My interest in this novel (and in the entire Riverworld series) was peaked when I ran across an item that mentioned that the story is about another world (Riverworld) where humans are resurrected after death, and this is not a a story about heaven and hell but a sci-fi depiction of the afterlife.

I was not disappointed by the first book in the series and look forward to reading the rest; it's a great adventure story that also addresses a lot of interesting philosophical, religious, and scientific issues:

--what is the nature of identity? are the bodies that are resurrected in Riverworld just duplicates (what Derek Parfit would call replicas) of the people who died on earth, or are the resurrected bodies identical with those who died on earth? are a shared memory and psychological continuity (as Locke argued) between the dead earthlings and the resurrected Riverworld inhabitants enough to establish that the two are identical? towards the end of this first novel, we seem to get an answer: ****POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT**** each body has a psychomorph associated with it, and it would seem that the psychomorph is the source of identity; it's not clear exactly what a psychomorph is, but it seems to be in many respects similar to a soul or to an astral body.

--is eternity something that, if we really ponder the concept and its implications, we desire? would we not eventually find ourselves so bored with existence that we would want to die, to die really and truly: to cease to exist all together? in Riverworld, if one dies, one is simply resurrected again in Riverworld, so that a Riverworld "death" is not really death; is this not a frightening concept?

--if we died and found that our expectations (or lack thereof) about a possible afterlife were completely different than anything that we had previously expected, how would we react? would we maintain the religious beliefs (or religious skepticism) that we had on earth, or would we develop new religious beliefs?

--are the gods or God necessary for an afterlife to exist? or could some highly advanced civilization discover some mechanism to resurrect the dead? does the existence of an afterlife have any bearing on our belief or disbelief in deities?

--is existence really more akin to samsara than traditional Western notions about the goodness of existence? should our ultimate goal be not some type of heavenly existence but rather moksha or nirvana? whatever type of salvation we may seek, how do we attain it?

This Hugo-winning tale from 1971 pitches an intriguing scenario: all humanoids who have ever lived on the earth -- including neanderthals from the distant past and an alien who was visiting the planet in 2008 -- are resurrected in the far future, in copies of their healthy 25-year-old bodies (or their age at death, if younger). They find themselves naked and hairless beside an impossibly long river boxed in by mountains, and eventually discover that if they are killed, they will again wake up at some random point along the millions of miles of shore.

There are three main avenues for this premise to develop, which achieve varying levels of effectiveness in my opinion. The initial big driving question is the matter of why all this has happened, but it isn't answered satisfactorily in this first novel, or in the rest of the series to my recollection. This may be the precursor to later genre works like Battlestar Galactica and Lost, pitched on the basis of mysteries that the writers don't have planned and frustratingly never figure out how to adequately resolve. So many bizarre details are thrown at us here -- All the men are circumcised even if they weren't in life! The daily teleported rations always include lipstick and cigars! -- that a proper explanation becomes fairly important for understanding the full scope of the story. Yet unless I'm misremembering the sequels, no such accounting ever really arrives. It certainly doesn't in this debut.

The other two narrative threads fare a little better. One concerns the worldbuilding of the new civilization that gradually develops in this place, as cultures clash from throughout history and everyone struggles to find purpose in the strange corporeal afterlife. And the second is the personal level of individual character interactions, for now primarily concerning protagonist Richard Francis Burton and his quest to reach the headwaters where the all-powerful beings who devised this arrangement reputedly dwell. That nineteenth-century adventurer is among several real historical figures that author Philip José Farmer features in the plot, for no reason I can detect beyond his own amusement and perhaps a 'Great man' theory of social change. Thus our hero encounters people like Alice Liddell and Hermann Göring, not to mention a self-insert writer with the same initials as Farmer.

Overall it's a mixed bag, and the resolution to this particular title isn't terribly exciting. But the ideas are worth exploring, and on revisiting the text today, I can understand why parts of it have stayed lodged in my imagination for decades now. I hope I'm remembering correctly that the following volume with Mark Twain is stronger, though.

[Content warning for torture, slavery, suicide, sexism, racism including slurs, antisemitism, pedophilia, and rape.]

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I was a bit disappointed by the style of writing and the old-fashioned values Farmer presents, but there are some very memorable moments and the book as a whole has it's strength as a platform for philosophical discussion.

Another book series that had a huge influence on me in my youth as I read as much science fiction as I could get my hands on. I don't exactly remember what year I read it and the rating reflects how I felt at the time and the imact it had on my life rather than what I may or may not think if I read it now. I am curious and wonder if I would enjoy it a second time...

Best SF ever, just aching to be adapted to a multiseason TV Series.

This was one of the better concepts for a sci-fi book I've come across in a while. Everyone who has ever died in the history of the world resurrected at the same time on an alien world. What could go wrong?

You could tell from the beginning that the author planned to write several sequels to this, and was pretty much using this volume to set the stage, but that's OK, I'm already hooked.

What a strange read. Part historical fiction, part religious polemic. This weird novel has famous historical figures resurrecting next to a river after they’ve exhausted their lives on Earth, only to find that the afterlife has been erroneously foreseen by every major religion that mankind has created. Nazis, Romans, and others from a more distant future interact and repeat all the moronic tendencies from life as we know it. The creation of new religions for this new existence, war, jealousies, and social strife all resurface.