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3.61 AVERAGE
3.61 AVERAGE
Book that got me hooked on sci fi. On re-read it is progressive for when it was first written but weirdly sexist and hereto-normative now. Not necessarily bad things, but it’s interesting how when I first read this at the tender age of 15, it probably had some small part to play in shaping my world view. I remember trying to learn Esperanto and getting a book out of the library about Burton. I reckon the book, and the premise, still hold up and look forward to re-reading the entire series.
I feel quite bad rating this so low, so much of it went over my head because I hated history in school and kind of switched off for a lot of it and so much of this book is focused on famous historical characters that at the very least a good knowledge of History is needed to read this book. Ignoring the historical stuff doesn't leave much a book to be honest. I found the idea fascinating but so little is explained during this book that it just doesn't keep you hooked well it didn't me but again if you enjoy history and sci-fi you'll love this book its a classic for a reason and certainly deserves that status. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
This book was fantastic. I enjoyed every second of reading it and am excited to seek out the sequels. It will be given a permanent spot on my bookshelves.
I want to write an article about these old Sci-Fi Books you read, listed in the 100 Best Sci-Fi, amazing world building, fun puzzles and metaphores you can contemplate and relate to our existence, amazing acheivements in imagination and writing but just painful painful painful to read as you wince and twitch at the poor female representation the entire time. Authors imagining this entire plane of existance in mood, tone, content, science, metaphore and then thinking 'well my guys will have to have sex so I guess throw in some ladies'. Everyone in this book at some point is naked and bald. Every discriptions of a women starts with their figure and ends with value summarizing quips like 'they'd be 'quite beautiful if they had hair'. This book has every human being who ever existed and the only historical woman character represented is 'Alice Lidell'. At some point the main character is contemplating a list of all the heros that people keep pretending to be; every single one is a guy. Aint no-one trying to be Cleopatra. No Indira Gandhis, no Gloria Steinhams. What are the women, aka half the human population doing in this reality? Unless I'm trying to screw it who cares! Ouch ouch ouch super ouch. And you hear the petulant boys whine and complain about Ghostbuster and 3 Muskateers reimaginings as if vaginas are destroying all that is good and right in this world. Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh.
When I first began reading To Your Scattered Bodies Go, I didn't give it enough credit. It has an amazing premise, and as a narrative it contains both the conflict and the thematic depth required to create a compelling science fiction story. And, I mean, it won the Hugo award—that can't be bad! So why was I so incredulous in the beginning? I'm not sure. It might have been the opening, which didn't draw me in like a book should. And it was difficult to connect to Burton as a character at first, although eventually I came to respect his adventurous, rebellious nature.
What first won me over was Burton's relentless rational approach to analyzing Riverworld. The majority of resurrected humans at first regarded their new life as a religious event (although obviously it didn't correspond to whatever religion they endorsed). Burton and many of his companions apply the scientific method to their observations, from the use of their grails and the operation of the grailstones to the way in which resurrection works. This approach to Riverworld is one reason Burton survives for so long and becomes a thorn in the side of Riverworld's operators (whoever They may be).
To Your Scattered Bodies Go is actually the combination of two stories: a look at what would happen to humanity if everyone was collectively resurrected in a massive river valley, and the story of one man's struggle to discover and thwart those who caused this resurrection.
The first story allows Farmer to ask the big questions. Are humans deserving of a second chance? Can they actually change their ways? Aren't we all curious about what really happened in past societies? Who wouldn't want a chance to see what Caesar was like or talk to Shakespeare? To his credit, however, Farmer sprinkles his story with famous personages and leaves it at that. He could easily have set up an all-star cast for little reason, but by limiting who we meet, he keeps the story focused and makes those people all the more interesting. By far, the famous person who gets the most pagetime is Hermann Göring. He starts out as the opportunistic conqueror he died as, but gradually he becomes a guilt-ridden madman and then the local leader of a post-Resurrection religion. Göring is Farmer's case study and a fascinating one.
