Tag: lord of light

Check out this YouTube talk on LORD OF LIGHT.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I turned this on with some trepidation. LORD OF LIGHT is a brilliant science fiction novel that will someday give an aneurysm to somebody that’s, heh, terminally online. Fortunately, all three people loved the book, read it deeply, and knew something about Buddhism. Mind the spoilers if you haven’t read the book yet.

#commissionearned

Book of the Week: ‘This Kind of War,’

Gotta actually do this on a regular basis, now: I got people paying for it.  Anyway: this week’s choice is This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War… which I am actually only about a third of the way through, but it really is a classic of its kind, and well worth recommending.  My dad was in Korea, and he didn’t like to talk about it; I am starting to really understand why.

And so, we say adieu to the brief visitation of Lord of Light.

Book of the Week: Lord of Light (We hit a Patreon goal!).

Patreon link here: they need buttons, frankly.  Anyway: time to bring back Book of the Week as a regular feature.  I’ll do it every Sunday, so that I can remember it easily, but we’ll begin with one for the rest of the week: Lord of Light.  I mentioned it, like, five years ago, but it really is one of the best science fiction novels of the 1960s, and maybe the best one that Roger Zelazny ever wrote. It’s kind of about Hinduism (explicitly), kind of about Buddhism (explicitly), and kind of about how Enlightenment can take you over even when you don’t want it too; but it’s mostly just good. It’s so good, in fact, that I don’t know if anybody’s ever really tried to top it.

Continue reading Book of the Week: Lord of Light (We hit a Patreon goal!).

Looking for someone to read? (Roger Zelazny)

(Today’s author: Roger Zelazny)

Don’t get me wrong: I loved the Amber series.  Very good alternate-universe stuff, in a conceptual sense.  Never really got into the paradoxes (paradoxi?) inherent in the premise of One True Reality and a Multitude of Shadows, but then, neither did H Beam Piper’s Paratime series, so who are we to judge? Well worth reading, in other words.

But it’s Lord of Light that triggered this entry.  The book is one of the first ones that I can think of that mixed science fiction with Indian themes (that’s Asian Indian, not Native American), and in a fashion that showed an understanding of the source material.  A very short synopsis: the main character is in opposition to a society where Hinduism has been co-opted to reinforce the somewhat restrictive rule of its ‘gods.’  This being a science fiction story, that includes a technological form of reincarnation; this also being New Wave, it meant a certain amount of other psionic* abilities.  This being written by Roger Zelazny, it’s excellent stuff; the hero foments his rebellion against this co-opted Hinduism by creating Buddhism… with results that would later prove bemusing.  All in all, it’s one of those books that you wish had a sequel, but you’re sort of glad doesn’t; it probably wouldn’t have been as good anyway.

Plus, the CIA used a script based on this book to smuggle some embassy people out of Iran during the hostage crisis – no, really – so there’s some good karma there.

Yes, I just did that.

Moe Lane

*That’s a science fiction term meaning ‘magic.’