To Your Scattered Bodies Go in Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy

Jul 15, 2015 Fungus Gnat rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) experiences what appears to be his death—everything goes black, then he wakes up floating in mid-air with multitudes of others. He is put back to sleep, then wakes up among a multitude again, this time lying on a grassy plain that slopes down to a river. It isn’t long before the impatient, pragmatic Burton, a natural leader, draws people to himself—Alice “in Wonderland” Liddell (as an adult), Hermann Göring, a young American man, a space alien (from t Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) experiences what appears to be his death—everything goes black, then he wakes up floating in mid-air with multitudes of others. He is put back to sleep, then wakes up among a multitude again, this time lying on a grassy plain that slopes down to a river. It isn’t long before the impatient, pragmatic Burton, a natural leader, draws people to himself—Alice “in Wonderland” Liddell (as an adult), Hermann Göring, a young American man, a space alien (from the future relative to Farmer's time), a Neanderthal, and assorted women. Before long, Burton has his people creating shelter, providing for defense, and so forth.

So this is more than one kind of novel. It’s a survival story of sorts, Swiss Family Robinson in “heaven,” although there’s no real worry about survival; it’s a book about travel and exploration, although there’s nowhere to go. Mostly it’s a mystery—what are they doing there? How did they get there? Why are they there? But it also has a scientific bent of course. His data may be few but Burton is always trying to learn what he can from them.

That more or less lays out the parameters of the book. It’s kind of charming in some respects—like a representative of an even older form of SF—the pulps: An expedition to the heart of Africa (or the heart of the Earth!) has gone wrong, and now our hero must discover how to work himself out of his bonds. It also has a bit of ideology to share—reincarnation coupled with a mistrust of authority—two themes popular in the early ‘70s.

But too often it’s kind of tiresome. Burton seems annoyingly dyspeptic much of the time—an odd attitude for someone who’s pleasantly dead and whose options would seem to be limited anyway. Whatever the solution to his situation or his strategic choices, we don’t get to learn as much as we might like to in this book. This is the first of a series of six “Riverworld” books, so some ribbons are bound to be left hanging, but even granting that, this one ends unsatisfactorily—unless you are enough taken with it that you’re going to read the others. I’d rate more highly the same writer’s novella “Riders of the Purple Wage” in Dangerous Visions, which showed more imagination, even without having to rely on the afterlife to stimulate reader interest.

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