The second story, however, provides the meat of the conflict. Burton discovers that whoever resurrected humanity has agents among them, watching them. Depending on who he asks, these entities either have an altruistic agenda or a sinister one. Either way, Burton plans to get to the bottom of the mystery by finding the source of the River. It's a common story: nearly powerless protagonist pitted against beings of immense power with his only weapon his will to survive and triumph. But set in the enchanting Riverworld, Burton's quest is part legendary—he rightly compares it to The Odyssey—and part necessary: he needs to rebel and explore, because he isn't content to stay home and help in the founding of a new civilization.
I would have liked to see Farmer develop some of the other characters in more interesting ways. Alice Hargreaves shows up, but her role is only as love interest and (sometime) warrior. Her relationship with Burton is superficial and tenuous at best. Farmer creates a small cast of characters, but then he leaves them behind as Burton begins venturing across Riverworld via "The Suicide Express" and we don't see them again until the end. I'm not satisfied with that . . . I would be more interested in learning what happened to them during the time Burton was away.
This book pleasantly surprised me. It's somewhat slow at the beginning, but the mystery of who resurrected humanity and why quickly becomes engrossing. To Your Scattered Bodies Go is a good science fiction exemplar, something one can hold up and say, "See? This makes you think. And it's fun to read too!"
What first won me over was Burton's relentless rational approach to analyzing Riverworld. The majority of resurrected humans at first regarded their new life as a religious event (although obviously it didn't correspond to whatever religion they endorsed). Burton and many of his companions apply the scientific method to their observations, from the use of their grails and the operation of the grailstones to the way in which resurrection works. This approach to Riverworld is one reason Burton survives for so long and becomes a thorn in the side of Riverworld's operators (whoever They may be).
To Your Scattered Bodies Go is actually the combination of two stories: a look at what would happen to humanity if everyone was collectively resurrected in a massive river valley, and the story of one man's struggle to discover and thwart those who caused this resurrection.
The first story allows Farmer to ask the big questions. Are humans deserving of a second chance? Can they actually change their ways? Aren't we all curious about what really happened in past societies? Who wouldn't want a chance to see what Caesar was like or talk to Shakespeare? To his credit, however, Farmer sprinkles his story with famous personages and leaves it at that. He could easily have set up an all-star cast for little reason, but by limiting who we meet, he keeps the story focused and makes those people all the more interesting. By far, the famous person who gets the most pagetime is Hermann Göring. He starts out as the opportunistic conqueror he died as, but gradually he becomes a guilt-ridden madman and then the local leader of a post-Resurrection religion. Göring is Farmer's case study and a fascinating one.
The second story, however, provides the meat of the conflict. Burton discovers that whoever resurrected humanity has agents among them, watching them. Depending on who he asks, these entities either have an altruistic agenda or a sinister one. Either way, Burton plans to get to the bottom of the mystery by finding the source of the River. It's a common story: nearly powerless protagonist pitted against beings of immense power with his only weapon his will to survive and triumph. But set in the enchanting Riverworld, Burton's quest is part legendary—he rightly compares it to The Odyssey—and part necessary: he needs to rebel and explore, because he isn't content to stay home and help in the founding of a new civilization.
I would have liked to see Farmer develop some of the other characters in more interesting ways. Alice Hargreaves shows up, but her role is only as love interest and (sometime) warrior. Her relationship with Burton is superficial and tenuous at best. Farmer creates a small cast of characters, but then he leaves them behind as Burton begins venturing across Riverworld via "The Suicide Express" and we don't see them again until the end. I'm not satisfied with that . . . I would be more interested in learning what happened to them during the time Burton was away.
This book pleasantly surprised me. It's somewhat slow at the beginning, but the mystery of who resurrected humanity and why quickly becomes engrossing. To Your Scattered Bodies Go is a good science fiction exemplar, something one can hold up and say, "See? This makes you think. And it's fun to read too!"
Note, this book was read before I got a Goodreads account as part of a challenge to read 50 new books by the end of 2019. I wrote a review for it right after I read it and copy pasted it here.
