Word: riverworld
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Back in 1971, Philip José Farmer abandoned the sci-fi world of space opera with a book that introduced this "Riverworld," titled To Your Scattered Bodies Go. In a tantalizing curtain raiser, Sir Richard Francis Burton, searcher for the source of the Nile, translator of The Arabian Nights, soldier, swordsman and linguist, dies in Trieste in 1890 (as did the historical Burton). Moments later-or is it millenniums?-he awakens, naked and bewildered, on the bank of the river. Burton's reaction is entirely in character. While other resurrectees stagger about in shock, the world's most...
...auspicious opening was a difficult act to follow, and many Farmerites wondered whether the Riverworld was wide enough to sustain a projected tetralogy. The author's next works allayed all fears. The Fabulous Riverboat gives Burton some delightful traveling companions. He and the grownup Alice Liddell Hargreaves (child model for Lewis Carroll's Alice) meet a cynical fellow named Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who constructs a side-wheel steamer to voyage upriver. The second volume also introduces Cyrano de Bergerac and England's King John, who attempted to steal the throne from his brother Richard in real life...
...cast of characters that includes Viking Warrior Erik Bloodaxe, Cowboy Star Tom Mix and a deck of World War I Flying Aces, its plot twisted to provide a climactic battle between Clemens and King John, and a final confrontation between Burton and the strange Ethicals who control the Riverworld, The Magic Labyrinth charts a territory somewhere between Gulliver's Travels and The Lord of the Rings. It also raises a few moral questions. Is Göring a villain or a political puritan who, "once having given his loyalty ... did not withdraw it"? As for the agnostic Clemens, Farmer...
...might have been. Like many another puzzlemaker, Philip José Farmer has trouble with his ultimate revelation. The idea of a highly advanced society using its unearthly powers to redirect humanity is neither especially new (2001 hints at a similar solution) nor appropriate. Ten-year followers of the Riverworld are likely to feel that they have crossed deserts, scaled mountains and battled hostile tribesmen for a potty message: Farmer's El Dorado looks suspiciously like Hoboken...
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