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.