riginally published in parts in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Zelazny's Hugo-winning novel displays its episodic origins, but nonetheless coheres into a magnificent whole.
The first section opens in mystery. A man named Yama, a woman named Ratri and an intelligent ape named Tak are attempting to reincarnate a man named Sam, pulling down his stored energy patterns from orbital exile. They succeed, installing the essence of Sam in a new body, and we learn that Sam was a legendary rebel many years ago. This mortal alien world is ruled by the members of the Hindu pantheon, who are in reality ex-humans equipped with miraculous technology that passes for magic. Yama and Ratri and Tak are former gods themselves, once allied with Sam, the Lord of Light, during his tremendous battle against the gods. Now, it is felt, the rebels may stand another chance to bring down the gods. If they can escape the near-omniscient attention of the deities.
Sections two through six, which form the vast bulk of the book, are one immense flashback, in which we follow Sam's career as celestial troublemaker, right up to his orbital expulsion. Sam is first seen in an aging body, having been denied reincarnation by the gods for his ideological transgressions. He wishes to liberate mere mortals from their feudal condition, through technological gifts. Sam liberates the necessary body-transfer equipment from a temple, renews himself, and now his opposition to the gods is out in the open. In Chapter 3, Sam faces an assassin named Rild, whom he converts to the Buddhism which he is preaching as a counterforce to the Hindu orthodoxy. In Chapter 4, Sam solicits the aid of the aboriginal inhabitants of the planet, energy beings of immense power whom he once confined to a prison called Hellwell. But the head native, Taraka, betrays Sam, bringing down the wrath of the gods prematurely.
By Chapter 5, Sam has been captured and brought to the polar Celestial City of the deities. He is tried and seemingly executed, his funeral pyre serving a tribute to the wedding of Yama and Kali. But Sam survives by a shifty body-switching trick, remaining in the Celestial City as a double agent. He wreaks havoc among the gods, but is eventually found out. Fleeing the Celestial City in Chapter 6, Sam begins to amass his forces for a climactic battle, one that finds Yama and Ratri joining his side. But despite masterful strategy and heroic prowess on the battlefield, Sam loses and undergoes disincorporation and banishment to the Bridge of Gods above the planet. The final chapter comes back to real-time, and recounts how Sam and his allies finally triumph, in an unexpected manner.
The New Wave at its finest
When readers in the 1960s speculated that science fiction could become the "new mythology" of the 20th century and beyond, they often had in mind the work of Roger Zelazny. With his bravura fabulism, blending contemporary speech and high-flown diction, nobility and scurvility, lust and sacredness, technology and ancient archetypes, romance and fatalism, Zelazny seemed to point the way to a potent new kind of literature. Perhaps no book of his exemplifies this paradigm better than Lord of Light.
The book manages to hit all the right notes. It never talks down to the reader, instead plunging the reader directly into a confusing milieu without infodumps, assuming that he or she will persevere and winkle out the lineaments of the setup. At the same time, the characters and actions are arresting enough on their own to inspire continued attention even in the face of initial befuddlement. Sam, of course, is the most deeply limned character, but the other gods with their intricate intrigues emerge as fully fleshed individuals as well. Yama in particular achieves a resonance which makes his final fate truly pathos-inducing.
Neither does Zelazny neglect the larger-than-life aspects of his characters. They wear their deific Aspects and Attributes with majesty, a majesty reflected in Zelazny's epic prose, which never descends to bathos or lapidary fulsomeness. And of course, a winking irreverence erupts at the appropriate moment. "The day of the battled dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden." This might be Homer as filtered through Bob Dylan.
Zelazny did not create his template ex nihilo. You will encounter flavors of Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison and James Branch Cabell among others in here. The dust-jacket text of the original edition cites Tolkien as well, but I don't see much of a resemblance to LOTR, but more to The Silmarillion (1977), which Zelazny of course could not possibly have read at the time!
Zelazny's model, alas, proved mostly inapplicable by anyone less talented than he. Even Zelazny himself, especially in his later years, was not always able to make his myths come alive. A few brave subsequent souls have succeeded, however, in emulating Zelazny to good effect. Consider Jan Lars Jensen's Shiva 3000 (1999) and Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series. Perhaps some future SF mythomane will someday pick up the ring of power that Zelazny wore for a brief heyday.
