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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