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A review by vegantrav
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer
4.0
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?
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?