Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light (1967)

Edition: Mandarin, 1986
Review Number: 1244

This novel is a science fiction classic - or possibly a fantasy classic, depending on how you look at it. It takes a particular theme of the genre, the relationship between science and religion, especially the counterfeiting of magical or divine power using superior technology, and develops it about as far as it is possible to go in its particular direction. For in Lord of Light, set on a world colonised from the now lost Earth, the controllers of technology have created the system of Hindu myth in reality, with themselves as the pantheon of the gods, controlling the cycle of birth and death and reincarnation. The plot of the novel is basically describing an attempt by someone who though one of the original colonists has remained something of an outsider, becoming a wandering preacher who has modelled his teaching on that of the Buddha, and aiming to overthrow the existing order of things.

The second half of the sixties saw the appearance of quite a few of the science fiction genre's most famous novels, many of which have religious themes - Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, A Canticle for Leibowitz, the Traveller in Black series. Of course, this was picking up (and also feeding) the mood of the times; the hippies and the New Age movement didn't just influence the psychedelic music scene. More than any of the stories I've just mentioned, Lord of Light aims to recreate the atmosphere of ancient myth (Brunner's Traveller comes closest to it, and is also written in a similar style). It is eminently successful in this, full of characters who are clearly no longer fully human, who have become remote and detached, just as portrayals of the Hindu gods often seem to be, particularly to Western eyes.

Lord of Light can be wearing to read in large doses, but it is an impressive achievement by any standards. The main reasons it is hard to read are the difficulty in keeping track of the large number of names associated with each character, the deliberately wooden, mythic and stylised writing, and an occasionally confusing chronology (the first chapter, for example, comes near the end of the story). Persevere, and the rewards make it worth the effort.

Roger Zelazny: The Dream Master (1966)

Edition: iBooks, 2001
Review number: 1005


Psychiatric care in the future is not a particularly common theme in science fiction, possibly because even though it has developed rapidly through the twentieth century it seems that many of its fundamental precepts are not yet very strongly established - so how can we guess what ideas and techniques will be available in the future? One idea that does seem clear is that dreams play some vital role, both in diagnosis and as part of the mind's own healing process.

So Zelazny's central character, Charles Render, is a dream shaper: his therapy consists of participating in and controlling to an extent the dreams of his patients. Too strong a psychosis or abnormal desire in the subject can overwhelm the mind of the therapists, but he hardly hesitates before embarking on the greatest challenge of his career. Eileen Shallot is also a psychiatric doctor, who comes to him wanting to be trained to become a shaper herself. The problem is that she is congenitally blind, and is at least partly driven by a desire to share the vision of those she will treat. Render needs to giver her therapy to overcome her anxiety about vision, showing her the world, at the same time dealing with the resentment of her guide dog, a genetically modified Alsatian with greatly enhanced intelligence who thinks that his mistress will cease to need him.

The major strengths of the novel are the powerful theme of the desire for sight, the unusual concentration on psychiatry, and the depiction of the dreams shared by Render and Shallot. Only one of them fails to work well, a recreation of a Walt Whitman poem which is a rather dull catalogue of visual images. Even if it is always a little strange to read a science fiction novel set at a date now past (1998), The Dream Master remains unusual and a powerful classic of the genre.