Rereading this series; I first read it when I was in middle school (and perhaps into my early high school years), and it's probably the only series that I can partly remember with my teenage brain, so that will no doubt affect my reviews this time through (at least for the Riverworld books I read back then).

This book stands up pretty well as a sci-fi book, mostly because a) it takes place elsewhere and b) Farmer talks very little about the 21st century. The stuff about how grails work and how the people were resurrected is shaky, but then it is being told from the eyes of a 19th-century person, so a lot of "modern" technology would seem odd anyway, and the resurrection part is so far from what we can do now that it doesn't really matter how it's described.

The one issue I have with the book is that, well ... it jumps around like Burton does. Some chapters represent a single day; others skip over several years. Sometimes we hear a lot about the people around Burton, and other times, we barely know where they're from. It's almost as if the book is more of a prequel than a standalone novel.

It does the job, though. There's a bit too much "everything is set up for reasons you do not know" for me, but then that's the point of the whole book, so Farmer can be excused for writing certain parts of the plot that way! I'll be interested to see how the next books compare to what I recall from the old days.