snpmurray's Full Review: Philip Jose Farmer - The Fabulous Riverboat: A Sci...
Alas, for bad sequels.
It is lamentable, is it not, when the first book in a series is truly excellent, that one is forced to drudge through any remainders, always hoping for a glimpse of the wonderment of the former creation, and yet never seeing anything but silage.
You’ve been there, right?
Permit me to spare you the misery of going there again. Do not read “The Fabulous Riverboat” by Philip Jose Farmer.
For those of you unfamiliar with the first book in the series, entitled “To your scattered bodies go”, which is truly innovative and outstanding (See my review of this book, I hope you read and enjoy it) I will give you a brief synopsis of the idea....which continues in Riverboat.
Every human being who ever lived, in any time period has been resurrected. They are all now 25 years old, regardless of their age at death. Their memory is intact. This screaming hoard of some thirty billion humans lives along the banks of an endless river. They are fed by machines, discharging three square meals a day, some ciggies and a psychoactive chewing gum. If they die, they are resurrected the next morning at anther random spot along the river, and there seems no limit to the number of reincarnations possible, essentially making every soul immortal. No one knows why this happened, who is responsible, or what they are meant to do now.
Plenty of room for plot maneuvering, wouldn't you say?
Indeed. And the first book does a grand job, where intrepid members of the human race pit themselves against the challenge of the river, the mystery of the reincarnators, and the need to reconstruct a primitive technology.
But this second book? Unfortunately the author seems to have forgotten why this scenario was a good idea. Jose-Farmer ignores the potentialities of the premise and sloughs off a dull political drama instead. Let me fill you in. Even after you read this synopsis, you’d think the book couldn't go wrong.
Mark Twain, who is good buddies with a huge primitive protohuman called Joe (obvious name for any protohuman, evidently) decides to get it together to build an enormous paddle steamer, in order to attempt to reach the head waters of the river. Aided by a nearby fall of iron lode-bearing meteors, and a perhaps-more-than-coincidental accumulation of minerals and engineers, he begins turning his local area of the river into a factory. With the skills of the engineers, and a group of diligent miners and other river-pilot wannabes, he manages to start executing a workable plan by which he can achieve all he wished for. In the many people who drop in on his territory, some helpful, some not, is one John Lackland, perhaps the most evil king of middle England (against some tough competition). John becomes co-regent in Mark Twains industrial territories. Together they battle against the river, the elements, the primitive jealous local chieftains, and each other, in order to try and build the fabulous riverboat.
Still sounds like a fairly interesting plot doesn't it?
A Ha! But don't be fooled! Jose-Farmer demonstrates a nearly supernatural ability to turn what most certainly could have been an excellent book into a pile of inane drivel.
So what exactly is wrong with this book?
Lets begin with the characters.
Now, you are on some thin ice supposing that you can recreate Samuel Clemens, in all his wit and intelligence, under any circumstances. Lets face it, you have to think you have all the wit and intelligence of, well, Sam Clemens! Well, it was a dismal failure. The Clemens character is no more resemblant of Sam Clemens than a cardboard cutout would be. In the writing, Clemens has no wit, no insight, and no personality traits commonly recognizable as recognizant of the original. An anonymous nobody would have been a better choice as the lead character under the circumstances, at least then one would not constantly appreciate the shortcomings of the author.
Add to the list of characters that shouldn't have been chosen for this exact reason, one Cyrano De Bergerac. Cyrano De Bergerac? Romantic poet-philosopher of eloquence and panache?
Big mistake. Another cardboard cutout. Another unachievable leap of literary style for this author to convince us of. Poor Jose-Farmer just doesn't have it in him. On every page, the dull, plain, one dimensional Cyrano forced me to think over and again “Impostor! You sir are not De Bergerac! Were you not so inestimably plastic, I would challenge you to a duel for your insolence!”
We don't stop there.....cue up one Lothar Von Richtofen, perhaps (with no comment on political inclination) one of the most charismatic and amazing humans of his time...reduced here to “the guy who can fly a glider”. Pitiful waste. And a plastic Mozart...reduced to “Oh you can be the band captain”
Worse still is the protohuman. The key feature of this character is twofold...he is giant, and very strong (see a paleolithic Worf) and, to your endless annoyance, he has a lisp.
A lisp?
Oooooohhhhh yes, and no ordinary lisp this, either. Insufficient, it is, for the author to inform us than the unfortunate creature has a rather debilitating speech pathology...instead, the entire text of this character (who is fairly verbose) is written entirely misspelled, evidently to remind readers with amnesia that it is hard to understand Joe.
Perhaps the most moronic demonstration of reader-interest-misjudgement I have been treated to since my last Samuel Delaney book.
Here is a typical passage of Joe-speak....
“I’m Ath brave ath the nektht guy......but thith vath the firtht time I ever thaw humanth”
I mean, really, who cares? Trust me, by page thirty, you want page thirty one to feature Joes vocal cords being sliced neatly out.
Now, thats just talking for the characters. Lets discuss the plot.
As I mentioned earlier, how can a plot so potentially excellent produce a bad book?
Focus, my friend, focus. Or, more specifically, mis-focus. Instead of concentrating on the interesting aspects, such as describing the many types of people, their many perspectives, reflections of the times from which they came etc etc this book instead homogenized everybody. Whether characters hail from the Mesozoic or the metropolitan, they are a huge bunch of self-serving one dimensional nobodies with as much historical perspective as a tub of margarine. The focus of this book is the political machinations of the tribes who live along the banks local to the riverboat construction area.
Endless pages are devoted to political meetings between tribes, who and how delegates are chosen to attend war meetings, and who is sneakily trying to steal whose woman behind whose back.
I couldn't believe it, I really couldn't. The first book is SO far removed from the second that you would swear blind they were written by different people (the second perhaps indeed being penned by Samuel Delaney, who has entirely more beard than talent).
One of the local tribes is something akin to the black panthers, trying to get their entire section of the river black. Okay, social commentary, no problem with that, but is that really the most interesting and congruent counterpoint Farmer could summon from the whole of human history? Wheres the scope gone?
I cant go on, I want to bury my head (and my copy of this book) in the sand and forget.
As I told my colleagues at work as I groaned and winced through this book to the end, “I'm only finishing this pile of puke so that I can slam it on Epinions”
Resurrected on the lush, mysterious banks of Riverworld, along with the rest of humanity, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) has a dream: to...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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