I love the premise of Riverworld, and enjoyed the earlier books, but the last couple feel like either the authour, the reader or both have lost interest. It's just meandering along to an finish, any finish will do. The endless possibilities of the Tower are expressed in bursts of mindless creativity with almost no logic at all, and some of the most intriguing ideas are picked up and dropped after only cursory examination. Serious Riverworld fans only I'm afraid. ( )

Fifth and final book of Farmer's Riverworld series. This was tough one for me. The first Riverworld book is one of my favorite SF books of all time. I also enjoyed the next three books. About halfway through this book I decided Farmer should have stopped at number four. There were some parts I didn't like. I finished it anyway and I ended up enjoying it.

If there was ever a SF series that sparked my imagination it was this one. ( )

Hmmm. It is my first Riverworld book (I've heard about their plot for years), and Farmer supplies an Afterword that outlines the first four. So it's not hard to get into when you know what's going on.

I gave it 3 stars: the imagination to pull something like this off, the inner lives of each of the main characters, are all innovative and something that makes American Sci-Fi such a classic. But.

To read his description of the invitees of Turpin is just downright, blatant racism, even for a guy born in 1918 and writing in the 1980s. Maybe even all that one can expect from someone of that era. The resurrectees of Turpin are all his familiar faces from St. Louis, and they are all whores, drug dealers, and alcoholics. And all of them are black people who have secret desires to murder the whites.

And then there are the women in his world, all of whom he casually mentions as having been raped multiple times. Really? You had to bring that issue in as part of your novel's plan? You couldn't just, I don't know, not write about it as so casually happening on Riverworld itself? There is a single, brutal rape that happens that affects the course of the story and the members of the Tower, thus once again suggesting women's frailty at the hands of big, bad (black) men.

There is also a lot of navel gazing, at the beginning with What happened? Where can we go? Who did this?" that goes on for too many pages, along with college-aged ruminations on the human condition. Ugh. Enough, already.

If you're a fan of Farmer, definitely finish the Riverworld series with this last, fell swoop. If you're ready to taper off, don't bother with this one. Read another book instead. ( )

The end of the Riverworld cycle, and a solid windup, if not a great climax. Entertaining enough, but filled with the "tell don't show" fallacy. ( )

Having followed the decline of the first four books of the Riverworld series, I bought this for completeness but without any lively hope of enjoyment. I shouldn't have wasted the time and money: it's crap.