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mburnamfink 's review for:
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
by Philip José Farmer
To Your Scattered Bodies Go is a book with a fantastical premise brought down by, well, everything but the premise. Humanity, all 37 billion of us, plus some prehumans and alien visitors, is resurrected along an immense river alley, hemmed in by Himalayan mountains. Magitech grailstones provide three square meals a day, along with tobacco, whiskey, and marijuana, as ten thousand years of human history try to make sense of what's happening to them. Our viewpoint character is Richard Francis Burton, Victorian explorer, spy, and diplomat par excellence.
Unfortunately, that's where things go awry. I only know what on Burton's wikipedia page, but he seems like a fascinating character. Unfortunately, his internal voice is as middle-American as it can get. He's a hyper-compentent linguist, leader, and warrior, but there's no sense of the man who infiltrated Mecca in disguise when it was death for a westerner, or who wrote the first frank discussions of homosexuality in the Victorian period. The Robinson Crusoe survival story has little tension, since starvation is avoided through grailstones and death involves resurrection somewhere else along the valley. The maximum allowable technology tops out at the neolithic, with social structure also reaching the warrior-king phrase and stopping. There's little to be said about the recreation of culture in this new place.
Burton encounters Hermann Goring again and again, but the appearance of this villain is another missed opportunity to think about the nature of personality and evil. Is Hermann Goring evil because he's a senior Nazi, or did he become a Nazi because of his personality problems? What does it mean to get a second chance in this place.
There are hints of something bigger here, in the new church that arises among the resurrectees that seems to be the only novel cultural development, and Burton's encounters with the Mysterious Stranger, a representative of the powers that constructed the Riverworld as a moral test for humanity, but as with so much else, the novel backs away from the ambitious to leave us with Farmer doing little more than historical fanfiction, bashing together historical personages like action figures.
Unfortunately, that's where things go awry. I only know what on Burton's wikipedia page, but he seems like a fascinating character. Unfortunately, his internal voice is as middle-American as it can get. He's a hyper-compentent linguist, leader, and warrior, but there's no sense of the man who infiltrated Mecca in disguise when it was death for a westerner, or who wrote the first frank discussions of homosexuality in the Victorian period. The Robinson Crusoe survival story has little tension, since starvation is avoided through grailstones and death involves resurrection somewhere else along the valley. The maximum allowable technology tops out at the neolithic, with social structure also reaching the warrior-king phrase and stopping. There's little to be said about the recreation of culture in this new place.
Burton encounters Hermann Goring again and again, but the appearance of this villain is another missed opportunity to think about the nature of personality and evil. Is Hermann Goring evil because he's a senior Nazi, or did he become a Nazi because of his personality problems? What does it mean to get a second chance in this place.
There are hints of something bigger here, in the new church that arises among the resurrectees that seems to be the only novel cultural development, and Burton's encounters with the Mysterious Stranger, a representative of the powers that constructed the Riverworld as a moral test for humanity, but as with so much else, the novel backs away from the ambitious to leave us with Farmer doing little more than historical fanfiction, bashing together historical personages like action figures.