I had almost forgotten we were reading this as our book of the semester for sci-fi club. Fortunately, it's pretty short and I managed to make it shorter so I was able to finish it really fast. Spoilers ahoy.
So the premise of this book is that all of humanity (including prehistoric members of the Homo genus and one alien who was a very bad ambassador to Earth) is resurrected on this river planet thing where if they die again they just come climbing back out at some random place along the river. The group who did this (the Ethicals) claim it's to grant these guys the opportunity to become their best selves. However, a renegade tells the POV character Richard Francis Burton (a real life asshole as well as an asshole in the book) that since he's special for unspecified reasons he gets to learn that they're actually doing it purely for shits and giggles. Burton wants to get to the end of the river where these guys are at. On the way he encounters lots of other assholes including some Nazis.
So, there's a lot in here that is just way too graphic for my tastes and I skipped a lot of paragraphs. I also skipped a lot of the more gross racist tangents. Because of this I probably enjoyed it the most out of the folks in sci-fi club who actually read it. And despite some of their objections that I didn't really read it since I skipped a whole bunch of it, I prefer to think that I merely curated my experience of it to best suit me. Probably the biggest problem with it is that while Burton was an actual asshole and the narrative reflects that, it's hard to tell what stuff is supposed to be Burton's opinions on stuff and which were the author's. The main plot about the Ethicals was pretty good, though, as was the main conceit of the book.
Kind of a lackluster book to finish the challenge on. Ah well, maybe I'll have some bonus books to add to it. I've got 2 weeks more.
I had almost forgotten we were reading this as our book of the semester for sci-fi club. Fortunately, it's pretty short and I managed to make it shorter so I was able to finish it really fast. Spoilers ahoy.
So the premise of this book is that all of humanity (including prehistoric members of the Homo genus and one alien who was a very bad ambassador to Earth) is resurrected on this river planet thing where if they die again they just come climbing back out at some random place along the river. The group who did this (the Ethicals) claim it's to grant these guys the opportunity to become their best selves. However, a renegade tells the POV character Richard Francis Burton (a real life asshole as well as an asshole in the book) that since he's special for unspecified reasons he gets to learn that they're actually doing it purely for shits and giggles. Burton wants to get to the end of the river where these guys are at. On the way he encounters lots of other assholes including some Nazis.
So, there's a lot in here that is just way too graphic for my tastes and I skipped a lot of paragraphs. I also skipped a lot of the more gross racist tangents. Because of this I probably enjoyed it the most out of the folks in sci-fi club who actually read it. And despite some of their objections that I didn't really read it since I skipped a whole bunch of it, I prefer to think that I merely curated my experience of it to best suit me. Probably the biggest problem with it is that while Burton was an actual asshole and the narrative reflects that, it's hard to tell what stuff is supposed to be Burton's opinions on stuff and which were the author's. The main plot about the Ethicals was pretty good, though, as was the main conceit of the book.
Kind of a lackluster book to finish the challenge on. Ah well, maybe I'll have some bonus books to add to it. I've got 2 weeks more.
Is there such a thing as life after death? It's a question that a lot of people have pondered for as long as humanity has had the capacity to do so. Though the question can be answered with a "yes" or a "no," for those who believe there is an afterlife, the kind of afterlife that one can expect depends entirely on one's own beliefs. Most people think that there is some kind of reward-and-punishment system in the afterlife: those who've been good are rewarded, and those who've been bad are punished. Some other faiths argue that this life is already hell, and if we do move on after death, it will be to someplace better; if we haven't learned the lessons we need to learn, we just come back to live through another lifetime on this plane. For yet others it's not so structured: they're certain that it's a happy ending, somehow, but they're not sure what it is, precisely - and they like it that way.
