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Series recreates the world It's difficult to
say exactly what constitutes the essential Riverworld series. I started
reading it when only the first two books of a projected trilogy existed
— To Your Scattered Bodies In the first exhilarating novel, the explorer Richard Burton dies impaled on a spear and awakes on another world, along with everyone else who has ever lived on Earth. Humanity is strung along a seemingly endless river. Food is provided and anyone who dies on this world is immediately resurrected elsewhere along the river. Burton sets up the river to seek answers to the mysteries. Who created this world and brought everyone back to life? And why? It's a metaphysical search as a well as a practical one. Burton has many adventures along the way — meeting, allying and fighting with other characters, such as the Nazi Hermann Göring, the Neanderthal Kazz, and the real-life model for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Alice in Wonderland. In the second novel, focus switches to Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) who links up with King John and a race of Vikings in a similar quest. In a Connecticut Yankee-style plot, Clemens uses 19th-century technology to build a riverboat and weapons to fight his way along the river. Further mysteries of the Riverworld are uncovered, setting the stage for the final push for answers. It became apparent to Farmer he could not wrap everything up in a third installment of the planned trilogy. So The Dark Design brought the characters together in various combinations, along with new personalities, like Jack London, Tom Mix, Cyrano de Bergerac and others unknown to earthly history — in preparation for the final assault on the tower at river's end in a fourth book, The Magic Labyrinth. Here however I was a little disappointed. Perhaps expectations were raised too high by the series to this point, but the answer to the mystery is not quite satisfying and too mystical. It's still a good read but perhaps, as the saying goes, the journey is more important — more exciting, more mysterious — than the destination. Gods of Riverworld gets downright silly. This fifth book seems like an afterthought, as the earthlings, having taken over the tower stronghold and solved the mystery of Riverworld, now try to uncover a mysterious renegade in the tower and mix it up with a bunch of cartoony characters. It all seems somewhat arbitrary. But Riverworld literature doesn't stop there. Like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or Asimov's Foundation "trilogy", the Riverworld series attracted legions of fans who demanded more and more about this imaginary world. Riverworld and Other Stories (1979) collected stories taking place on the strange planet but not directly affecting the narrative of the novels. Riverworld War: The Suppressed Fiction of Philip José Farmer (1980) published a couple of Riverworld novellas that had been left out of previous volumes. River of Eternity (1983) is Farmer's recreation of his lost story from the 1950s, "I Owe for the Flesh", upon which the novels were based. More recently other authors have jumped in with anthologies of stories set in the same world: Tales of Riverworld (1992) and Quest to Riverworld (1993). And the Riverworld universe keeps getting more and more mixed up. My recommendation is to read the first novel, by all means, and keep going as far into the series as you find involving and intriguing. You may give up after the first two — and best — novels. You may make it to the end of the tetralogy (the first four). Or you may turn into one of those crazed Riverworld fans who just can't get enough. Whichever, I can understand. — Eric |
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© Copyright 2002-2004 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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