Resurrected on the lush, mysterious banks of Riverworld, along with the rest of humanity, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) has a dream: to build a riverboat that will rival the most magnificent paddle-wheelers ever navigated on the mighty Mississippi. Then, to steer it up the endless waterway that dominates his new home planet--and at last discover its hidden source.
But before he can carry out his plan, he first must undertake a dangerous voyage to unearth a fallen meteor. This mission would require striking an uneasy alliance with the bloodthirsty Viking Erik Bloodaxe, treacherous King John of England, legendary French swordsman Cyrano de Bergerac, Greek adventurer Odysseus, and the infamous Nazi Hermann Göring. All for the purpose of storming the ominous stone tower at the mouth of the river, where the all-powerful overseers of Riverworld--and their secrets--lie in wait . . .
This is like chapter two in Riverworld. It's in the same setting as To Your Scattered Bodies Go, but it follows a second set of characters and doesn't come to a conclusion. No it ends like it was chapter two.
The premise of riverworld is that some alien species has taken every human being who ever died on Earth and resurected them on the planet of riverworld. Each person woke up naked and with a bucket. The planet consists of one endless river, with the terrain being pretty much the same on both sides of the river. A valley about 10 miles wide, ending at unscalable mountain cliff, and the river in the middle. Along the river every mile is a grailstone. People put their buckets or grails, on the grailstone at regular intervals of the day (like breakfast, lunch and dinner), and the grails will then be filled with food, liquor, tobacco, dreamgum, a towel, etc.
Each little area is stocked with 60% of it's population from one time & place, 30% from another and 10% random. When a person is killed in riverworld they are resurrected the next day somewhere else on the river.
Since the world contains everyone who has ever lived, Farmer is having some fun by making many of his characters actual historical figures. The first book follows Sir Richard Francis Burton, in real life an English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, linguist, poet, hypnotist, fencer and diplomat. So he gets the people in his land to build a boat an he explores the river. Of course as he's traveling other lands are making technological improvements, and his boat eventually gets captured or sunk.
Riverboat picks up with Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) traveling on a boat with Bloodaxe and a bunch of eleveth century norsemen. With Sam is his riverworld friend Joe Miller. OK, somehow Farmer came up with the idea that in the very distant past there was a race of humans that was gorilla size or bigger. Joe is of that race, has a huge nose and talks with a lithp, er lisp.
Sam has an ambition of building a riverboat, but there is no or very little metal on this planet. As they are travelling a meterorite hits the planet just miles from where they are. The rest of the book is taken up with there struggles to build Sam's dream boat. The struggles being claiming the land where the meteorite hit, finding people to mine for the ore, then refine it. It isn't very long before the neighboring states are inhabited.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go wasn't that much better of a book, it won the Hugo, but it was. That book introduced riverworld and different cultures that develop all the river, such as grail slavery -- keeping someone just alive enought so that they can use that person's grail. It was original. The first couple of chapters when they first wake up on riverworld, that can't be replicated.
It is good enough that I had to go find book three, The Dark Design, off my shelf and start reading it.