And, because humanity has been thinking about the afterlife for as long as it has, it's practically inevitable that there should be books written about it. Many are philosophical in nature, and a lot more are religious, but there are those fictional books that try to tell us what lies beyond this life and in the next one. The most notable of these is, of course, Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, wherein the persona takes the reader on a full tour of hell, purgatory and heaven. Lots of other writers from other genres have played with Alighieri's take on the afterlife, though others have gone to other cultures for their works: Kim Stanley Robinson, for instance, uses elements from Buddhism (specifically Tibetan Buddhism) for his portrayal of the afterlife in The Years of Rice and Salt.
But what if we're all wrong - and by all, I mean even those folks who don't believe there's life after death? What if there is, but it's nothing like any kind of afterlife we've ever imagined? What if that afterlife is something far, far more than simply the eternal bliss so many belief systems promise? And what if, in that afterlife, we are still as human - meaning, as flawed and weak and broken, albeit emotionally and mentally, not physically - as we were in life?
Philip Jose Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first book in the Riverworld series, is an attempt to put a new spin on a possible answer to an old question. In it, people from all points of history - many famous, but also a great many ordinary people - wake up on the banks of a river. Those who died of old age or past the age of twenty-five are restored to the bodies they had at twenty-five, and pretty much cease aging. Those who died before reaching twenty-five are given the bodies they had when they died, but age quickly until they are reach the body they would have had at twenty-five, at which point they stop aging.
Into this afterlife wakes Sir Richard Francis Burton: adventurer, poet, diplomat, and spy (amongst a great many other things), though most well-known for his translation of the Arabian Nights. He wakes up near a lot of other people who died during this time, though there are a small handful who did not, including Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the same Alice in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass), who died when Burton was in his twenties; Kazz, a Neanderthal; Peter Frigate, who died in an alien attack on Earth in 2008; and Monat, an alien who caused the attack that resulted in Frigate dying along with the rest of Earth's population at the time.
But what makes Burton different is that he awoke before everybody else, and got a very brief glimpse of the workings behind this new life into which everybody has been reborn. As a result, he's got some very important questions: who is behind all this, and why do it at all? This launches Burton on a quest to find answers, and along the way he attempts to figure out how to get alone with his new companions, and tries to survive in a world that's supposed to be heaven, but which turns out to be the farthest thing from anybody's idea of heaven.
The main reason I picked up this book (and the four others in the series) is because of the concept. Based on the blurb it was obvious that the whole scenario was some kind of massive social experiment conducted by an alien intelligence of some kind, but everything else wasn't quite clear. Why choose Burton as the protagonist? Who else was resurrected, and how would they react to this new world they live in? How do they survive? Does Burton find the answers he seeks? And how does he, who was quite the nonconformist during his own lifetime and proud of it besides, will deal with this new environment and the people around him? I wanted to see how Farmer planned to answer those questions, and see what kind of story he'd make out of them.
And I did get the answers to those questions - sort of. While the premise of the novel is incredible and fascinating enough to get a reader into the book, the execution of it all leaves something to be desired - or rather, a lot to be desired.
When I start reading a book, I go into it assuming that the writer knows where they're going to take the story. I also assume that they've got a handle on all the characters who speak more than two lines in the course of the novel, but most especially on the protagonist/s and any other supporting characters that might turn up. Of course, I don't mind if a story rambles, or if a few minor characters don't quite live up to their full potential, as long as the plot goes somewhere and the main characters are not too objectionable. Unfortunately, To Your Scattered Bodies Go does not live up to those expectations, and has some other issues, to boot.
I'll start with the characters. I was very intrigued by Farmer's choice of protagonist: Sir Richard Francis Burton was a character, even by the standards of his time, and had he been alive in the twenty-first century he'd still probably be as notorious as he was in the Victorian era during which he lived (except he'd probably have his own reality show and would be constantly hounded by paparazzi). While I know that it's impossible to accurately recreate the personality of any historical persona in fiction, I do expect said fictional representation to have the same depth and complexity that any other properly-written fictional character would have. This is especially true with supposedly-eccentric characters like Burton, whose larger-than-life, unconventional personalities make them too easy to write as caricatures of themselves.
