Lord of Light × Disability

In *Lord of Light*, the First occupy heaven not through divine right but by monopolizing the technology of body-transfer, assigning lesser or damaged forms to dissidents as punishment. This is disability as political weapon: the "gods" can grant or withhold able bodies the way institutions grant or withhold access. Read alongside Bujold's Barrayar — where Miles Vorkosigan's damaged body is both a social death sentence on his militaristic world and the thing that makes him ungovernable — and a pattern emerges. The body you're *given* is never neutral; it's a verdict issued by whoever controls the machinery of normalcy. Rifkin documents the same structure without the SF apparatus: the disabled were invisible not because they couldn't participate but because participation itself was architecturally withheld. Zelazny just made the architecture literal — a machine called the Hall of Karma that reads your soul and prints your prison.