Riverworld

Every human who ever lived wakes up, all at once, young and healthy, on the banks of an endless river that winds across an entire planet. From that staggering premise Philip Jose Farmer built the Riverworld saga, and this volume collects its first two novels, the Hugo-winning To Your Scattered Bodies Go and The Fabulous Riverboat. I like this book a good deal and would happily read it again.

It rests on one of science fiction’s great high-concept ideas, executed with real imagination and historical flair. These opening books are the strongest of the series by a wide margin, and that matters, because the later volumes lose the thread badly.

Farmer’s concept stops you cold on scale alone. Not a city resurrected, or a world. The entire human species, every person who ever lived, set down together along one impossible river.

One of SF’s great premises

The premise is the saga’s triumph, and it is a magnificent one. The universal resurrection raises irresistible questions, who did this, and why, what does it mean for the billions now living a second life, and how do people from every era of human history interact when thrown together, and Farmer mines them with genuine imagination.

The first novel follows the real Victorian explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton, the man who searched for the source of the Nile, as he begins to probe the mystery of the Riverworld and its hidden makers, and the sheer conceptual audacity, history’s entire cast given a second life along an endless waterway, generates exactly the sense of wonder and possibility that makes high-concept SF thrilling. The idea alone is worth the price of admission.

History as a playground

The saga’s most distinctive pleasure is its use of real historical figures, pulled from every era and culture and set loose to interact. Farmer populates the Riverworld with real people from across human history. Burton. Mark Twain in the second novel. A vast supporting cast. The fascination is watching figures who never could have met thrown together, forced to build new lives and societies, is an original delight.

For a writer it demonstrates how a speculative premise becomes an engine. Character, history, and human nature explored at once, with a fantastic setup staging encounters and questions no realistic story could reach.

My gripes, and the hero problem

Here is what holds it back for me. It is a little slow in spots, the pacing sags here and there as the story wanders, and it can feel somewhat all over the place instead of tightly driven. My bigger reservation is the protagonist.

Burton is an interesting historical figure, but I am not sure he was the right choice to anchor this story; the book never quite settles around him the way it should, and a different central character might have given the saga a stronger spine. None of this stops me from liking the book, and the premise and the historical interplay carry it past the rough patches, but it keeps the first volumes short of the very top even for me.

Farmer’s prose, too, is serviceable instead of beautiful, the concept does the heavy lifting.

Where the saga goes wrong

The most important thing to know going in: these first two books are the good part, and the follow-up volumes lose the track. A premise this enormous is far easier to launch than to resolve, and as the series goes on Farmer increasingly defers and complicates its central mysteries in ways that wander and disappoint, so the later books rate much lower than these openers.

If you read and love the premise here, temper your expectations for where the saga goes, because it does not pay off the way these strong first novels promise. I would rate the opening volumes collected here an eight; the sequels, considerably less.

Is Riverworld worth reading?

It is a strong, imaginative pairing of the first two Riverworld novels, built on one of science fiction’s great high-concept premises and enlivened by the inspired device of resurrecting real historical figures to interact across the ages. I like it, I would read it again, and I rate these opening books an eight, held just short of higher by some slow stretches, a wandering quality, and a protagonist in Burton who never quite anchors the story.

The important caveat is the saga as a whole: the follow-up books lose the thread and rate well below these, so enjoy the strong beginning for what it is. A magnificent idea, very well begun, and worth reading for the premise even knowing the larger series wanders.

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