A review by mrtvavrana
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

adventurous informative mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

 

Lord of Light is utter chaos. It´s really heavy on information, religion (dominantly Hinduism), and talking. It also lacks action.

This novel is about “gods”—advanced humans who are able to reincarnate their souls using new bodies. They are divided into two factions: one wants humanity to advance, and the other is purposefully halting humanity's progress so they still get worshiped.

The book is extremely slow to get going, and you really need to pay attention to detail and write information down to fully grasp what is happening and who is who.

I mostly struggled with the characters—many of the gods have multiple names, and some of the names are just a title that gets passed to a different character later in the story.

While, at first glance, this book only has a few chapters, they are in fact different and separate stories. They are (more or less) only connected by the characters, which was extremely confusing to me, as I was expecting something different entirely.

I also had to consult the internet multiple times as I had no clue what was going on half the time. I think that without looking the additional information up, I would have despised this book completely.

Lord of Light also deals with topics such as classism, colonialism, and even racism (between different species). But unfortunately a lot of it gets lost between the pages.

Honestly, the sole reason I have picked up and read this book was that I thought a stand-alone by Zelazny would be easier to digest than The Amber Chronicles. Lord of Light has also been named one of the best sci-fi novels of all time, and it won a Hugo award. Unfortunately, it did not meet my expectation.