The plot of Lord of Light would have seemed a lot more outlandish when it was published in 1967, but these days it feels all to plausible, if not creepily familiar. The novel drops us right into a strange situation. On a planet that might not be Earth, a bunch of powerful entities are up to all kinds of mysterious business. They are all named after Hindu gods, like Krishna, Ganesh, Shiva, and so on. At first I thought they were actual gods, but eventually their powers seemed more technological than supernatural, and slowly the context takes shape, and this is the crucial survival information. These so called gods are all former tech lords, basically, people hundreds or even thousands of years before who got access to godlike technology, but instead of sharing it with the world, they hoarded it for themselves. One of the technologies was the ability to upload one’s mind into a new body as the old one ages, so these folks are immortal, unless they are suddenly killed. You can imagine why they didn’t want to share the tech with the rest of the world. If nobody dies, we’d run out of space pretty quickly, so instead, they reduce the rest of humankind to a permanent dark ages, where the ignorant worship the tech lords/gods. There’s an elaborate system of priesthood, where a dedicated loyalists can sometimes rise to the rank of god, only when a present god dies. Of course, the current gods are ultra paranoid about being killed, so that doesn’t happen often. Whenever a human civilization starts to rise up and invent things, like technology or enlightenment thinking, the tech gods use their priests to send in a hoard of barbarians to kill the upstarts and destroy their inventions and writing. This has been going on for ages and ages.

The conflict of the story is that one of the gods decides, partly out of boredom, to buck the system and let the poor plebs advance. This sets off a great war among the gods, and that’s where the story takes place. I find it a little chilling that the only hope for regular humans at this point is if one of the tech lords decides to help them. No way the hero is coming from the plebs’ own ranks. Poor folk in this novel have zero agency.

So what can this possibly have to do with our world today? Surely our tech lords, Musk and company, most of whom have warned that AI poses existential risk to the human species, though that risk hasn’t stopped one of them from dropping out of the accelerated development of this stuff, surely they’ll be nice to us, once they rule the world, right? I mean, sure, they all have bunkers in New Zealand, and small armies of former Navy Seals to protect themselves, but they wouldn’t subjugate us, would they? I mean, they seem so nice on social media. Nothing to worry about, right?