has a communal, almost oral aspect to is, just the like myths and folktales its style apes. Maybe, like enlightenment, it takes more than one try to thoroughly understand exactly what it is that Lord of Light has to offer.