The problem is that Farmer doesn't quite manage to do that. His characterization of Burton is, frankly speaking, rather boring, which annoys me because Burton was, as I mentioned, quite the character when he was alive, so it should take quite a bit of convoluted writing to make someone who was practically a real-life adventure hero into something absolutely dull. And yet, Farmer somehow manages to do just that. There is something that feels half-baked about Burton's characterization, like Farmer relied on shorthand popular knowledge and a short encyclopedia article about Burton's life and simply went from there. The whole thing reeks of sloppy writing to me.
And speaking of encyclopedia articles and shorthand popular knowledge, it feels like Farmer did the same thing when writing about the other cultures he mentions in the book. There is a deeply racist undercurrent in Farmer's writing, especially when he's writing about pre-colonial African, Native American, and Polynesian cultures. If he wanted to, Farmer could have gone out and done some proper research, instead of relying on stereotypes. As with his depiction of Burton, this speaks of sloppy writing.
Farmer's characterization of the women in his book is equally sloppy, and particularly horrific. His characterization of Alice Hargreaves, especially, took me to new levels of pissed-off: I don't think I've been that angry at the way a female character was written since Anastasia Steele in 50 Shades of Grey. And this isn't counting the other female characters who are not white, which was worse since Farmer layered on both misogyny and racism when writing about them. The only good thing was that they were largely minor characters, and so I didn't have to spend a lot of time reading about them.
Bu what really makes me grind my teeth about this whole thing is that Farmer has no excuse for being as racist and misogynistic as he is in his writing. Ursula K. Le Guin was doing non-racist, non-misogynistic writing at more or less the same time that Farmer wrote and published this novel, so there was already precedent for that sort of writing. If Farmer had chosen to do a bit more work, take a bit more care with his characterization, I think this would have been a remarkably tolerable novel. As it stands, though, it's almost painful to read, and the only reason I kept reading it was because I wanted to see how it ended.
As for the rest of the story, well, that's problematic too. While the concept that Farmer started out with is very interesting, the execution of it left something to be desired. It's already clear from the blurb alone that the whole thing is supposed to be some kind of grand experiment, so all I was reading the book for was Burton and the expectation of finding out who is behind the whole thing, and why they're doing it in the first place. Except getting to that point takes the whole initial three-fourths of the book, with most of the revelations being made in the last fourth - and those revelations are, in fact, inconclusive, because one needs to read the next novel in order to find out what happens next. Not only that, but the novel rambles in a way that isn't very fun at all - mostly because Burton is a great big bore as a narrator, for reasons I've already mentioned.
Overall, To Your Scattered Bodies Go seems like a very promising novel, given the concept, but the execution is absolutely terrible. Not only do racism and misogyny run rampant throughout the whole thing, but it's very clear that Farmer didn't really take the time to do the necessary research or appear to make any kind of effort to make any of his characters truly compelling, nor does he do the same for any of the cultures that appear throughout the novel. Even Burton, the main narrator for the novel (who tells the story from third-person limited perspective), is a dreadful bore to read about, which consequently affects the rest of the novel and makes it all a dreadful bore, too, until one gets to the last one-fourth of the book. By then, however, only the most stubborn reader would have made it past the gauntlet of every other problem this book has, only to get an unrewarding ending that urges the reader to go on to the next book - which will, most likely, only contain more of the same dreadful things the first book has.
This is a book best avoided, and if one is looking for a novel with a similar concept, David Edison's The Waking Engine, published just this month, looks to be a far more promising read than this one.
And, because humanity has been thinking about the afterlife for as long as it has, it's practically inevitable that there should be books written about it. Many are philosophical in nature, and a lot more are religious, but there are those fictional books that try to tell us what lies beyond this life and in the next one. The most notable of these is, of course, Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, wherein the persona takes the reader on a full tour of hell, purgatory and heaven. Lots of other writers from other genres have played with Alighieri's take on the afterlife, though others have gone to other cultures for their works: Kim Stanley Robinson, for instance, uses elements from Buddhism (specifically Tibetan Buddhism) for his portrayal of the afterlife in The Years of Rice and Salt.
