Our Lords of Light

When I have trouble falling asleep, I usually put on an audiobook — and the one I’ve been listening to lately in 10 to 20 minute chunks before falling asleep is Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. I first read it a few years ago, and it didn’t quite work for me at first. But it grew on me, and I’ve come around. Now I think it’s a very fine, sublime, and funny novel that gets to the heart of our modern dreams and our political predicaments.

The book is about a war for power between gods on a distant planet. Well, the planet had been settled by humans centuries earlier. We find out in bits and pieces as the story progresses that some (or all) of the initial colonizers — the people who came over on the ship from Earth — had advanced technologies that allowed them to set themselves up as gods on this new planet. And just any gods but specifically Hindu gods. In fact, they recreated the entire cosmology and social structure of Hindu society, with reincarnation and a caste system.