One day, every human being who ever lived and died between approximately 100,000 B.C. and a mass slaughter of most of the human race in 2008 A.D. wakes on a strange new world.

Actually, it eventually turns out that some humans are missing. Anyone who was 25 or older when he died has been brought back in a body that looks about 25, and anyone who died at an age between 5 and 25 has been resurrected in a body identical to the previous one (except that all bodies provided on Riverworld start out in perfect physical condition, no chronic medical problems, scar tissue, obesity, etc.), but no one ever finds any babies or toddlers who died before their fifth birthdays and were then resurrected on Riverworld. Apparently special provisions have been made for them by whoever is responsible for this situation.

Those with some knowledge of how to perform astronomical observations and calculations with very little in the way of tools soon determine a few things, and subsequent explorations tell us more.

1. The Riverworld's night sky is very different from that of Earth. For one thing, it seems a lot more crowded with stars, as if they are closer to the center of the Milky Way (or some other galaxy). At any rate, it is commonly agreed that this is not the Planet Earth after a massive redecoration job.

2. The Riverworld is approximately the same size as Earth, assuming it's spherical instead of being an artificial construct with some other configuration (nobody has any way to go up into space and check).

3. The Riverworld must have been artificially modified to create its present appearance. A single river, usually at least a mile wide (sometimes more) bursts forth from under a high mountain range somewhere up in the Arctic regions (although this planet seems to have a warmer climate than Earth, so that you don't have Eskimos wearing thick furs up at the northern or southern "polar" regions) and then flows all over the globe, winding back and forth down what we might arbitrarily call the "Western" hemisphere, into the vicinity of the South Pole, and then turning around and flowing all the way back up across the Eastern hemisphere until it disappears under the ring of mountains that cuts off the north pole from the remainder of the world.

4. The River is estimated to be at least 10 million miles long, possibly a lot more (call it at least 16 million kilometers for those of you who are more comfortable with metrics). As near as anyone can tell, the entire surface of the planet (barring a bit at the very top) is nothing but a narrow Rivervalley. Typical configuation seems to be: a river 1 mile across, with flat grassland on either side, approximately 1 mile wide, followed by a strip of heavily forested hills about two and a half miles wide, which abruptly end at the base of a huge mountain range (frequently estimated by those with surveying experience as being about 20,000 feet high - call it 6 kilometers or worse). These mountains seem to be more of a solid wall than a mountain range in the traditional sense, where you would have had high peaks and lower areas serving as passes between individual mountains.

Arbitrarily assuming that each mountain-wall is one mile thick, you can see that we end up a typical cross-section of the river being as follows (roughly - with a fair amount of variation as you go along):

1 mile of mountain
2.5 miles of forested hills
1 mile of grassland
1 mile of river
1 mile of grassland
2.5 mile of forested hills
1 mile of mountain (you might call this the beginning of the next strip laid alongside the first one)

If you only count the mountains once per strip, you get a thickness of about 9 miles. Imagine taking a globe of the earth, abolishing the oceans, and wrapping up its entire surface with a thin ribbon meant to represent a strip nine miles wide, zigging and zagging back and forth to cover the entire surface in one unbroken line beginning and ending near the north pole. You'd use an awful lot of ribbon.

36 billion people woke up on the Riverworld without knowing how they got there (last thing they remember is dying, except for those who died in their sleep, I suppose). This does not quite match anyone's expectations for Heaven (or whatever his religion may have called the afterlife). Everyone has been shaved bald - all over their bodies (or else, alternately, these are newly created bodies that have never yet grown any hair). No clothes have been provided, although it is possible to use plant life to make a sort of "grass skirt." Husbands and wives and other close relatives are not necessarily in the same place, and with a river 10 million miles long, you have a looooong search ahead of you if you want to find your one true love. (I grant that some husbands and wives may be very happy to discover they no longer have to tolerate one another.) At first they are unclear on how food is to be provided, but it turns out provisions have been made for that. Also, a fair number of people recognize other people they knew back home and are prepared to swear "there's no way that crook would ever make it into heaven if my parish priest was right about the rules for getting in!"

There's also a general lack of technology. The ground is covered with a very tough grass that makes it hard to start digging a hole with stone tools, but it can be done. Not much point in it, though. Even if you do dig through the topsoil until you strike bedrock, very rarely (as in, practically never!) do you find any interesting veins of metal ore. Whoever built this place apparently didn't want to let any Industrial Revolutions get jump-started by having a plentiful supply of iron (and other useful metals) to use in building advanced technology from memory.

And then there's the language problem! Do you have any idea how many different languages human beings have spoken over the past 100,000 years? Whoever built the Riverworld and resurrected the dead did not take the trouble to program a "universal language" into everybody's brains, so if you ended up with a bunch of Ancient Egyptians, I hope you are thoroughly conversant with their native tongue or else a very quick study!

