Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer

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FlyingPenguin
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Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer

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http://www.amazon.com/Riverworld-Includ ... B003DX0I44

This is a series of 5 books: To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, The Magic Labyrinth, and The Gods of Riverworld.

I read the first 3 books (and various short story collections) in the 70s as a boy and teenager, and the final two books in the 80s as a young man. I just finished re-reading it, which was quite enjoyable. As a teen, I had a hard time slogging through the first 3 books, and forgot a lot about the details, and especially the rich historical & biographical detail Farmer famously goes through on each of his major characters. It was fun reading it again with the ability to focus more attention on it than the first time around.

I read all the original books as they were released, and there were many years between their releases (6 years between Book 2 and 3) and that made it hard to read the last 3 books because by the time I read them, I had forgotten a lot about the previous one, and for the most part each book picks up right after the last book. It was great reading them one after the other this time around.

This was a tremendous sci-fi book series at the time - in the same league as Dune - painting an incredible world where every single person who had ever lived and died (38 billion people) is resurrected on this planet which consists of a single river snaking across the entire planet (no oceans). The river runs between two impassable mountain ranges so that there is no other way to travel, except by sailing up and down river. There are dozens of fascinating historical characters - both as protagonists and antagonists - and we learn a lot about them. The two main protagonists are Sir Richard Francis Burton, the 19th century explorer, and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). However there are many, many others you'll get to know including Cyrano de Bergeraq, Lothar von Richthofen (the brother of the legendary Red Baron), King John of England, Hermann Göring, Alice Hargreaves (the woman who as a child was the inspiration for Alice in 'Alice in Wonderland', and Peter Frigate (a fictional 20th century science fiction author, who is actually a stand-in for the author himself), along with many other famous, and totally unknown people from history.

You can't permanently die on the Riverworld - you are just resurrected somewhere else on the river. You also don't age - everyone is perpetually in their mid-20s. Food, luxury items and toiletries are provided three times a day via a bucket-sized "grail" (a matter converter) that everyone is resurrected with. The grail can only be opened by it's owner, but this doesn't prevent "grail slavery": city states that enslave people and force them into slave labor or to fight in their armies, and the state takes a percentage of what your grail supplies as tribute.

No clothes are provided, but there are towels with magnets sewn in them that are used as clothes, and everyone is raised on Resurrection Day buck naked, and without hair. Men are all circumcised and can't grow facial hair (greatly upsetting most men from ancient societies - most especially Hasidic Jews). One of the most entertaining things about the first book is watching Alice Hargreaves - a proper 19th century Victorian lady - deal with rampant nudity on the Riverworld. Except for towels and leather made from fish skin or human flesh, there is no other source of clothing on the Riverworld: there are no animals (except fish) and no plant like cotton that can be used for making cloth. Even sails for sailing ships are made from towels.

Farmer goes into great detail on the psychological impact of this world on humanity (keep in mind the vast majority of the people are from prior to the 20th century, and thus have all the baggage of their religious beliefs and superstitions to carry with them) and how they must face a very different "after-life" than was promised by the world's religions.

Farmer - like in his other novels - loves to play with social commentary, and the Riverworld is a giant social experiment (throw people from different periods of history together and see what happens). Needless to say, the early years of the Riverworld are full of bloody conflict and nation states come into being - many of them cruel slavery based governments led by history's worst genocidal maniacs, although the fact that death is an easy escape from totalitarianism, and the growing influence of a pacifistic religious order "The Church of the Second Chance" eventually leads to a certain stability and the emergency of more peaceful governments. The Church is also responsible for teaching the world's inhabitants a common trading language - Esperanto - which also goes a long way towards establishing a stable and generally cooperative society among disparate nation-states.

The main driving plot point is the desire of the protagonists to try to figure out who created this world and why, and to reach the reputed control center of the planet, located at the north pole. This is fueled by an apparent 5th columnist among the "Ethicals" (the people who created and manage this world) who disagrees with the purpose of the project, and enlists these people to help throw a monkey wrench into the plans of the Ethicals. Burton, Clemens, and several others are enlisted by this "Mysterious Stranger" to try to reach the control center. Burton is the primary protagonist and appears in all 5 books (although he's only in about half of the 2nd and 3rd books). He's a special case in that he awoke in the "resurrection chamber" in the control center, before Resurrection Day, and actually knows with certainty that this world is an artificial construct. Farmer goes into great detail about Burton's Earthly adventures during the course of the series. He was a fascinating man. Among his many exploits, he disguised himself as an Arab and was the first westerner to enter the forbidden (to infidels) city of Mecca, writing a book about it, was one of the leaders of an expedition to find the source of the Nile. He also published the first English translation of the Kama Sutra and The Arabian Nights. In his later years he served as British consul to Damascus and Trieste. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton

The novels hold up nicely after almost 5 decades because the technology of the Riverworld is strictly limited by the Ethicals to the stone age (that is until some iron and other rare elements are discovered, and a few city-states develop 20th century tech). The only time that technology gets an awkward presentation is in the last book when we find out about the Ethicals and their futuristic technology. Like most 70's sci-fi, computer technology is a little awkwardly presented, but Farmer actually did a pretty good job despite this.

There's also some attempt by Farmer to address Earthly social issues that were brought to the Riverworld as excess baggage: slavery, bigotry, anti-semitism, sexism & women's rights. Homosexuality is almost completely not mentioned (don't forget - this was written in the 70s) until the 3rd book, when we are introduced to a major protagonist who is a woman who was a blimp pilot on Earth in the late 20th century, who is bi-sexual. This was actually pretty daring stuff at the time of it's writing, and I remember there being a lot of uproar about in in reviews at the time.

What keeps the books interesting is that the story often switches between several different groups, all independently trying to reach the control center. A lot of the story takes place after Samuel Clemens builds a high-tech Mississippi style riverboat (although it's HUGE - it carries three bi-planes, a helicopter and auxiliary patrol boats) and he spends several decades sailing up river to the reputed location of the control center. The construction of this boat, and the necessary wars fought to maintain control of it and the facilities to build it, are a major focus of the 2nd book.

As the back cover for one of the books states "Everyone who ever lived INCLUDING YOU is is in this book!" This is as much your story as anyone else's. Part of the fun of reading these books is to imagine yourself waking up on the Riverworld on the Day of Resurrection, along with everyone else, and trying to deal not only with a very different afterlife than ever imagined on Earth, but also having to deal with day-to-day survival on what is initially a primitive world.

This time around I listened to the audiobook versions of all five books from Audible, and the reader is excellent.

I strongly recommend the first book. You will either fall in love with the concept after the first book, and voraciously devour the next four, or you won't. The first book really hooked me originally. You will definitely like this if you like classic adventure stories like Doc Savage. There are lots of epic battles, small and large, taking in the tactical constraints of the Riverworld's topography, and the limitations of technology.

Ignore both of the miserable attempts by the Sci-Fy channel to bring this novel to TV in 2003 and 2010 (and I will never forgive them for casting Richard Burton as the antagonist instead of a hero in the 2010 version). This would be a very hard series to bring to TV or film properly. The only way to do it justice would be a 5 part miniseries like they made for Dune, or an R-rated series on HBO or Showtime along the lines of Game of Thrones. There's a LOT of adult topics in this series of books, and a fair amount of sex. Just dealing with the nudity issues in the first book would be difficult. It would also require a lot of CG because this planet has unusual topography and it's densely populated.

More background on the series on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverworld
"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

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