Another book I've read recently
Jan. 8th, 2005 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinI finally got around to reading Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, the 1967 book that established him as a brilliant new talent to look out for. This is back in print as part of the general renaissance in classic SF reprints that seems to be going on.
It's the story of a bunch of people who have established themselves as a godlike planetary aristocracy through indistinguishable-from-magic super-tech and assumed the identities of Hindu gods, and the quasi-Buddha who tries to take them down.
It's pretty cool and is not a very long novel, but it's slow going. Since its characters are patterned after the Hindu pantheon, there about a jillion of them, most of them have several different names, and they're constantly transmigrating into new bodies, changing their appearances, and replacing each other in the pantheon through a system of promotion. So keeping them straight requires some care.
I was mostly able to roll with the premise; the one thing that abused my suspension of disbelief was the way that the indigenous energy-entities of the planet acted like traditional Hindu demons. Why would they do that? Some acquired sense of aesthetic balance? It's not clear.
It's the story of a bunch of people who have established themselves as a godlike planetary aristocracy through indistinguishable-from-magic super-tech and assumed the identities of Hindu gods, and the quasi-Buddha who tries to take them down.
It's pretty cool and is not a very long novel, but it's slow going. Since its characters are patterned after the Hindu pantheon, there about a jillion of them, most of them have several different names, and they're constantly transmigrating into new bodies, changing their appearances, and replacing each other in the pantheon through a system of promotion. So keeping them straight requires some care.
I was mostly able to roll with the premise; the one thing that abused my suspension of disbelief was the way that the indigenous energy-entities of the planet acted like traditional Hindu demons. Why would they do that? Some acquired sense of aesthetic balance? It's not clear.
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Date: 2005-01-08 07:14 pm (UTC)