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A review by kaylecorey
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer
5.0
This isn't a perfect book, but it still deserves 5 stars. It's easy to overlook it for being, first and foremost, dated. This is a 1972 Hugo Award Winner that is no longer in print. It beat out The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin AND Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey. The cover art feels very 1970's SciFi. And yet within it's pages, there is something that has become scarce in modern Sc-iFi/Fantasy... it is original.
The premise revolves around explorer Richard Francis Burton, who wakes up at age 25 (after dying at age 69), nude, hairless, and surrounded by bodies. He sees the moment of resurrection, and wakes at the edge of a river. Every person who has ever lived on earth has been returned, and no one is receiving the afterlife they expected. The world they live in is governed by strange rules, and settled along millions of miles of a river, where occupants of every era congregate and create new societies. Meanwhile, Burton searches for the truth of their sudden return to a strange life.
There are things I can nitpick about it. The passage of time in the book is difficult to follow and stilted. Often, the plot can be confusing. But it does something incredibly well that many modern books cannot, and that was to find a way to pose complex philosophical and ethical quandaries without becoming preachy, judgmental, or biased. I am excited to continue the series and see where it goes, and likely the hardest part will be finding the books.
The premise revolves around explorer Richard Francis Burton, who wakes up at age 25 (after dying at age 69), nude, hairless, and surrounded by bodies. He sees the moment of resurrection, and wakes at the edge of a river. Every person who has ever lived on earth has been returned, and no one is receiving the afterlife they expected. The world they live in is governed by strange rules, and settled along millions of miles of a river, where occupants of every era congregate and create new societies. Meanwhile, Burton searches for the truth of their sudden return to a strange life.
There are things I can nitpick about it. The passage of time in the book is difficult to follow and stilted. Often, the plot can be confusing. But it does something incredibly well that many modern books cannot, and that was to find a way to pose complex philosophical and ethical quandaries without becoming preachy, judgmental, or biased. I am excited to continue the series and see where it goes, and likely the hardest part will be finding the books.