I discovered Roger Zelazny’s writing recently and I’m kinda obsessed. For context Zelazny was George RR Martin’s literary mentor.

The book is often billed as fantasy, but it’s actually Scifi.

The gimmick is making Buddha the main character of a fantasy about his conflict with the Hindu Gods.

The twist is, it’s not *really* Buddha, and they aren’t *really* the Hindu Gods.

Instead it takes place in the far future on a distant non-earth planet where death is almost impossible. The Gods are essentially a literally technocratic elite who figured out how to transmigrate a person’s consciousness from one body to another.

So they went about setting up a society with them at the top as the “Lords of Karma”. They adopted the model of the Hindus where when a guy dies they look at his karma (obtained via technological Omni surveillance along with brain scans) and depending upon that, they decide how he will be reborn.

The Buddha character is one of the first of these ancient “souls” that would become the gods…but he refuses Godhood, and later appropriates and introduces Buddhism to undermine them.

The world ruled by the Lords of Karma is a dystopia, in which humans are intentionally restricted to a quasi-medieval society. Buddha (or rather “Sam”) wants to topple them on behalf of humanity, rather than allow the to restrict “Godhood” and therefore technology to only the “deserving” few whom they have decided are “ready”.

Zelazny is an edgy writer, so his version of not-Buddha leans heavily on the somewhat amoral “trickster” archetype, and he’s basically an anarchist—but what’s really interesting is that by the end, whether he actually *is* Maitreya, or just a pretender is a matter of interpretation.

Anyway, very cool book with a lot to say. Gave me quite a bit to think about.

Anyone else read this?