I've recently been interested in reading some of the past Hugo winners that I haven't read yet. I admit that I picked up To Your Scattered Bodies Go with high expectations. I had heard of Riverworld before, and, like I said, Hugo.

I'm pretty sure that even if my expectations hadn't started high, I'd have been disappointed. His concept - that people from all across time and every place on Earth wake up together in strange little valleys along a river, could have been interesting. Unfortunately, it wasn't, ultimately. Farmer's writing made me feel like he was mostly excited to be using historic characters as his main figures, and was not nearly so focused on what they were doing or why they were there.

It easily took well over half the book for the main character to have any focused goal. Even though the book starts with a mystery, progress is not really made towards it until close to the end. Then all at once, things seem to happen and it feels very abrupt.

I have a pretty big issue with the depths of his characters too. His main character, Richard Francis Burton, sounds like he could have been extremely interesting, but instead feels very flat. Even accepting that character's personality, the characters around him were, if anything, worse. I cared little about them and had little interest in what happened to them. Again, there were so many opportunities to explore something interesting here, and it just didn't happen.

The book ends by asking more questions than it started with, but I didn't feel tremendously excited to read a sequel. I would like to know the answers, but I don't feel like spending more time with the characters to get there.