One of the most original science fiction novels I've read. It starts with a seemingly ridiculous question: What if every (or nearly every) person who ever lived were suddenly placed on a massive planet? And more importantly, why would anyone do this? Farmer answers with an unexpected and brilliant story. ( )

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I am always a bit nervous about returning to books I enjoyed when I was much younger. Will the magic survive? I had fond memories of Farmer's four-part Riverboat series, despite the very unsatisfactory ending, and the peculiarly anal accuracy of some descriptions ('the mountains were seven miles or 11265 metres high', if I remember correctly from one of the later books). There is a brilliant central sensawunda concept: all of humanity who ever lived (up to the year 2008, and who survived past the age of seven) are resurrected on the shores of a world-twisting river, apparently as some gigantic social anthropology experiment. Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) attempts to find out What Is Really Going On, aided in later volumes by Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain.

Coming back to the first book 25 years after I first read it, I am sorry to say that I found it pretty dire. Farmer is too dazzled by the audacious brilliance of his concept to actually write interesting characters or settings - one early warning is when he writes himself into the book, as Peter Joseph Frigate, to tell us just how interesting Burton is. There are numerous blunders of racial or gender sensitivity, of which the most boringly repetitive is a bizarre fixation with Hermann Göring. Extraordinarily, everyone in the world gets bacon and eggs for breakfast, steak for dinner, and marijuana to smoke in between. And yet nothing is actually resolved in plot terms in the book. I'm afraid that this goes right to the bottom of the Hugo winners on my list, keeping company with They'd Rather Be Right, Hominids, The Gods Themselves and Neuromancer.

(One problem I had with the book which I suspect is not Farmer's fault - my memory of the original version of the erotic encounter between Burton and Alice Liddell in Chapter 8 was that they explicitly have drug-fuelled sex, but the relevant paragraphs seem to have been cut from my recently acquired 1998 Ballantine edition; is my memory of the 1971 original incorrect? Or is it a peculiar act of censorship by Ballantine/Del Rey?)

Other Hugo nominees that year were The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin, Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey, Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny, and that year's Nebula winner, A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg. I don't think I have read the McCaffrey; the other three are all manifestly better novels than To Your Scattered Bodies Go, but I guess lacked the sensawunda that Hugo voters like. ( )

For me, the appeal of Speculative Fiction is the breadth and depth of its scope. An author is free to explore the most difficult questions and imagine worlds vastly different from anything we have ever experienced. I often find myself questioning what it means to be human, what it means to be capable of thought and self-knowledge. Though all literature tries to tackle this issue, few outside of Sci Fi go to such lengths to address these fundamentally human questions.

However, there is a drawback. Often, authors succumb to the temptation to create a world so new, so different, so complex, and so vast that it becomes almost impossible to write it. Farmer has selected too vast a canvas, too great a scene, and so the small (if engaging) story he paints upon it seems a far cry from the overarching premise.

Farmer creates an artificial afterlife, one containing every human being ever born. By using the old Sci Fi trick of 'science did it', he avoids the knee-jerk response many people would have to a book about an actual afterlife. Since everyone was just recreated by aliens, Farmer is not automatically a blasphemer.

Everyone is there; even, as the book jacket likes to point out, 'you!'. Farmer has the grandest possible cast of characters, and does not waste it. His protagonists, their friends, and their enemies are plucked from the greatest and most notorious men in history, as well as Farmer himself. However, we are struck with an immediate difficulty: namely, that Farmer is trying to write some of the most remarkable people in history.

Unfortunately for Farmer, many of his characters' real-life counterparts were brilliant, eccentric men. Since they are more brilliant and eccentric than Farmer himself, we come to feel that he is simply writing fairly standard protagonists and attaching famous names to them.

For example, he chooses one of the most remarkable men of a remarkable period, Sir Richard Burton. In a time of colonial adventurers, he was one of the greatest and most notorious. He was one of the greatest swordfighters of his day and braved and escaped death numerous times over his remarkably long career.

He was also a polyglot who knew some thirty languages, making him an extremely convenient hero for a book taking place on a world where every culture was rubbing elbows with every other. He also nearly discovered the source of the Nile, giving him a thematic connection to this 'Riverworld'.

In short he was a real-life hero, straight out of an adventure story. However, he was also a refined and educated man who made a full and unabridged translation of the 1,001 Arabian Nights. Though Farmer's version of Burton is as capable and impressive as we might expect, he does not have Burton's singular and remarkable personality.

Perhaps it was wise of Farmer to pick a man so clearly suited to play the role of the adventure hero. Many authors have tried to create adventure heroes out of small and inexperienced men. However, in this case, Farmer has thrown his net too far, and caught too large a fish for his dinner.

Farmer experiences a similar problem with all of the myriad cultures he writes. Since he is not a historical expert on any of these cultures, their portrayal tends to be rather unremarkable, such that as we travel along the river, we find Victorian Gentlemen, Dakota Indians, and Chinese Marauders are more or less interchangeable.

Beyond this, their interaction with one another becomes likewise simplified. It would be a remarkable feat for any author to be able to write such interactions as might occur between Sumerians and Olmecs, but this hardly excuses Farmer. After all, he was the one who chose to write this book.

Farmer took his inspiration from Edgar Rice Burroughs, who also had a mysterious and mystical river in his John Carter of Mars series. However, Farmer might have taken another lesson from Burroughs. When Burroughs wrote of strange Martian cultures, he could create as he liked without any need for research or knowledge. However, we can see by the wild inaccuracies of his 'Tarzan' that he probably should have stuck with aliens.

Likewise, if Farmer's book had been about his own made up cultures, there would be little to fault him. However, since he chose such a difficult path himself, I feel no guilt in stating that he was unequal to the challenge. The book is exciting, adventurous, and the writing is not without grace, but it is certainly not what it would promise to be.

The next book in the series is worse, with a hackneyed, unfunny Mark Twain taking center stage. ( )

This is a very good book that I put off reading for a long time because my copy has a terrible kitschy "genre" cover. If yours does too, please disregard it; this is such a better book than that.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go is speculative fiction about the resurrection and afterlife. Our protagonist is the 19th century explorer (/writer/linguist/extremely educated and curious generally) Richard Francis Burton; he is joined by other historical figures like Hermann Göring and Alice Pleasance Liddell.

Earth has evidently been destroyed by an inter-galactic war, and at least a portion of its population, spanning from every time and culture, has been resurrected in Riverworld. Of course, everyone brings his or her pre-conceived notions of the afterlife to this world and an explanation of it. But Burton the explorer needs to *know* for certain what Riverworld is, who is running it, and whether this creator/force is benevolent or malignant.

It's a unique book, and an interesting commentary on science-religion interaction. The book was written with the entire series already in mind, so it does not wrap up as satisfyingly as a stand-alone novel. But still a good and engrossing read. ( )

This is the first book of the famous Riverworld series. It starts with what was a unique premise at the time - a famous adventurer from Earth's past wakes up in a room full of thousands or millions of dead bodies, connected to a large machine of some type (The Matrix, anyone?). Waking up later, he and countless others find themselves reincarnated on Riverworld, by no one knows who, or why. Only a few souls realize they are reincarnated and prisoners of some alien intelligence, and seek to find out why.
This is a creative, well written and fascinating book. A science fiction classic that is well worth reading. ( )