Need to find science fiction story. Can you help me?

Question

Short science fiction story likely from the 30s by one of the best.Involves a machine that reincarnates the leader (like Dalai Lama) only politics force acceleration of the machine. Result is Insane leader who it seems has been had, but in the end knows what happened. He talks the conspirator into devising a torture wheel that will resuscitate the victim into infinity, while providing infinite torture. Then he uses this on the conspirator. I read this in an anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, and I believe it was a set of 1930s or 1940s SF. Also appeared in Astounding, early SF magazine. I think the title had some reference to gods or something religious. Theme is definitely Tibetan Buddhist. You would think of Zelazny, but haven't found it among his stories. I've tried search engines and come up with zero. Please help.

Answer 1

That sounds like "Lord of Light" a Zelanzy novel not short fiction but it has been soooooo long since I last read it. Good luck!

here is the link on amazon, does the summary sound right?
http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Light-Roger-Zelazny/dp/0060567236/sr=1-1/qid=1172135313/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-2364398-3970560?ie=UTF8&s=books

Answer 2

Major Books of the Decade
1930 John W. Campbell: "The Black Star Passes"
1930 Olaf Stapledon: "Last and First Men" (London: Methuen) the philosophy professor
author makes an "attempt to see the human race in its
cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values" a
brilliant multi-billion-year vision of the future
1930 John Taine [Eric Temple Bell]: "The Iron Star" (New York: E.P.
Dutton) Meteorite in the Congo changes men to animals
1930 Philip Gordon Wylie: "Gladiator" (New York: Knopf) unhappy life
as a superman growing up, perhaps the origin of "Superman" comics
1930 John W. Campbell: "The Black Star Passes"

1931 Raymond King Cummings: "Brigands of the Moon" (Chicago: McClurg)
serialized in Astounding (1930) Earth-Mars space war over Radium
1931 Raymond King Cummings: "The Exiles of Time"
1931 Andre Maurois: "The Weigher of Souls"
1931 Abraham Merritt: "The Face in the Abyss" (New York: Horace
Liveright) Inca treasure hunt leads to lost land of Yu-Atlanchi
1931 E. E. Smith: "Spacehounds of IPC"
1931 John Taine (Eric Temple Bell): "Seeds of Life"

1932 Edwin Balmer & Philip Wylie: "When Worlds Collide"
1932 Raymond King Cummings: "Wandl the Invader"
1932 John Gloag: "To-Morrow's Yesterday"
1932 Aldous Huxley: "Brave New World" (London: Chatto & Windus) classic dystopia
of genetic engineering, brainwashing, censorship, destruction of
the family. Science Fiction about Genetic Engineering
Reproduction is done in the laboratory, with people
systematically conditioned for various strata of life. Sex
and all the senses are the bases of media exploitation.
Literature, art, and philosophy are suppressed, production
and consumption are glorified, and the god is Ford (or
Freud). Workers are kept content through the drug "soma",
and a "savage" is kept on an Indian reservation as a museum
exhibit. Bernard Marx, of the Psychological Bureau (one of
the ruling Alphas) feels isolated, his Alpha Plus friend
Helmholtz Watson is creatively restless, large-breasted
Lenina Crowne disgusts Bernard and bores Helmholtz, so they
bring the savage John onstage, protest against soma, and are
summoned by Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller
for Western Europe. The controller is an ex-radical
himself, who now loves science most. Bernard is drugged,
Helmholtz exiled, and John (ambivalent over Lenina) commits
suicide. Harsh, ironic, fantastic, and unforgettable.
1932 Leslie Mitchell: "Three Go Back"
1932 John Taine [Eric Temple Bell]: "The Time Stream"

1933 Edwin Balmer & Philip Gordon Wylie: "When Worlds Collide" (New
York: Stokes) Two planets approach Earth, one destroys it,
one is our escape
1933 John Collier: "Tom's A-Cold" [US edition is titled "Full Circle"
poignent post-apocalypse look at the 1990s.
1933 John Russell Fearn: "The Intelligence Gigantic"
1933 Lawrence Manning: "The Man Who Awoke"
1933 H. G. Wells: "The Shape of Things to Come"

