Lord of Light
Roger Zelazny
Zelazny’s best novel?
Lord of Light was Roger Zelazny's second novel, and, in my opinion, his best. It was, I believe, the first of Zelazny's works I ever read, and I loved it. I have since read almost everything he ever published. He is generally recognized as one of Science Fiction's greats and was sometimes grouped with the New Wave writers who redefined science fiction in the 1970s (Ursula Leguin, Samuel Delany, Iain M. Banks, ...)
Zelazny sometimes liked to make life difficult for critics, bookstores, librarians and others whose jobs force them to assign books to specific shelves by straddling the boundary between Fantasy and Science Fiction. His first novel, This Immortal, does this very successfully. He claims to have done the same with Lord of Light, but it is in my opinion quite clearly science fiction. It takes place on a distant unidentified planet to which people from Earth escaped a long, long time ago, with their advanced technologies.
One of these technologies allows a personality (a "soul") to migrate from one body to another. In this way the original migrants have survived for a very long time (centuries?) and have become Gods to their children. In fact, they have become Hindu Gods: we have a Krishna, a Vishnu, a Kali, a Yama, etc. Hinduism provided a convenient rationale for the transmigration of souls. One of their number, our hero Sam, is a revolutionary who fights the rule of the Gods over their children. Sam is a brilliant con artist. He doesn't believe in fighting fair. You know the type: the scoundrel who, despite his unsavory methods, is always (well, usually) on the side of the angels.
It's a great story. It also contains Zelazny's most famous pun, "The fit hit the shan." It is occasionally claimed that the entire novel was written as an excuse for this pun. Indeed, I believe Zelazny was one of those who made the claim.