Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light is one of the strangest and most ambitious science fiction novels ever written, a 1967 Hugo Award winner about a crew of colonists who have seized the identities of Hindu gods to maintain technological control over future generations, and the one man who takes on the role of the Buddha to fight back.

In this episode of Resistance Reads, Michael Kilman and Matt Wellstrom dig into why this book reads like a portrait of Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley existed, what accelerationism actually means when the people hoarding technology are literal gods, and why the idea of liberty cannot be killed no matter how much power you throw at it. Along the way they cover the New Wave science fiction movement, Joseph Campbell's hero's journey and why it doesn't actually work, the curse of the Buddha, what it means to separate a leader's ideas from their character, and why a sixty year old novel still hits this hard.

If you've ever wanted anthropology and science fiction in the same place, you're in the right spot. Next Episode, House on the Cerulean Sea.

What happens when you take H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror and hand it to the people he feared most?

In Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, the real monsters aren't lurking in ancient tomes or sunken cities. They're wearing badges, drawing red lines on maps, and deciding who gets to exist in public after dark.

In this episode, Michael Kilman and Matt Wellstrom dig into Matt Ruff's genre-bending novel set in 1950s Jim Crow America, where a Black Korean War veteran and his family navigate sundown towns, racist hauntings, shape-shifting elixirs, and a white occultist with questionable motives, all while facing horrors that don't need magic to be terrifying.

We explore:

• Why H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic dread actually maps more accurately onto the Black experience than onto his own
• How each chapter uses supernatural horror as an allegory for real Jim Crow era injustices including redlining, minstrelsy, and white allyship with strings attached
• The question of whether a white author can write the Black experience with integrity, and what Matt Ruff does right
• Why neutrality is power, and what Ruby's time as a white woman reveals about race, attractiveness, and privilege
• How the monsters in this book never kill a single Black character

Also featuring tangents on Stephen King, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Colorado Constitution written in three languages, and why racism is always the real monster.

Next episode: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light

Resistance Reads is a podcast exploring literature, power, and resistance through a social science lens. Hosted by Michael Kilman (Anthropology) and Matt Wellstrom (Political Science).

Matt and Michael dig into John Milton's Paradise Lost, the 17th-century epic poem that tells the story of the Fall from Satan's perspective. They explore why Satan reads as the tragic hero, how Milton's own political defeats and blindness shaped the work, the structural impossibility of free will in a world with an omniscient God, and why Eve gets a far more sympathetic treatment here than in almost any other retelling of the Eden story. The conversation moves into the Lilith midrash, the historical roots of Satan as a concept, and how the Jewish experience of oppression shaped the God of the Torah. They close with the Denver Gay Revolt as a model of effective resistance, and what Milton's Satan can teach us about working inside a broken system rather than just protesting outside it.

Next up: Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff.