By Philip Jose Farmer
Winner of the Hugo Award! blares the strip across the top of the cover. For a sci-fi/fantasy fan, that's a big deal. It's essentially the Pulitzer or National Book Award for this wing of "genre" lit. The category is very exclusive and includes some all-time great works: Dune, Starship Troopers, The Forever War, Neuromancer, A Fire Upon the Deep, American Gods, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
I have a bunch of them on my shelves, and it's how I chanced upon this novel.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go is the first book in the Riverworld (more later) series, published in 1971. This will sound awful, but I don't tend to look for "older" books* when there's so much great, creative, new work coming out with pleasing frequency. I do trust the genre award lists to act, at the very least, as a a guide to "good reading" or at least strong authors (not all of the award-winning books are the authors' best). When perusing the list, I happened upon this series and it made its way onto my "buy" list. And so five or six years ago, I picked up this book, and two of its sequels (on binges, I tend to buy authors in bulk. See Martha Grimes; I went from 0 -> 10 after one Friends of the Library sale).
The story is full of possibility: everyone who has ever lived wakes up, naked, within short distance of a massive river that appears to have no end. The nations, ethnicity, creeds, etc. are all mixed up. While their basic needs are seen to by mysterious "grailstones," they are left otherwise to their own devices. Our viewpoint character is famed British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton, who finds himself together with a disparate group of lost souls (the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice, all grown up, Hermann Goering, a neanderthal, a sci-fi author, an alien and a few sporadic others) trying to make sense of what's going on. Queue adventure.
I won't say much more about the plot, save that Burton - ever the explorer - will not remain sedentary and seeks to find the source of the great river, a task for which he is uniquely suited. In his quest, he finds all variety of human civilization and temperament as he sails every on up the mighty river valley.
While the plot did meander at points, and the origins of the piece as two distinct - but linked - novellas is apparent in structure, it's an enjoyable yarn and light meditation on society. As it is part of a series of stories, the end isn't as final as you might want. But that's the fun the Riverworld saga. In future volumes, we will meet different (real world, [in]famous) travelers on the River, find out more of the origins of this alien place and see the various character strands wound together to a purported satisfying conclusion
The major flaw I found in the writing of this volume was a vagueness - not of plot or character, but with his description. There were some confused passages where the action, the point A to inexplicable point J, was not clear. Perhaps a future re-reading will show that I wasn't as attentive a reader as the book deserved.
Farmer died in 2009, but before then he wrote four sequel novels and several short stories; he even opened the universe to other authors in two anthologies. I haven't read anything beyond the back copy of the other books, but this first volume is enough to keep me interested in the others on the shelf.
3.75/5
-Erik
*Of the Hugos for best Novel since 2000, we have nine on our shelves, and a quick glance at upcoming reading reveals recent works by Stephenson, Grossman, Scalzi, Mieville, Sanderson, Brockmeier, MM Smith, Stross, Abraham, Scholes, etc. Far more current than classic fiction.
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