Lord of Light. Roger Zelazny (Doubleday, $14.95). The Mind Parasites. Colin Wilson (Arkham House, $4.00).

Roger Zelazny has been working at the problem of plotting a novel for some time now. This Immortal had no real plot; Dream Master was essentially an expanded novella. In his latest book, Lord of Light, he combines seven episodes – some splendid, some merely very good – into what is not quite a whole novel.

Lord of Light draws on classical Indian culture to recreate it on a future colony of vanished Earth, where the first settlers (who deliberately made up the culture after the Earthly model) play the roles of the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, relying on their mutant psi powers and considerable scientific gadgetry. Reincarnation is a reality, for personalities are now transferred from body to artificially grown body, and the demon Rakasha of Hindu legend is the original, energy-based life of the planet: protean, immortal, and inimical to humankind. A banished god, Siddhartha, Binder of Demons, and then (as a deliberate move against his former colleagues and in imitation of Earthly history) a reviver of Buddhism with himself as the Bodhisattva, sets out to fight the heavenly Establishment and thus bring back technical progress to the mass of mankind. At the end of the book, Heaven (a geographically locatable city) is on its way to ruin, and the hero – who has been many people in many bodies, for the story spans generations – vanishes in the mysterious manner typical of his religious and mythological prototypes.

None of the above gives more than a slight idea of the brilliance of Lord of Light, of the manner in which the mimicked Hindu culture is both splendidly described and splendidly explained in the purest science fiction terms; Zelazny can write like the Ramayana while discussing incendiary grenades or the flush toilet. He can also recount events in Heaven in colloquialisms that would embarrass every god and goddess in it, and rightly so. There is even a physicist's equivalent of Nirvana in something like a visible Van Allen belt. The two worlds never conflict; they are always at one, and that is a triumph.