Name recognition?
I can kinda see the need to change the Richard Burton character but did they have to change him into Mitch Buchannon?
And I was also thinking “she’s supposed to be African??? No fucking way.”
I hate to bring it up, but about the african woman…well, isn’t her hair a little…long and straight? Especially if she’s just been ressurected in a low-technology world?
I stumbled across Riverworld on SciFi late Saturday night after the basketball games were over. The hour I saw was obviously the first hour. Have they already broadcast more?
In spite of the fact that I’ve read a lot of science fiction in my lifetime, this series of books never came across my radar screen. To save me some time on the Amazon site, could someone please post the correct order of the books?
I enjoyed the show, but since I didn’t have the original book to compare it to I had nothing to nitpick or complain about. I’ve seem worse production values on big money network television so I have no complaints there.
And I enjoyed the actor who played Nero. I thought the casting department did a nice job there because he had an appropriately evil grin (though I’d echo what Baldwin said about Nero being an expert fighter. Huh?).
I thought Riverworld was an absolutely fine adaptation and a great movie to watch. It probably helps that it’s been a long time since I read the books, so the nitpicky details didn’t bother me.
I thought the opening scene with all the naked people scrambling out of the surf of the giant river with the alien cliffs in the background, dazed and confused and half out of their minds, was incredible, was absolutely great science fiction imagery. I also thought the grail was nicely handled.
I also thought the male lead handled his role well, bringing a little gravitas to the character who could easily have been a mindless Bob Boxbody type. I wish to hell they’d stuck to Sir Richard Burton as the lead, though. I suspect they were afraid no one would know who he was.
There was a little too much “primitive idiots running around hacking at each other with swords and knives and fists” stuff going around, but basically it was FAR better than I expected. It looked like the pilot for a TV series – I’d like to see one materialize, but I dunno if it’s a failed pilot or a pilot for somethign that’s actually going on the air.
Here you go Algernon. More complete then you’d ever want.
Or
“To You Scattered Bodies go”
“The Fabulous Riverboat”
“The Dark Design”
“The Magic Labyrinth”
“Gods of Riverworld”
Here you go Algernon. More complete then you’d ever want.
Or
“To You Scattered Bodies go”
“The Fabulous Riverboat”
“The Dark Design”
“The Magic Labyrinth”
“Gods of Riverworld”
I think there have also been a couple of collections of short stories by various writers, set in Riverworld.
Posted by Astro:
**Never read the book and could only catch the last half of the show on TV … so who was the alien looking guy in the engine room of the riverboat?
I take it the book is a good read?**
As I recall, the book is a great read, full of big ideas, odd juxtapositions and action. Of course, having everybody in human history available as characters doesn’t hurt.
The alien guy, Monat, was one of a group of Aliens who made contact with Earth, attempting to warn us of an approaching asteroid. Unfortunately he got killed on Earth, and woke up on Riverworld, apparently separated forever from others of his species, and stuck with a bunch of humans.
Another nitpick: what’s with all the “cold fusion” nonsense? Ever since that debacle back in 1989, “cold fusion” has been a chestnut in the world of sci-fi. (In this context I use the term “sci-fi” to mean stuff that looks like science fiction, but is written by people of superficial scientific knowledge.)
Thank you Osiris for the link and the list. I appreciate it.
While I already have a rather large pile of books to take with me to read on the beach over Easter vacation, I’ve decided to add at least “To Your Scattered Bodies Go” to my pile.
The short story collections were called, I think, “Quest To Riverworld” and “Tales Of Riverworld”, but I’m not sure in which order they came out. In each, Philip Jose Farmer (author of the original Riverworld books) wrote the first story, and other writers wrote the rest. I own them, but I’ve never read them, so I can’t tell you if they’re any good.
What I can say is that the original series never included Gods Of Riverworld. It was supposed to be just the four books (actually three, but the last was too long and was divided into The Dark Design and The Magic Labyrinth). The story ended with The Magic Labyrinth.
