Lord of the Light (Roger Zelazny, 1967)

Lord of the Light (Roger Zelazny, 1967)

"The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in the final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unkown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either."

This book is AWESOME. It is a mixture of science-fiction and fantasy, that I could just imagine everything in done in adult, violent anime.

"Open a fruit and there is a seed within it. Is that the center? Open the seed and there is nothing within it. Is that the center?"

Story is full of Gods, Hindu Gods to be exact, but not really exact-exact, because in the world of the book, the Gods are actually really technically advanced humans. The story doesn't explain the exact history of the people, which is good, but you can get a general idea, that they are so advanced, that they colonized a new world, and act like Gods. They have set a separate section of the planet fully guarded as Heaven, and they are able to use new bodies when their old bodies are old, therefore claiming immortality. Each God also has a super power called an Attribute which is usually also linked to science, but the average layman just considers it a supernatural power of the Gods.

"You were correct, for all men have within them both that which is dark and that which is light. A man is a thing of many divisions, not a pure, clear flame such as you once were. His intellect often wars with his emotions, his will with his desires… his ideals are at odds with his environment, and if he follows them, he knows keenly the loss of that which was old – but if he does not follow them, he feels the pain of having forsaken a new and a noble dream. Whatever he does represents both a gain and a loss, an arrival and a departure. Always he mourns that which is gone and fears some part of that which is new. Reason opposes tradition."

These Gods are like an elite monarchy, controlling the people, and hiding the science from them. Their justification is they are not ready, but there is one of them that rebels against the system. His original name is Sam, but he has several God names, and in the world, he is also the Buddha, wanting to destroy idols and religion, and give the power to the people. But war against Heaven isn't easy.

The best thing about the book is that even though it is science-fiction, the author doesn't write it like it is. The Gods are not actual Gods, but they have pretended to be Gods for so long, that they talk and act like they are, even to each other, even among themselves who know the secret of their Godhood, so the story is never people pretending to be Gods, but Gods, like we have read them in all mythologies, just, with a reasonable explanation…!

Also, Sam, the Buddha, the rebel God, really kicks fucking ass.

"As there is a time for everything, there is time also for the end of everything."

5/5