A review by rjkamaladasa
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

3.0

When I started reading this, I thought it was definitely going to be a masterpiece. The Buddha bringing down the gods and unveiling the treacheries of heaven to mankind, the fall of class-system, and the dawning of the age of enlightenment - all set in a future of our own making; this is the stuff that legends can be made of. Yet, the author uses too much violence, too much hatred, too much blandness to paint Siddhartha's battle against heaven, it ends up being no interesting than a war fought by two ordinary mortals. Oh Roger, you could've so easily used Buddhist sub-text to make this a literary tribute to the concept of Nirvana, but you miss the mark by a couple of football fields.