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justiceofkalr 's review for:
Lord of Light
by Roger Zelazny
Hugo award winner for 1968.
I was pretty excited when I read the premise for this book. Typically when myth or religion makes it into sci-fi it's very western-centric. So the idea of a more Eastern focused book with Hinduism and Buddhism was refreshing. The set-up is kind of vague about how things exactly came about, but humans with advanced technology are posing as the gods of the Hindu pantheon, and one of them rebels by bringing Buddhism back to the people as an attempt to overthrow his fellow "gods".
I lean more towards hard sci-fi a lot of the time. I love to see technology explained and well thought out. Here though, technology just was. I found it semi acceptable in this case because it went along with the ideas in the book. To the people in the book, the technology the gods use is so far above them that it's considered magic. So the lack of explanation kind of added to that feeling of it being magical. Still, it was kind of irritating to me that things just magically worked because they did. Also the gods somehow magically maintained their powers even though they switched bodies because of some weirdly vague explanation about imposing their patterns on new bodies.
The back story for how everything came to be is left kind of vague. You get the general idea only. A human ship comes to this planet and with their technology they defeat the current inhabitants who then become the demons of myth. The crew of the ship sets themselves up with the technology while the passengers are somehow allowed to revert to a primitive state and build themselves up to civilization slowly. I love world building, and I would have liked to have seen/heard a lot more about these origins.
Overall the story was great. I just wanted more detail.
I was pretty excited when I read the premise for this book. Typically when myth or religion makes it into sci-fi it's very western-centric. So the idea of a more Eastern focused book with Hinduism and Buddhism was refreshing. The set-up is kind of vague about how things exactly came about, but humans with advanced technology are posing as the gods of the Hindu pantheon, and one of them rebels by bringing Buddhism back to the people as an attempt to overthrow his fellow "gods".
I lean more towards hard sci-fi a lot of the time. I love to see technology explained and well thought out. Here though, technology just was. I found it semi acceptable in this case because it went along with the ideas in the book. To the people in the book, the technology the gods use is so far above them that it's considered magic. So the lack of explanation kind of added to that feeling of it being magical. Still, it was kind of irritating to me that things just magically worked because they did. Also the gods somehow magically maintained their powers even though they switched bodies because of some weirdly vague explanation about imposing their patterns on new bodies.
The back story for how everything came to be is left kind of vague. You get the general idea only. A human ship comes to this planet and with their technology they defeat the current inhabitants who then become the demons of myth. The crew of the ship sets themselves up with the technology while the passengers are somehow allowed to revert to a primitive state and build themselves up to civilization slowly. I love world building, and I would have liked to have seen/heard a lot more about these origins.
Overall the story was great. I just wanted more detail.