But what if we're all wrong - and by all, I mean even those folks who don't believe there's life after death? What if there is, but it's nothing like any kind of afterlife we've ever imagined? What if that afterlife is something far, far more than simply the eternal bliss so many belief systems promise? And what if, in that afterlife, we are still as human - meaning, as flawed and weak and broken, albeit emotionally and mentally, not physically - as we were in life?
Philip Jose Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first book in the Riverworld series, is an attempt to put a new spin on a possible answer to an old question. In it, people from all points of history - many famous, but also a great many ordinary people - wake up on the banks of a river. Those who died of old age or past the age of twenty-five are restored to the bodies they had at twenty-five, and pretty much cease aging. Those who died before reaching twenty-five are given the bodies they had when they died, but age quickly until they are reach the body they would have had at twenty-five, at which point they stop aging.
Into this afterlife wakes Sir Richard Francis Burton: adventurer, poet, diplomat, and spy (amongst a great many other things), though most well-known for his translation of the Arabian Nights. He wakes up near a lot of other people who died during this time, though there are a small handful who did not, including Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the same Alice in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass), who died when Burton was in his twenties; Kazz, a Neanderthal; Peter Frigate, who died in an alien attack on Earth in 2008; and Monat, an alien who caused the attack that resulted in Frigate dying along with the rest of Earth's population at the time.
But what makes Burton different is that he awoke before everybody else, and got a very brief glimpse of the workings behind this new life into which everybody has been reborn. As a result, he's got some very important questions: who is behind all this, and why do it at all? This launches Burton on a quest to find answers, and along the way he attempts to figure out how to get alone with his new companions, and tries to survive in a world that's supposed to be heaven, but which turns out to be the farthest thing from anybody's idea of heaven.
The main reason I picked up this book (and the four others in the series) is because of the concept. Based on the blurb it was obvious that the whole scenario was some kind of massive social experiment conducted by an alien intelligence of some kind, but everything else wasn't quite clear. Why choose Burton as the protagonist? Who else was resurrected, and how would they react to this new world they live in? How do they survive? Does Burton find the answers he seeks? And how does he, who was quite the nonconformist during his own lifetime and proud of it besides, will deal with this new environment and the people around him? I wanted to see how Farmer planned to answer those questions, and see what kind of story he'd make out of them.
And I did get the answers to those questions - sort of. While the premise of the novel is incredible and fascinating enough to get a reader into the book, the execution of it all leaves something to be desired - or rather, a lot to be desired.
When I start reading a book, I go into it assuming that the writer knows where they're going to take the story. I also assume that they've got a handle on all the characters who speak more than two lines in the course of the novel, but most especially on the protagonist/s and any other supporting characters that might turn up. Of course, I don't mind if a story rambles, or if a few minor characters don't quite live up to their full potential, as long as the plot goes somewhere and the main characters are not too objectionable. Unfortunately, To Your Scattered Bodies Go does not live up to those expectations, and has some other issues, to boot.
I'll start with the characters. I was very intrigued by Farmer's choice of protagonist: Sir Richard Francis Burton was a character, even by the standards of his time, and had he been alive in the twenty-first century he'd still probably be as notorious as he was in the Victorian era during which he lived (except he'd probably have his own reality show and would be constantly hounded by paparazzi). While I know that it's impossible to accurately recreate the personality of any historical persona in fiction, I do expect said fictional representation to have the same depth and complexity that any other properly-written fictional character would have. This is especially true with supposedly-eccentric characters like Burton, whose larger-than-life, unconventional personalities make them too easy to write as caricatures of themselves.
The problem is that Farmer doesn't quite manage to do that. His characterization of Burton is, frankly speaking, rather boring, which annoys me because Burton was, as I mentioned, quite the character when he was alive, so it should take quite a bit of convoluted writing to make someone who was practically a real-life adventure hero into something absolutely dull. And yet, Farmer somehow manages to do just that. There is something that feels half-baked about Burton's characterization, like Farmer relied on shorthand popular knowledge and a short encyclopedia article about Burton's life and simply went from there. The whole thing reeks of sloppy writing to me.
