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Today’s topic being Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light.

I’m going according to my own personal order of precedence: Lord of Light is in my opinion perhaps not the best, but certainly the coolest, thing next to Dune.  It’s by far the best of the few Zelazny works I have read (although “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is similar enough), and top-drawer among far-reaching, ambitious science fiction.

Lord of Light takes place on a colony world that has all but forgotten the existence of “vanished Urath”–but much of culture we would recognize does persist. Specifically, the conflict between Hinduism and Buddhism. The technology that (long before the era of the story) has set the plot in motion is a “reincarnation” device that allows rich or powerful enough people to transfer to new bodies, but as a technology this barely plays a part. The real kick-start to the story is that those who control this technology have by now lived long enough to have discovered and developed within themselves certain psychic abilities … and that they declare themselves the gods of the planet, based on the Hindu pantheon. They are opposed by an original settler of the world, Sam, who plays out the Buddha’s role, speaking for the oppressed against the status quo.

I read Lord of Light long before I knew anything significant about Eastern religions, and it blew my mind. I have since studied Hinduism academically, and Lord of Light loses nothing with increased familiarity. I referred earlier to this book as being simply cool. Read this:

Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extent that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe….

It’s all the better when I tell you that this, my favorite speech in the novel, comes from Yama, the Deathgod. But then it’s better still when you reflect that this is not inconsistent with the teachings of all sorts of religious cosmologies. There is a natural law, which one can access by digging deep enough within oneself. Or, in slightly more Hindu terms, the universe is one. It gives me courage.

Courage, however, is not why I read Lord of Light. There’s a couple of awesomely written scenes. There’s some wry characters. There’s some to be learned, and far more to consider. And, as in many of my favorites, there are no easy answers.

Because, well, why not?

Personally, I am a proper Dune fanatic. Dune is the War and Peace of speculative fiction, and, yes, I say that believing War and Peace is the greatest novel yet written. Dune, too, encompasses everything:

• War
• Peace
• Guerrilla tactics
• Religion
• Fanaticism
• Time
• Space (tesseracts)
• Love
• Death
• Psychology
• Compromise
• Ecology
• Legend
• &c…

The plot is intricate and deeply thought out, several of the characters can break a reader’s heart, and the world-creation is quite simply complete.

I first encountered the Dune world at age 13, through the David Lynch movie adaptation.  I read the novel immediately afterwards, and since then have owned somewhere on the order of a dozen copies, most of which I have given away (indeed, the purpose of having extra copies on hand).  I generally try to start reading the book slowly with lots of processing time; this works with many books I love, but in the case of Dune I am inevitably absorbed, and I career through the last 150 pages in a short evening.  I am left feeling somewhat heartsick each time, for Dune ends but does not resolve: the story is wide-ranging and messy, and even the “right” solution to the crises involve lots of death and–worse–soul-destruction and the breaking of barriers that protect people, like self-preservation.  None of which will be forgotten or forgiven, the ending makes clear.  I love the story for its truth to life that way. 

I have seen a friend become a creature.

In my family, I should note, “proper Dune fanatic” means that we attempt to forget the existence of all series books subsequent to Dune itself.  Or at least to spare ourselves any interaction with them.  Dune ends openly, and so theoretically open to sequel, but Herbert was quite evidently utterly unable to keep up the intensity of engagement that any true succeeding volume would have required.  I don’t necessarily hold this against the author; I have been told that many of the subsequent books were written to make money for Mrs. Herbert’s medical bills, and I tend to imagine that Dune as a universe is something powerful enough that it existed (somehow) prior to the books, while Herbert merely (somehow) saw it and tapped into it.  Which is a great accomplishment in and of itself, and should be enough.

I am thisclose to agreeing to teach again for the MIT student-run summer program for high school and middle school students, HSSP. If you’d like to do the same, or to do it with me, great!

And if you’d like to advise me on the course I am thinking of putting together, also great. I set up a Google Groups page for discussion on my curriculum. I’d love input!

The basic idea will be explorations into the process of reading and the experience of stories. I came to this idea through a recent penchant for philosophizing on reading. Speculative fiction often provides excellent metaphors for the reading experience–Narnia being an obvious example, and David Brin’s Kiln People one of my favorites. I’d like to take that as one day’s theme, and also expand/expound (or, better yet, lead discussions) on different literary forms, how we experience them and how we’re meant to experience them.

Help much appreciated! Respond here, by email, or through my Google Groups page (which I might like best because then my other friends who are willing to help can weigh in).

I stared at the computer for some time before beginning to write this.  Decompression time.  Sometimes coming out of a book really is like rising out of deep water, isn’t it—bends and all.

Today the book is Orson Scott Card’s The Worthing Saga. Other days it may be Anne Perry’s Tathea, or David Brin’s Kiln People, or Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry.

And there’s no need even to get me started on Martha Cooley’s The Archivist–I am quite sure I have already written more about it than anyone else wants to know.

Part of the agreement I made in beginning to post to this weblog was to write about what I’m reading. I suppose I’ll start by writing about how I read.

I read many works in parallel, because my tastes change with mercurial alacrity (okay, so I just wanted to use the word “alacrity”), and more importantly because I frequently want time to digest a chapter or scene in a story. (This makes me the perfect kind of reader to adore the Amazon Kindle, and indeed I do. Mine is named “The Guide, Mark II.”) My philosophy of reading holds that I owe nothing to a book merely because I begin to read it. I will quite happily discard a book after 3 pages, 100, or 300, rarely looking back. However, if I do intend to finish a book, I shoulder the (occasionally awesome) responsibility of learning the characters on their own terms, of allowing them their full measure of existence.

I loaned The Archivist to a friend who reads entirely differently from me (who once as an escape read half of War and Peace in two days, and feels compelled to finish every book he starts). The next morning he handed it back with a simple, “It was good. Let’s talk later.” His major critique of the book was that Ms. Cooley should have let the ideas percolate another 20 years or so before writing the book: it seemed a “green” undertaking to him. Although he may have a point, I still feel I too had a point when I responded, “Who are you to say that? You didn’t even give her two days.”

I have a friend who for several intense months at age 11 or so went around murmuring scenes from Lord of the Rings under her breath, imagining herself tromping along as a tenth member of the Fellowship. Another who has spoken of planning lighting schemes and camera angles as if to stage and film favorite scenes from stories. My imagination works differently. I rarely see the characters of whom I read, though I sometimes see through their eyes. I hear them speak, but it always sounds like my own voice. I feel my body move their gestures. I suppose I try personally to experience the story.

Which is more or less how, in the world of The Worthing Saga, telepathy works. If they “look into the minds” of others, the telepaths experience those others’ memories as their own. This can cause all sorts of philosophical/psychological quandaries if the “viewee” is a very different sort of person from the telepath, who has done very different things, had (to the telepath) inconceivable reactions to the stimuli of life. Twice so far in Worthing there have been conversations where one character says to another, “Your life is more real to me than mine. How did you take my life from me?” But it’s not that anyone’s life is erased—just that the overwhelming force of someone else’s strongest memories may seem more evocative than one’s own “normal” life.

The more I read, especially in good speculative fiction, the more metaphors I find for the reading experience. I think this one, from Card, will last me for a while. And of course Card is the author who wrote, in a 1991 introduction to Ender’s Game, “The ‘true’ story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. … The story is the one that you and I will construct together in your memory.” I hope all my favorite authors have such faith in me. I hope I may live up to that faith.