Gods of Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer

Okay, so that was the final Riverworld novel, book #5, unless you count the collections of short stories, which I don’t. They are dead to me.

In case you haven’t been keeping track, the Riverworld series describes the adventures of everyone who ever lived. Sort of.

It imagines that (almost) everyone who ever lived on Earth has been resurrected on a planet entirely composed of a winding, 10 million mile river. Everyone is young, healthy, and essentially immortal. All needs are provided for by this kiosk things that give food and clothing and, for some reason, cigarettes. Also some sort of mind altering drug in gum form. Nobody knows why.

The series is ostensibly telling the story of the people trying to figure out why they are there. More or less. Two of the books are primarily concerned with Samuel Clemens and King John building two gigantic riverboats and fighting each other on the way to find out why they are there. Yawn. I’ve commented in the book logs for those that my overall impression of that story was “Just let it go, Mr. Twain.”

By the fourth book, we’ve pretty much got a picture of what’s going on. In fact, Philip Jose Farmer had intended to stop the series there. But, like Douglas Adams, he decided he had a fifth one in him. Essentially, this book is a story of what the people decide to do with the knowledge of what is actually going on on Riverworld. Essentially, this is pretty much ado about nothing, aside from a not very interesting dissertation on human nature.

I kept reading because there were mysteries, and I thought maybe we’d learn something new about the world Farmer had built, but not so much. I think the series could have been kept to two books just fine.

A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong

It took a few starts to get me going into this book. It attempts to thimbalize the general progression of beliefs from pre-history until now, in a mere ~150 5×8 pages. With wide spacing.

I had to keep stepping back and taking a breath when she is claiming a general belief for people in the world over periods of thousands of years, when it’s hard to nail down what people in, say, Georgia believe this week, as a group. But it’s a necessary simplification for what she’s trying to do.

Perhaps I had more trouble than usual because I’m continuing to simulatenously read Guns, Germs and Steel and The Ancestor’s Tale during this same period, both humongous works with tons of detail covering the same time period or greater than Myth.

There are a few points she makes that I remain skeptical about.

One is that it is only recently that people have taken their myths to be literally true, a quirk of modern fundamentalism. She claims the bible was not written as a historical document, but rather as metaphor… Genesis, for instance, is not a literal description of the beginning of the world, but rather a story to give one context to live in, to help in developing our personal philosophies. Or something like that. I couldn’t find a quote that sums it up neatly.

My question is, how does she know? Though there are many footnotes, I didn’t see one attached to that assertion anywhere. Really, Genesis was not meant to be taken literally? Ever? Huh.

The second point that I take issue with is her assertion that we’re kind of flailing these days without our mythology. She makes the claim that novels can suffice, and some art.

This reminds me of an episode of Northern Exposure that I thought particularly brilliant. There is a shaman who is trying to break into the business of healing White People through his means, and he goes about collecting White People mythology. So he asks everyone for their stories that get handed down, and all he gets are these campfire stories about murderers with hooks for hands and the like.

So, he gets frustrated, but then he meets with Ed, shaman in training, in the movie house. He is watching some classic, I think Citizen Kane. He then realizes that movies are our modern mythology, our stories that give us the context, the philosophy.

But Karen Armstrong never mentions tv or film. Perhaps they are too recent in a historical context to include in a book with such huge time-scope.

Or maybe she’s just never seen Citizen Kane.