Time like an ocean, space like its water, Sam in the middle, standing, decided. [loc 4237]
Lord of Light (winner of the Hugo award for best novel, 1968) is set in the far future, on a planet colonised by humans, who defeated the original inhabitants by developing -- through a combination of technology, genetics and psychology -- god-like powers. Each individual having a unique Aspect, they assume the personae of gods of the Hindu pantheon, ruling over a caste-based society composed of the less powerful colonists. Reincarnation, via body transfer, is standard -- though it's controlled by the Lords of Karma, who have recently started using a psych-probe to 'tape' the minds of those applying for new bodies.
The events of the novel occur several thousand years after the arrival of the colonists. Sam, the protagonist, wants to overthrow the deicratic rule of the 'gods', and make technology and reincarnation available to all rather than the domain of the elite. His chosen tool is Buddhism, and his allies include the native life-forms of the planet, now pure energy and considered as demons. Over the course of the novel, various gods turn to Sam's cause: in particular, the Lord of Death, Yama, who is a technological genius and also happens to be in love with Sam's ex, Kali.
I adored Lord of Light when I first encountered it in my teens, and I still think it may be Zelazny's best standalone novel -- though my opinion has altered somewhat since my last reread, which was likely in the 1990s. Although I still know whole paragraphs more or less word for word -- and found myself looking out for familiar typos ('I would have numbered its days internationally', thanks Sphere) -- I had somehow completely failed to notice what I would now tag as 'period-typical sexism'.
When I was thinking about this review, I wondered if it was narrative sexism or the sexism of a particular character: Sam is particularly prone to using sexist (and transphobic) slurs to rile an opponent, but that opponent is also described in problematic terms.
It was almost as if sex were a thing that transcended biology; and no matter how hard he tried to suppress the memory and destroy that segment of spirit, [he] had been born a woman and somehow was woman still. Hating this thing, he had elected to incarnate time after time as an eminently masculine man, did so, and still felt somehow inadequate, as though the mark of his true sex were branded upon his brow. It made him want to stamp his foot and grimace. [loc 976]So, it's not just Sam -- though he is the character most likely to remark on sex and gender. The demons, pure energy beings who long ago rejected the flesh, have hung onto misogyny: Taraka dismisses Kali as 'only a woman'. The plot hinges on a love triangle: the two men in that triangle are the novel's two protagonists, while the woman seldom appears. The goddess Ratri actually gets to be part of the plot: she is punished by being reincarnated into bodies of 'more than usually plain appearance'.
Despite its problematic aspects, Lord of Light remains a splendid read. I still don't especially like Sam, but Yama is one of my favourite of Zelazny's characters: his final scenes -- the import of which I completely missed as a teenager! -- are intensely moving. The world-building is visually ravishing, never heavy-handed, and creates a sense of an alien world that has become a human home: there are proverbs, customs, ways in which the strangeness has become comfortable. Not comfortable for the original inhabitants, obviously: but for a novel based on forcible colonisation, Lord of Light is remarkably sympathetic. 'To them, we are the demons,' says Sam: and, to Taraka (demon king), 'perhaps some reparation might be made'.
Three final points:
- there is no legitimate English-language ebook edition. If your French is up to it, you can purchase Seigneur de Lumière.
- there was going to be a film; Jack Kirby was involved; and this was used as a cover to rescue US officials from Iran: see How Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light transformed into the CIA's Argo covert op and The book that Argo forgot: SF Classic Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. (The latter also gives a good overview of the novel.)
- no review of this novel would be complete with a nod to one of the most egregious puns in SF, painstakingly built up when Sam is considering reincarnation and sends the Shan of Irabek to test the waters.
I still think it's one of Zelazny's best: and having reread it, I found myself rereading it again, for sheer enjoyment.
It won't let me log into my Google account for some reason, so this is damadigan AT gmail DOT com. I enjoyed your review. LORD OF LIGHT is one of my all time favorite books and I've read it a ton of times. It wasn't until the second to last time I finally realized that the whole thing is only seven chapters long, which seems unthinkable once you realize it, and that the whole Buddhism thing is completely irrelevant to the plot... something Zelazny himself seems to realize at the end, as he has Yama specifically bring it up, as if to apologize to the reader.
ReplyDeleteYour comments on how poorly LOL has aged in terms of modern sensitivities regarding various minorities all ring true to me, the more so because I am a writer myself (albeit an unsuccessful one) and I struggle with these things constantly. I grew up reading and enjoying this era of fantasy, sci fi, and some other genres and so I have to make very conscience efforts to overcome my tendency to make all my characters just like me and people I know, i.e., white and straight. My defaults are Caucasian and heterosexual. I don't mean to leave people out, or be denigratory, and I have made efforts to be more inclusive in many of my novels. But it does not come naturally.
Part of me wants to argue that Brahma should be judged as an individual character, and not a comical and insulting exemplar of all trans people. But for that to work Zelazny would have had to include a more positive portrayal of a trans person, and of course he did not. (If he had I suspect his publisher would have edited the character out; only Delaney and Dick could have gotten away with that stuff back then, mostly because hardly anyone really reads very far into anything by Delaney and Dick.) I also agree that Ratri's particular punishment is very troubling. That women are still judged entirely on their physical appearance many thousands of years in the future is grim indeed. Tak was turned into an ape; Ratri was turned into a homely woman. That's really irksome and ugly.
I do remember Kali being in the book more than you allow for, though. I always found her quite scary and could never understand what Sam saw in her, but, then, I liked Sam more than you did, apparently.
The one character I really liked a great deal was the assassin sent to kill Sam who became the true Buddha, and who sacrificed himself trying to save Sam from Yama. I can't remember his name right now, though.
I look back over the stuff I read growing up and as a young adult and pretty much everything written by male authors is just shot through with really objectionable nonsense. It's sad to me that that really objectionable nonsense shaped so much of my own writing style.