1934 Edwin Balmer & Philip Wylie: "After Worlds Collide"
1934 Thomas Calvert: "Rebirth"
1934 Alun Llewellyn: "The Strange Invaders"
1934 A. M. Lowe: "Adrift in the Stratosphere"
1934 Leslie Mitchell: "Gay Hunter"
1934 E. E. Smith: "The Skylark of Valeron"
1934 E. E. Smith: "Triplanetary" with a communications space station
in an orbit allowing contact between Earth and Venus
1934 John Taine [Eric Temple Bell]: "Before the Dawn"
1934 Jack Williamson: "The Legion of Space"
1934 H. G. Wells: "Seven Science Fiction Novels of H.G. Wells" (New
York: Knopf) from "The Time Machine" (1895) through "In the
Days of the Comet", these are among the best of the best
1934 Edgar Rice Burroughs: "Pirates of Venus" (Tarzana CA: self
published) start of ERB's Venus seeries

1935 John Benyon [John Wyndham]: "The Secret People"
1935 John W. Campbell, Jr.: "The Mightiest Machine"
1935 John Russell Fearn: "The Liners of Time"
1935 Robert E. Howard: "Conan the Conquerer" [Fantasy]
1935 Joseph O'Neill: "Land Under England" (telepathic totalitarianism)
1935 Festus Pragnell: "The Green Man of Graypec"
1935 Herbert Read: "The Green Child"
1935 Thorne Smith: "The Circus of Dr. Lao"
1935 Olaf Stapledon: "Odd John" (London: Methuen) Mutant genius
children struggle to deal with ordinary humans

1936 Karel Capek: "War with the Newts" (Prague: Fr. Borovy) satire on
Nazi expansion about smart salamanders conquering Earth
Science Fiction about Clones and Smart Animals
1936 Murray Leinster: "The Incredible Invasion"
1936 H. P. Lovecraft: "At the Mountains of Madness" [Fantasy]
1936 Margaret Mitchell, "Gone With the Wind" Pulitzer prize
[not SF, just here for context]
1936 Festus Pragnell: "The Green Men of Kilsona" (London: P. Allan)
scientist switches minds between his brother and subatomic
green-haired ape-man
1936 Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", one of the most amazing science
fiction novels of all time. To learn more about its author,
his influence on Arthur C. Clarke and other writers, and to
related its contents to the latest astronomical theories of
the future evolution of Earth, stars, galaxies, see:
Cosmic Future: Billions, Trllions, Googols
1936 Jack Williamson: "The Cometeers"
1936 John Wyndham [John Benyon]: "Planet Plane"

1937 E. C. Large: "Sugar in the Air"
1937 Andre Maurois: "The Thought-Reading Machine"
1937 Alex Raymond: "Flash Gordon in the Caverns of Mongo" -- one of the
first science fiction novels to spring from the magazine
and film world
1937 M. P. Shiel: "The Young Men are Coming"
1937 William Mulligan Sloane: "To Walk the Night" (New York: Farrar)
woman from the future posses body of modern retarded girl,
who marries a Professor, whose mysterious death exposes the secret
1937 E. E. Smith: "Galactic Patrol"
1937 Olaf Stapledon: "Star Maker"
1937 H. G. Wells: "Star-begotten: A Biological Fantasia"
1938 C. S. Lewis: "Out of the Silent Planet"
1938 Thomas Calvert McClary: "Three Thousand Years"
1938 Eden Philpotts: "Saurus"
1938 Ayn Rand: "Anthem" (London: Cassell) dystopian exposure of
communism and socialism, a future where people have no names and
do not know the words "I" or "my"
1938 Jack Williamson: "The Legion of Time"
1938 S. Fowler Wright: "The Adventure of Wyndham Smith"

