Riverworld: To Your Scattered Bodies Go and The Fabulous Riverboat by Philip Jose Farmer – review

The “Riverworld” series by Philip Jose Farmer is back, and it’s better than ever, with the first two novels To You Scattered Bodies Go and The Fabulous Riverboat now combined into one volume for the very first time. If you have never read it, why haven’t you? Get it! If you have, but it’s been years since then, get it and read it again–there’s so much in the novels that you discover something new each time you read them.

Sure, admittedly, I’m an unabashed fan of both Philip Jose Farmer and the Riverworld series, but now is an especially good time to get into the series either for the first time or to renew one’s acquaintance with it. Besides these two novels, The Dark Design was released in June of this year and The Magic Labyrinth was released on November 9, 2010. Also, in the near future, Tor will be coming out with the final book of the series, Gods of Riverworld. It will be released for the first time in February of 2011.

This review of the first two novels will really be a retrospective look at them, in which I touch on plot elements of both books, but also in which I comment about them and various characters in them and why they and the series have such a profound effect on readers. Though I haven’t yet had the fortune to see it, the SyFy Channel has made the series into a movie starring Tahmoh Penikett (Battlestar Galactica/Dollhouse) and Laura Vandervoort (Smallville).  The four-hour miniseries aired on April 18, 2010, and I’ve heard some good things about it from a coworker who saw it–but he didn’t read the series, so I’m not sure how accurately it follows the books. I have read online that there’s an American journalist, Matt, in it. If he is a replacement for the character of Sir Richard Burton, then that, in itself, could be doing a grave injustice to the book and the Riverworld series. Still, sometimes a movie can differ drastically from a book, and yet be good in its own ways, so I’ll reserve judgment until I get a chance to see it. If any of our readers have seen it, and like/dislike the movie, please leave a comment below.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go was the winner of the 1972 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It still is very powerful and as thought-provoking and interesting now as it was then. In re-reading it, I didn’t find it a bit dated. Philip Jose Farmer obviously did a lot of research into Sir Richard Burton’s life (he’s the famous “explorer and linguist,” the discoverer of Lake Tanganyika, who “made a pilgrimage to Mecca while disguised as a Moslem,” and who translated The Thousand and One Nights), and Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the real-life Alice from The Adventures of Alice In Wonderland), Mark Twain, and Hermann Goring’s lives, among the other famous/infamous personalities who are characters in the Riverworld novels. This knowledge of the lives, loves, adventures, and exploits of his characters helps lend an air of plausibility to the entire series, and made me want to learn more about the lives of the actual historical figures.

What man who has read The Adventures of Alice In Wonderland hasn’t at some time thought to himself, “I wonder what Alice would have looked like grown up, and if she’d be hot?” Sir Richard Burton finds that out, waking up, as all of the resurrected people who ever lived on Earth do on the same day, naked as the day the were born, bald and lacking hair anywhere, looking as if they were twenty-five years old, on Riverworld. Alice is remarkably okay with the fact that she is nude–after all, when you’re in a place where everybody around you is naked, you would be the odd one if you were clothed. As she tells Burton and another major character, Peter Frigate: “Where all are nude, none are nude. It’s the thing to do, in fact, the only thing that can be done. If some angel were to give me a complete outfit, I wouldn’t wear it. I’d be out of style.” She and Burton have a one-night fling, while they’re both under the influence of a narcotic type of chewing gum that is contained in their grails (cylindrical containers strapped to their wrists), and, though she feels like Burton has violated the trust she’d felt existed between them, she still continues to be a part of Burton’s retinue of followers.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go will probably continue to be my favorite of the Riverworld series, but mainly because it was the first book I read of the series, and it has Sir Richard Burton and Alice Liddell in it, and the alien Monat (who, in an attempt to protect his fellow aliens, himself, and his spaceship from mobs of humans hoping to obtain the secret for longer lives destroyed possibly every human on Earth), and the Neanderthal-like Kazz (whose great strength and skills at constructing primitive but effective weapons like spears serves Burton and his followers well in battles).

Also, it and novels like Dune by Frank Herbert were masterpieces of what has come to be called “worldbuilding” science fiction novels, describing in detail the worlds that we read about, making them seem more realistic to us by the colorful descriptions and details the authors include. Riverworld is much more immense than the Earth, with a river that encircles the planet that is longer than all of Earth’s longest rivers put together. Farmer goes into how the river influences the groups of people who are resurrected on either side of it, and the various fish that can be found in the river. He notes things like the types of bamboos and trees on the planet, some like types of oaks native to the Earth, some that look like they’re from a different world altogether.

What’s more, an aspect of the entire series that I liked and found to be very intriguing, are the philosophical and religious ramifications that the characters (and us, as readers) are presented with, like what is Heaven and Hell to different people and cultures around the Earth, and how they act when they’re confronted with the reality of an afterlife entirely at odds with the convictions and beliefs they had while living on Earth. Is it really a sin to kill when dying is not permanant, and the person you kill will be resurrected once again the following day? Ditto, regarding suicide–would that no longer be considered to be a sin? If we get resurrected, in our old bodies with our old memories intact, and were given the chance to change our attitudes, prejudices, etc., would we change, or continue to act and think as we did on Earth? And, of course, there’s the question Burton and everyone else is forced to face, that if aliens with practically godlike powers are behind the scenes and planned the resurrections for millennia, why would they go to such lengths to do so? And, what will we owe, if anything, and to whom, for the new life and bodies that we are resurrected into?

