All those who ever lived on Earth have found themselves resurrected--healthy, young, and naked as newborns--on the grassy banks of a mighty river, in a world unknown. Miraculously provided with food, but with no clues to the meaning of their strange new afterlife, billions of people from every period of Earth's history--and prehistory--must start again.
Sir Francis Bacon would be the first to glimpse the incredible way-station, a link between worlds. This forbidden sight would spur the renowned 19th-century explorer to uncover the truth. Along with a remarkable group of compatriots, including Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the Victorian girl who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), an English-speaking Neanderthal, a WWII Holocaust survivor, and a wise extraterrestrial, Burton sets sail on the magnificent river. His mission: to confront humankind's mysterious benefactors, and learn the true purpose--innocent or evil--of the Riverworld . . .
The Fabulous Riverboat (1971) 256 pages by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
