Yama is my favorite character from Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, a Hugo winner and arguably the best thing he's ever written. To sum up, it's a combination of science fiction and Hindu mythology, where the ruling class of colonists on a distant planet use psionics and advanced technology to assume the mantles of the Hindu gods - but on another level, in doing so some of them (like Yama) actually become the gods (in a way) that they play.