The Fabulous Riverboat (Riverworld Saga, Book 2) (original 1971; edition 1998)

Well this book was a bit of a disappointment to me. I loved book 1 but book 2 , I do not know, It seems to me it was more a war book. There were still scenes I thought interesting, like the relation ship between Sam and his earth wife and I liked The Big guy but hated the way he talked. It was hard for me to understand what he was saying, but overall I was just glad to end it.
I will give book 3 a try. I am reading it right now and glad to be back with Richard F. Burton to be honest. Maybe that was another reason, so many new people and I did not really like Sam as much. ( )

Why the change to Mark Twain? I liked the Burton story. ( )

The Fabulous Riverboat is a good follow up to To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first book in the Riverworld series. I shouldn't have read some reviews about this one while I was reading it because it did colour my feelings about the book a little. Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) isn't his witty best in this story. There's no one funnier than Twain in full flight. One of my favourite books by him is The Innocents Abroad and it is hilarious, the satire is scathing. Farmer's Twain is more humourless. Possibly the circumstances of his re-birth and life on Riverworld has made him more earnest and mopy. That said I still liked the book for the ideas expressed and the plot moves along at a nice clip. There's more than enough intrigue to continue. Richard Burton, the explorer and main protagonist in the first book - not the actor , returns in book 3 of the Riverworld series so I'm looking forward to that.

A quick edit to note that SF&F books prior to the 1980s are notable for being short compared to now. This probably a good thing. The Fabulous Riverboat is no exception. It only runs to about 230 pages. If it had been written now Farmer would be expected to punch out 4 or 500 pages. A couple of hundred pages is easily more digestible and less intimidating that 500 page door stopper. ( )

I had purchased the first two books of the Riverworld series together at a used book store several years back, but then found myself quite disappointed with To Your Scattered Bodies Go. So this had been languishing in my "to be read" stack for a long, long time when I decided to pick it up for a quick read before digging into heavier duty anticipated Chrismas gift reading materials.

I am happy to report that I liked it more than the first book of the series (doesn't it usually seem to work the other way?). Samuel Clemens is not particularly believable, but I found him more sympathetic as a protagonist than Richard Francis Burton. Indeed, while the characters here are often annoying, they are at least drawn in more realistic shades of gray than I remember from the first volume. And at least some of the billiions of women from the history of humanity seem to have some purpose higher than having carnal knowledge of the protagonist. The ending offers no sense of closure whatsoever.

By the end of this volume I can almost begrudingly admit that I have at least a moderate level of interest in finding out who created this world and why and which of them is out to thwart their grand plans and why. But the moderately interesting meta story seems to me the limit of what the series has to offer. ( )

Samuel Clemons takes over for Richard Burton as the dominant figure in this book. Since I knew the fiction of Mark Twain, Clemons wasn't exactly what I expected. At the time, I hadn't read any of his autobiographical works, but now that I have, I can see where Farmer got his impression of Clemons. Based on that knowledge, I can now see why Farmer sees Clemons as restless, inventive, and energetic. He sees Riverworld as a second chance, and he isn't going to waste it. Like Burton, he hungers to know, but unlike Burton, he isn't willing to sacrifice everything he's gained to find out. ( )