1939 Stephen Vincent Benet: "The Devil and Daniel Webster", play
(later adapted to Opera) about New Hampshire farmer Jabez
Stone who sells his soul to the devil for a period of
prosperity. Jabez refuses when the Devil comes to
collect, and the great lawyer Daniel Webster has to defend
Jabez before a jury of the worst traitors... and wins
through superior oratory.
1939 L. Sprague de Camp: "Divide and Rule"
1939 L. Sprague de Camp: "Lest Darkness Fall"
1939 Aldous Huxley: "After Many a Summer"
1939 James Joyce: "Finnegans Wake"
Neither Science Fiction nor Fantasy, this book subsumes
both, and specifically incited the New Wave of speculative
fiction three decades later -- though no one at the time
could have known.
James Joyce's final and most puzzling literary experiment
had occupied him for 17 years, and parts of it had appeared
in "Work in Progress." "Ulysses" dealt with the
conscious; "Finnegans Wake" is a hand grenade tossed into
the material of Fantasy, in that it is entirely about the
unconscious and the semi-conscious. "Finnegans Wake"
carries a single character through a summer satrurday
night's sleep. It has all the mystification of a dream --
the hero's fantasies, forbidden desires, dim memories,
half-conscious sensations. The dreamer is Humphrey
Chimpden Earwicker, of Scaninavian descent, keeper of a
public-house in Dublin. He has lost interest in his wife
Maggie (who sleeps beside him), but is physically drawn
towards his grown daughter, Isobel, and one of his twin
boys, Jerry.
In the background is the ballad about the
Irishman who fell off a scaffold and was taken for dead,
but came to life when the word "whiskey" (which
etomologically means "water of life") was mentioned. In
the background, too, is the cyclic view of history
promulgated by Giambattista Vico, as well as Giordano
Bruno's dialectical concept of nature. "Finnegan" is the
"end-(French 'fin')again"; the book comes round full cycle
starting with the later part of a sentance which is begun
at the end of the book (a time-travel conceit), and
towards the end Earwicker, like the ballad hero, partially
wakes up from dream-death even as a man is partially
renewed in his children.
In addition to the experimental language, or as part of
it, the book is enormously learned, abounding in
polylingual puns, in allusions, myths (hence the Fantasy
component), history (the seige of Sevastopol in the Crimean
War is of detailed importance at one stage), and in
Freudian disguises and Jungian drawings on the racial
unconscious. Earwicker poses as Tristram in love with
Iseult la belle, a disguise for Isobel, and more at large
loves Anna Livia Plurabelle, a river (ana-upper-Liffey,
near where the public-house is) standing for the feminine
principle, even as the Hill of Hoeth (H.C.E. -- Howth
Castle and Environs), another local landmark, is the
masculine principle.
In various phases, very science fictionally, the dreamer
is Adam, Oliver Cromwell and other invaders, and JONATHAN SWIFT.
Beside being himself an individual troubled with incestuous
and homosexual fantasies, he is universal man, part of all
history and myth and biological experience, his name
alliterating with Here Comes Everybody and Haveth Childers
Everywhere.
1939 Eric Frank Russell: "Sinister Barrier"
1939 Robert Cedric Sherriff: "The Hopkins Manuscript" (London: Victor
Gollancz) Moon hits Earth, Persian conquers survivors
1939 E. E. Smith: "Grey Lensman"
1939 Stanley G. Weinbaum: "The New Adam" (Chicago: Ziff-Davis)
alienated mutant superman torn between mutant wife and sexy human
1939 Jack Williamson: "One Against the Legion"

1940 Herbert Best: "The Twenty-Fifth Hour" (New York: Random House)
Germ warefare after economic chaos
1940 L. Spague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt: "The Compleat Enchanter" [Fantasy]
1940 Robert A. Heinlein: "If This Goes On"
1940 L. Ron Hubbard: "Final Blackout"
1940 L. Ron Hubbard: "Typewriter in the Sky"
1940 A. E. Van Vogt: "Slan"
1940 Jack Williamson: "Darker Than You Think"