Although Farmer's statistics vary on this issue, it appears that the resurrections were arranged more-or-less in a certain pattern. A given area several miles long might have about 60 percent of its population be people who had all lived and died in the same general region during the same general timeframe (such as the city of Trieste in Italy in the last years of the 19th Century, which seems to have provided most of the population for the area in which our hero wakes up), with an additional 30 percent being drawn from a totally different culture, and the last ten percent being a motley assortment of anyone from anywhen. There is some evidence that people who died in the high-tech cultures of the late 20th Century or the first 8 years of the 21st have been scattered all over the map instead of being clustered together where they can instantly try to recreate their own United States from scratch (or any other modern nation), but aside from that, there seems to be a rough tendency that the further upriver you go, the further back into history and prehistory you are going. (I think.) At any rate, we found there were some extremely prehistoric people living way up at the head of the river where it first wells up from out of the arctic mountains and starts flowing its way around the planet

By the way, you may have wondered what happens if you die on the Riverworld? Very simple! The following morning you wake up at some other randomly selected spot on the bank of the river, having been resurrected anew! If you've got the nerve - or should I say the reckless stupidity? - to make suicide a habit, it's a fast and exciting way to travel to strange new places!

I've been discussing all this because the entire concept of the Riverworld is the real strength of this book, and the others as well (even though, in Books 3 and 4, Farmer suddenly switched directions and started retracting a lot of the statements he had made in the first two. But let's ignore that). However, I suppose you'll be a trifle upset if I try to post a book review without mentioning a single character name, so let's mention one: Sir Richard Francis Burton, legendary British explorer and linguist of the Victorian Age!

There, I mentioned the name of the major viewpoint character! Are you happy now? Can I wrap this review up and call it a day?

No? All right, I'll mention some other characters! (You slavedrivers!)

Alice Hargreaves, born Alice Liddell, was the little girl who inspired Lewis Carroll to write his classic stories, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. She grew up and lived to a ripe old age, but now she has been resurrected as a charming woman just 25 years of age.

Monat is the alien being who was one of a small group that crossed the interstellar void to make first contact with the human race in 2008. Due to a slight misunderstanding, most of his colleagues were killed by angry humans and he activated a weapon which he calculated would kill most of the human race, enough to prevent them from posing an immediate threat to his home planet. Then he died too.

Peter J. Frigate just happens to have the same initials as our author (Philip Jose Farmer), just happens to have been born in the Midwestern USA in the same year (1918), just happens to have eventually become a science fiction writer, just happens to have been a great fan of Burton's and knows practically everything that was ever written by him or about him (as did Farmer, evidently - and let us all note respectfully that Burton is credited with having invented the term ESP) . . . are you getting the idea?

Kazz is a Neanderthal from tens of thousands of years ago. Although it takes a while to teach him enough English for him to speak with Burton and his new friends, it was worth the effort. For one thing, he is phenomenally strong. For another thing, he feels right at home making his own hand tools and weapons from scratch, using available pieces of wood, flint, and so forth. He never had the chance in his first life to get lazy and dependent on modern technology which you can buy in the friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart without worrying about how it was manufactured!

John de Greystock was a Medieval English knight who fought in the Crusades. It is worth mentioning that Tarzan of the Apes was the Duke of Greystoke, and given that PJF once wrote a "biography" of Tarzan, I can't avoid the suspicion that this fellow was supposed to be his direct ancestor.

Naturally the first book raises oodles of questions without providing many answers. Burton and his newfound friends (including some I didn't name) decide to build a boat and start sailing upriver to see what there is to see. They get ambushed and enslaved over a year later, however, because by then there's been enough time for things to settle down and new local governments to start springing up. Sad to say, the government that gets a grip on them is one run by a two-man partnership, one of the men being a major Nazi from the good old days of World War II. Burton eventually does some more traveling, by various means (including frequent use of the suicide gambit) but is still left with a ton of unresolved questions when the curtain falls.

At the end of the book, Burton is interviewed by a council of twelve who allegedly run the project that created and maintains the Riverworld. Why they interviewed him at all is not terribly clear, given that they tell him he will not remember this conversation when he wakes up. Since they state they have already been using advanced technology to crawl through his memories while he was unconscious in their custody, what's to be gained by speaking to him before they drop him back along the River? (Not to my surprise, he woke up the next morning with full recollection of that little interview. You see, it appears that there is a renegade among the masters of the Riverworld who is opposed to their long-range plans, but took considerable trouble to make sure that in his only conversation with Burton in a previous scene, his face and voice were thoroughly masked by hi-tech means.) There was at least one blatant inconsistency in what they told him in this scene which made me think they were all part of a conspiracy to manipulate him into doing something while thinking he was outwitting them, but as near as I could tell from the fourth book of the series, the inconsistency I had spotted when I first read the book (I may have been 12 or 13?) was not a clever clue but rather a sheer blunder on Farmer's part.

Farmer has done some clever things in his day but his writing style has never really appealed to me. In this book, however, I found it less of a problem than in several of his others, partially because of the "sense of wonder" as we realize what a radical concept he is describing to us. I dithered over whether or not to give this book five stars, but finally decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I admit that the knowledge that this book won a Hugo had something to do with that, but I think the biggest factor is simply my recollection of how excited I was when I first read it. (Pity the end of the series didn't fulfill the promise of the first part of it.)

P.S. Before you get all excited about an entire series with billions of people running around naked, I might mention that basic clothing was provided some weeks after the big Resurrection Day - now that everyone had had time to get used to seeing each other's bodies and the nudity taboo had been greatly weakened.


Recommended: Yes