And speaking of encyclopedia articles and shorthand popular knowledge, it feels like Farmer did the same thing when writing about the other cultures he mentions in the book. There is a deeply racist undercurrent in Farmer's writing, especially when he's writing about pre-colonial African, Native American, and Polynesian cultures. If he wanted to, Farmer could have gone out and done some proper research, instead of relying on stereotypes. As with his depiction of Burton, this speaks of sloppy writing.
Farmer's characterization of the women in his book is equally sloppy, and particularly horrific. His characterization of Alice Hargreaves, especially, took me to new levels of pissed-off: I don't think I've been that angry at the way a female character was written since Anastasia Steele in 50 Shades of Grey. And this isn't counting the other female characters who are not white, which was worse since Farmer layered on both misogyny and racism when writing about them. The only good thing was that they were largely minor characters, and so I didn't have to spend a lot of time reading about them.
Bu what really makes me grind my teeth about this whole thing is that Farmer has no excuse for being as racist and misogynistic as he is in his writing. Ursula K. Le Guin was doing non-racist, non-misogynistic writing at more or less the same time that Farmer wrote and published this novel, so there was already precedent for that sort of writing. If Farmer had chosen to do a bit more work, take a bit more care with his characterization, I think this would have been a remarkably tolerable novel. As it stands, though, it's almost painful to read, and the only reason I kept reading it was because I wanted to see how it ended.
As for the rest of the story, well, that's problematic too. While the concept that Farmer started out with is very interesting, the execution of it left something to be desired. It's already clear from the blurb alone that the whole thing is supposed to be some kind of grand experiment, so all I was reading the book for was Burton and the expectation of finding out who is behind the whole thing, and why they're doing it in the first place. Except getting to that point takes the whole initial three-fourths of the book, with most of the revelations being made in the last fourth - and those revelations are, in fact, inconclusive, because one needs to read the next novel in order to find out what happens next. Not only that, but the novel rambles in a way that isn't very fun at all - mostly because Burton is a great big bore as a narrator, for reasons I've already mentioned.
Overall, To Your Scattered Bodies Go seems like a very promising novel, given the concept, but the execution is absolutely terrible. Not only do racism and misogyny run rampant throughout the whole thing, but it's very clear that Farmer didn't really take the time to do the necessary research or appear to make any kind of effort to make any of his characters truly compelling, nor does he do the same for any of the cultures that appear throughout the novel. Even Burton, the main narrator for the novel (who tells the story from third-person limited perspective), is a dreadful bore to read about, which consequently affects the rest of the novel and makes it all a dreadful bore, too, until one gets to the last one-fourth of the book. By then, however, only the most stubborn reader would have made it past the gauntlet of every other problem this book has, only to get an unrewarding ending that urges the reader to go on to the next book - which will, most likely, only contain more of the same dreadful things the first book has.
This is a book best avoided, and if one is looking for a novel with a similar concept, David Edison's The Waking Engine, published just this month, looks to be a far more promising read than this one.
Every human who has ever lived is reincarnated along the banks of an endless river and find that each time they are killed, they are reincarnated elsewhere along the banks of the River. Richard Francis Burton (adventurer and translator of the Arabian Nights) is determined to find the source of the River and whose mysterious beings who have brought them here.
I loved this book. The first in the Riverworld series, it's a gripping adventure with a solid mystery at the heart of it, some likeable protagonists and a startling spiritual journey for Hermann Göring, who we first encounter as a tin-pot dictator who enslaves Burton and his companions.
Highly entertaining, I can't wait to get hold of the next volume.
I loved this book. The first in the Riverworld series, it's a gripping adventure with a solid mystery at the heart of it, some likeable protagonists and a startling spiritual journey for Hermann Göring, who we first encounter as a tin-pot dictator who enslaves Burton and his companions.
Highly entertaining, I can't wait to get hold of the next volume.