To Your Scattered Bodies Go
by Philip José Farmer
Summary
Every human being who ever lived, some thirty six billion of them, wakes at once on the banks of a river that runs for millions of miles across an entire planet. Everyone is naked, hairless and twenty five years old again, restored to health. Beside each person is a metal cylinder which, placed on a mushroom shaped stone at set hours, produces food, drink, cigarettes and a narcotic gum.
Nobody knows who did this or why. There are no children under five, no metal ores and almost no wood, and anyone killed simply wakes the next morning somewhere else along the river, which makes murder a form of transport.
The viewpoint is Sir Richard Francis Burton, the Victorian explorer, translator and duellist, who is exactly the person you would want as a guide and who immediately sets out to travel the river to its source and find whoever is responsible. He falls in with a Neanderthal, an alien from a future Earth, a woman from 1980s America, Alice Liddell, the original of Alice in Wonderland, and, less happily, Hermann Goring.
Farmer's premise is one of the great hooks in the genre and the book runs on it hard, less interested in character than in the sheer scale of the question.
The best material is sociological. Farmer works out what thirty six billion resurrected people would actually do, which is build boats out of bamboo, invent alcohol immediately, and form riverside states along a strip of land a few miles wide, with slavery reappearing within a year.
Around two hundred and twenty pages, fast and pulpy, with a 1971 attitude to women that has dated badly and a habit of explaining its history lessons.
Best for readers who want one of the genre's most spectacular hooks, and who do not mind that the four sequels never quite pay it off.
Historical Context & Significance
To Your Scattered Bodies Go won the 1972 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Its title comes from John Donne's Holy Sonnet on the resurrection of the dead, which is the book's whole premise stated in a line.
Philip Jose Farmer had built a career on deliberately breaking the field's taboos, beginning with the 1952 novella The Lovers, which introduced sex to a genre that had mostly avoided it, and he spent decades writing real historical and fictional people into his own stories.
Riverworld ran to five novels, and readers generally agree that the explanation offered in the later books is smaller than the mystery of the first. A television adaptation was attempted twice, in 2003 and 2010, and neither took.