Riverworld, book 1 and 2

"To Your Scattered Bodies Go" and The Fabulous Riverboat by Philip José Farmer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I checked this out from the library, and I'm glad I didn't purchase it. The edition I checked out was an omnibus of the first two books of the Riverworld series.

My feeling is these books are like, "Wouldn't it be really cool if..." all the interesting characters of history were all living and ran into each other. And, yes, it's cool to think about, but it's not something you can base a novel on. It's more like a dinner party idea. Though, I've never been to that kind of dinner party.

The reason the idea doesn't really work is that the characters are restricted. Or at least, the author's ability to be creative with the characters is restricted. So the first book, written with a relatively unknown(at least to most modern audiences) character has a somewhat more interesting characterization. The second, starring Samuel Clemens, seems more forced, less natural.

The world is a little interesting--an artificial world with one long river, food and clothing supplied daily, but very little in the way of natural resources besides wood--but also unvarying. In a way it's an advantage, since after a single description of the landscape, it's easy to visualize wherever the characters may travel. You never feel like you don't know the place. The only difference is in the cultures of the people inhabiting the area. This gives you a sense of humanity being the landscape.

One thing I found surprising was the female characters. They were essentially objects. Not necessarily sexual objects,(though they sometimes were) but things to be acted upon, not actors in themselves. Sometimes Fantasy and Science Fiction are harped on for their depictions of women, and this book made me understand why. There's a big gap between the way Brandon Sanderson writes women, and the way Farmer did.


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