Riverworld
An afterlife where all of humanity is resurrected along a mysterious river.
The Riverworld series is a sequence of five science fiction novels by American author Philip José Farmer, set on an artificial planet where every human who ever lived is resurrected along a vast river. The series is notable for its exploration of interactions among historical figures from diverse eras and its quasi-religious themes concerning the motivations of the unknown intelligences behind the resurrection.
Quick Facts
- First
- "The Day of the Great Shout" (1965 novelette)
- Last
- "Coda" (1993 short story)
- Creator
- Philip José Farmer
- Genre
- Planetary romance
- Pocket universe
- Philosophical fiction
Facts from the source article.
Works
The Riverworld sequence originated with a 150,000-word novel titled Owe for the Flesh, written over six weeks in the fall of 1952 and submitted to the Shasta Science-Fiction Novel Prize Contest, which Farmer won. The complete manuscript, now believed lost, consisted of four books: Owe for the Flesh, "The Great Cry", "A State of Honesty", "The River of Eternity", and "The Paddle Wheeled Comet". Around 1981, after the success of the published novels, Farmer asked for any copies of the original manuscript. An 80,000-word document called "River of Eternity" was found in a garage and returned to Farmer; it was a version produced in the mid-1950s from the third book at the request of publisher Melvin Korshak, and Farmer had entirely forgotten about it. This document was published unaltered in 1983 by Phantasia Press as River of Eternity and is considered mostly of academic interest. Farmer rewrote the material into a second version in 1963–64 and a third in late 1964, now called Owe for a River, which Ballantine Books rejected as too much an adventure story without sufficient philosophical implications. Frederik Pohl suggested breaking the novel into several novelettes for serial publication, leading to the fourth version: five novelettes published between 1965 and 1971. Four of these were expanded and combined into the first two novels published by Putnam Publishing Group in 1971. The final version comprises four mainstream novels (1971–80) and the sidestream book Gods of Riverworld (1983).
Story
On the Riverworld, every human who ever lived and died, from the earliest Neanderthals up to 1983, is resurrected on the banks of a seemingly endless river on an unknown planet. The river stretches almost 18 million twisting miles, and some 36.6 billion humans are miraculously provided with food but given no clue to the meaning of this afterlife. Some individuals set sail to quest for the purpose of their resurrection and to confront their mysterious benefactors. Among the denizens are Sir Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain, Odysseus, Cyrano de Bergerac, Hermann Göring, Tom Mix, and an alter ego of the author. The Riverworld was engineered by an alien race starting in the late twenty-second century, consisting of a single long river-valley snaking across the entire surface. The river's source is a small North Polar sea; it zig-zags across one hemisphere, flows into another, and returns to the same sea. Its average depth is 1.5 miles, width ranges from 6.8 to 24.8 miles, and the valley averages 9 miles in width, with narrows and occasional widenings into lakes with islands. There are no seasons, and daily variations are metronomic. Animal life consists only of fish and soil worms; vegetation is lush and varied.
Elaborations and adaptations
A licensed guidebook for the GURPS role-playing game, GURPS Riverworld, was released in 1989 by Steve Jackson Games, summarizing chronology, characters, geography, and technical details. Several authors have been licensed to use the Riverworld setting for their own stories. A PC computer game version was released in October 1998 by Cryo Interactive. A television series for the Sci-Fi channel went into production in 2001, but only the feature-length pilot Riverworld was completed, first aired in 2003; it replaced the book's hero Sir Richard Francis Burton with an American astronaut and John, King of England with Nero as the villain. In 2010, a three-hour TV film titled Riverworld was produced by Syfy, written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe, with protagonist Matt Ellman, an American war reporter, and Richard Francis Burton as the main villain. Some fan stories set in the Riverworld universe have been published through the official Philip José Farmer website.
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