Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light won the Hugo in 1968 and almost became a big-budget Hollywood movie a decade later, after Star Wars paved the way — but even though it didn’t get made, it still made history:
In 1979, a $50 million film version of Lord of Light was announced. The plan to make a movie collapsed due to various legal issues, but the CIA acquired some set designs and parts of the script, and used them to set up a cover for a team sent to Tehran — ostensibly scouting shooting locations, but really to help rescue six members of the US embassy staff who had narrowly missed being held prisoner during the Iranian hostage crisis because they had been out of the building at the time. These half-dozen people were in hiding in the Canadian embassy, and the Lord of Light pretext contributed to the CIA bring them safely out of the country.
I’m not sure I’d choose a script with this premise for my cover while traveling into revolutionary Iran:
The plot is simple enough. A group of tough characters have acquired some radical technology, and they use it to set themselves up on a colonized planet as quasi-deities modeled on the divine figures of Hinduism. But one breaks away, reinventing himself as a Buddhist alternative, taking on the guise of Siddhartha, and thus undermining the more rough-and-tumble philosophy of his rivals.
The book opens: “His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.”
(I somehow forgot that Wired had a piece on the escape a few years ago.)
Incidentally, it’s a really, really good book.
And my understanding was that it was the officers and engineers on the colony ship who chose to deny Earth’s advanced technology to the colonists — particularly the technology to move human consciousness between bodies, actual re-incarnation. Whilst those same officers using this technology live thousands of years, a civilisation grows up on the colonised planet, which the officers keep artificially pre-Industrial.
Lord of Light is probably my second favorite Zelazny book after Doorways in the Sand. Both would make fantastic movies. If done right, of course.