The Fabulous Riverboat focuses more on the experiences that a resurrected Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) has on Riverworld. I thought Burton’s story would still be front-and-center the first time I picked up the sequel and read it, and was somewhat disappointed initially that he wasn’t, but Twain is one of my favorite authors, so I quickly got into the novel. At first blush, at least to me, I hadn’t given a thought that Clemens might–under the right set of circumstances–become a leader of men, like Sir Richard Burton, but he indeed does become one. He has the dream of constructing a huge riverboat, like the ones he’d piloted on the Earth, and of exploring the entire river and finding the woman who was his wife on Earth, Livy.

To do this, though, Clemens knows he will need to locate a great amount of iron, something that seems to be in short supply on Riverworld. With the aid of followers like the titanthrope Joe Miller and the Norseman, Erik Bloodaxe, he engages in a search for the iron he’ll need to fulfill his ultimate goal. He suspects that the iron used in Erik’s steel battle axe had to have come from a meteorite, so he has the Norsemen take him on their ship, the Dreyrugr, to where they found their source of iron.

Clemens and Burton (whose post-resurrection exploits he’s heard rumors about), have similar goals of exploration and discovering the secrets behind whatever and whomever caused the resurrection of the Earth’s teeming billions. It is not enough for people like them to be content with the chance to start over, to get a second chance at living their lives, and changing aspects of who they were to become better people–they are driven by a need for meaning, for answers, and in Twain’s case, by the desire to meet up with once again the former love of his life, even while knowing that she might have fallen in love with someone else by the time he finds her once again.

Clemens is wracked with feelings of guilt, at sins and wrongs he’s committed on Earth, and he feels that a glimpse he’s had at a person who may have been his Livy (she looks like her, dead again, but Bloodaxe has made many stops at banks along their voyage for other times when Twain has imagined he’s seen Livy) might be God laughing at him and his pathetic self, telling him he has to suffer and pay for his sins with “tears and agony.” He feels immense pain over the deaths of his wife and daughter, and “responsible for the death of his only son, the death caused by his negligence.” He reasons that his son’s death might have actually been the result of “carelessness that had made his son catch the disease that killed him,” that perhaps his “unconscious mind permitted the robe to slip from little Langdon, while taking him for a carriage ride that cold winter day,” but that doesn’t stop him from still aching with guilt. And, he realizes that being resurrected really hadn’t changed a thing:

It made no difference that all the dead were once more alive and the sick were healthy and the bad deeds were so remote in time and space that they should be forgiven and forgotten. What a man had been and had thought on Earth, he still was and thought here.

Joe Miller, Erik Bloodaxe, and a character who becomes Twain’s arch-nemesis and competitor to build a steamboat first, King John, are characters that I loved reading about and who still live with me to this day. Miller, with his gentle ways towards his friends, his lisping and pronouncing “w”‘s like “v”‘s, and his ferocity in battle situations; Erik Bloodaxe, who is a friendly but uneasy ally of Clemens’ (Twain only got the Norsemen to aid him by using their “greed for the metal, and also Miller’s story, to launch them on this expedition); and King John, known and reviled by history (and wanting to make a name for himself again by being a ruthless leader of men on Riverworld); and characters like Lothar von Richtofen (the Bloody Red Baron of Germany) made The Fabulous Riverboat incredibly fascinating for me and almost as good as (and possibly better in some ways than) To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

Again, the research that Philip Jose Farmer must have done on his characters’ real lives while on Earth must have been fairly in-depth, and it really helps make the entire series more plausible and realistic. For instance, there’s the many details he writes about Twain’s life, some of which I’ve brought up in passing in this review, and King John’s, and there are details about the historical lives and exploits of Lothar von Richtofen. Currently, on Riverworld, he is a glider pilot captain, but in World War I, he “had fought under his brother and had accounted for forty Allied plandes. In 1922, while flying an American film actress and her manager from Hamburg to Berlin, his plane had crashed and he had died.”

Enough time has gone by on Riverworld that territories have been demarcated, and rulers have arisen, such as King John, who have in some cases enslaved parts of their populations both as a labor force and for their daily grail rations. This really began in the first novel in the series, but continues to a greater degree in the second one. If you happen to die and are resurrected elsewhere, this means that you don’t have as many opportunities to start afresh again as you initially had, because someone might try to enslave you right away.

Just as in Twain’s time, in The Fabulous Riverboat, slavery and human rights are important issues. Twain’s uneasy alliance with King John and their dealings with trying to gain the cooperation of a man known as Sinjaro Hacking, who has created a a walled city he calls Soul City, is one of the most interesting parts of the novel. Hacking demands a lot for the bauxite that Sam and John require, though. As von Richtofen, who has been sent as an emissary to Hacking reports to Sam and John, Hacking has in his territory certain people who are not black that he doesn’t want there anymore:

“The Wahhabis want to convert Soul City to their brand of Moslems, and if they can’t do it peacefully, they’ll do it bloodily. Hacking wants to get rid of them and the Dravidians, who seem to regard themselves as superior to Africans of any color. Anyway, Hacking will continue to furnish us bauxite if we will send him all our black citizens in return for his Wahhabi and Dravidian citizens. Plus an increased amount of steel arms. Plus a larger share in raw siderite.”

In commenting about the significance of the first two novels of the Riverworld series, I hope that I’ve also given anyone who hasn’t yet read the novels enough of an idea about them that you will want to experience them for yourselves. I will be reviewing the other Riverworld books in the next few weeks (probably not back-to-back, though). They are some of the most inventive, original, and interesting works of literature written in the science fiction or any other genre, and I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity to have read them. If you have any comments about the first two books you’d like to make, please add them using the Comment form below.