Then along came Gods Of Riverworld, which reads like a bad spinoff of a good TV show. Most of the old characters are there, but the story is so obviously a disconnected afterthought that it’s just irritating to read.
That said, the first four books are amazing. To Your Scattered Bodies Go is probably the most universally liked of the four, but my personal favorite was The Dark Design, where the stories from the first two books finally make a solid intersection and everything starts to really go to hell.
You should know: the most recent in-print edition of the series is ridiculously overpriced. I suggest trying to find them at a used book store - these books have been published several times over, so they won’t be hard to find.
Also, there’s an original short story that this is all based on - “I Owe For The Flesh” - that actually is fairly hard to find. I think it was published in a collection called “Riverworld and Other Stories”, but I’ve only ever seen that book once in my life. Since it’s basically a primitive version of the idea, it’s not really an essential or even connected part of the seires, but it could be fun to add to your scavenger hunt list.
As one might expect the collections vary widely in quality. I was really looking forward to the one with John Lennon, but it just felt weird reading it. Very disappointing. I’d say you’re almost better off writing your own fanfics. Certainly here’s an idea with more fodder then pretty much any other.
Spoil the book for me: I undersatnd Riverworld is a kind of afterlife. Can one die on Riverworld? if so, what happens? If not, what happens when you chop someone up into 1 inch cubes, encase each in a glass jar, and disburse the jars throuout the world?
Brian
I got it with a box of books from Ebay. I dislike Farmer, so it was going to Goodwill. I read it after the program. Tom Mix is the protagonist, has Jesus as his sidekick. Maybe Farmer is cooler than I thought. 
When is the mini series scheduled to air again?
What happens when you die on Riverworld, the short version:
Your Riverworld body is the body you had in life, rebuilt. You’re alive again, and you can be injured, starved and killed much like you could on Earth. When you die on Riverworld, you come back to life the next morning, resurrected at a random spot along The River. It doesn’t matter what happened to your old body; you’re given a new one each time you’re resurrected.
What happens when you die on Riverworld, the long version . . . I’m revealing some major plot points here, so don’t read this unless you really want it spoiled:
[spoiler]When people were first resurrected on Riverworld, they awoke on the shores seemingly randomly dispersed; later on they noticed that some shores had statistically significant clusters of specific Earth cultures (for example, one river bank would have 60-80% Aztecs, the rest random; another would have 60-80% colonial Americans, the rest random). But if you die . . .
You are resurrected the next morning, at a random spot along the river, regardless of what culture is dominant there. What happens to your corpse is irrelevant - you’re given a new body. At first resurrection, everyone was brought back naked, hairless, circumcised (if male), and at age 25. I’m not sure if, when you’re resurrected again, your body is still hairless, but I think it’s otherwise the same as when you first arrived on Riverworld.
You can be brought back an infinite number of times. What survives is your Wathan, a glowing multicolored ball that floats above your head, invivisble to the naked eye but detectable with equipment built by the Ethicals, the creators of Riverworld. When you die, the Wathan is sent to a chamber in the tower at the river’s source, where it is stored and can be “removed from play” if an Ethical decides you should not be resurrected again. Otherwise, it is sent back out with your new body in the morning. It’s not a soul, but it is specific to each individual and it is necessary to the resurrection process.
The color of the Wathan varies with your ethical purity or mindset, and turns black when you are about to commit an atrocity such as murder. This ties in with the concept of the Second Chance, and that the Riverworld was constructed to allow people from Earth a second chance at life and being a good person . . . this is not the point of the books, but it is the dominant mindset on Riverworld. Our main characters, for the most part, don’t really care about the Second Chance theory and spend the greater part of their adventures getting pissed off at people who do.
At least one of our main characters decided that the best way he could think of to get to the source of the River was to just keep killing himself over and over until he came back to life close enough to the River’s source. This didn’t really work (the only time he came close enough he was immediately killed), but it was an accepted form of travel early on.[/spoiler]