Wired has a remarkable story this month — a cloak-and-dagger saga about the rescue of a handful of Americans from Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-80. This group had slipped out of the U.S. embassy as it was overrun and taken refuge underground; a CIA operative rescued them by masquerading as a film producer and manufacturing new identities for the Americans as his crew.
The story is a great yarn in itself. But one little tidbit really stood out for me: the movie the producer was pretending to make was a film adaptation of a science fiction novel that was one of my absolute youthful favorites — Roger Zelazny’s 1968 Lord of Light.
The original book is set among human exiles from a lost earth — a spaceship crew stranded on a new home planet, where they have used technology to set themselves up as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Ironically, given its use by the CIA during the chaos following Iran’s overthrow of the Shah, it’s a tale of revolution: the “gods” maintain a monopoly on the body-swapping technology that makes them immortal, keeping the masses in a backward state; the hero, Sam, is a populist who sparks a war against the oligarchy. (In the novel’s parallel world, Christianity is represented by the original ship’s chaplain, who has become the menacing leader of a zombie army. It was the ’60s, remember?)
Here you can see all sorts of information about the CIA/Lord of Light connection, including the screenplay, designs by comic-book-art legend Jack Kirby, and an article by the CIA agent who led the rescue mission.
I don’t know that Lord of Light would ever have made a great movie; then again, who’d have thought that The Lord of the Rings ever would, either?
[tags]wired, cia, roger zelazny, lord of light[/tags]
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