Lord of Light
by Roger Zelazny
Summary
The crew of a colony ship reached a new world, subdued its native energy beings, and then declined to share their technology with the descendants of the passengers. Instead they installed themselves as the Hindu pantheon, using mind transfer to change bodies and live forever, engineered psychic powers as divine attributes, and set up a system of reincarnation run through a machine that reads a soul and assigns the next body according to Heaven's judgement of it.
Sam, once an officer of that crew, decides this is intolerable. Since the gods have made themselves Hindu, he opposes them by importing Buddhism, wholesale and cynically, as a political tactic, preaching enlightenment he does not personally believe in because it is the doctrine most corrosive to their authority.
What follows is a war of assassination, theology, alliance with demons and one very well planned battle, told out of order: the book opens with Sam's return from a form of death and then spends five chapters explaining how he got there.
Zelazny writes in a register that should not work, mixing high mythological cadence with dry wisecracks in the same paragraph, and it is exhilarating.
Yama, the god of death, is the best of the gods: an engineer and weapons designer who supports the pantheon on principle, changes sides for reasons of his own, and gets most of the best lines in a book made of good lines.
Around three hundred pages, though dense enough to read longer, and the chronology takes a chapter or two to settle since the second chapter jumps back several decades without saying so.
Best for readers who want mythology and science fiction fused rather than compared, and one of the wittiest prose styles the genre has produced.
Historical Context & Significance
Lord of Light won the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel and remains Roger Zelazny's most admired book, though he is more widely read for the Amber sequence.
It also has the strangest afterlife of any novel on this list. In 1979 the producer Barry Ira Geller optioned it, commissioned concept art from the comics artist Jack Kirby, and planned a Colorado theme park called Science Fiction Land around the designs. The film collapsed. When the CIA needed a cover story to extract six American diplomats from Tehran in 1980, the makeup artist John Chambers handed Kirby's artwork and Geller's screenplay to the officer Tony Mendez, who retitled the project Argo and used it as the fake production.
Ben Affleck's 2012 film Argo tells that rescue and mentions neither Zelazny nor the novel.