philip jose farmer to your scattered bodies go

I'm afraid that this goes right to the bottom of the Hugo winners on my list, keeping company with They'd Rather Be Right, Hominids, The Gods Themselves and Neuromancer. And yet nothing is actually resolved in plot terms in the book. Extraordinarily, everyone in the world gets bacon and eggs for breakfast, steak for dinner, and marijuana to smoke in between. There are numerous blunders of racial or gender sensitivity, of which the most boringly repetitive is a bizarre fixation with Hermann Göring.

Farmer is too dazzled by the audacious brilliance of his concept to actually write interesting characters or settings - one early warning is when he writes himself into the book, as Peter Joseph Frigate, to tell us just how interesting Burton is. Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) attempts to find out What Is Really Going On, aided in later volumes by Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain.Ĭoming back to the first book 25 years after I first read it, I am sorry to say that I found it pretty dire. There is a brilliant central sensawunda concept: all of humanity who ever lived (up to the year 2008, and who survived past the age of seven) are resurrected on the shores of a world-twisting river, apparently as some gigantic social anthropology experiment. Will the magic survive? I had fond memories of Farmer's four-part Riverboat series, despite the very unsatisfactory ending, and the peculiarly anal accuracy of some descriptions ('the mountains were seven miles or 11265 metres high', if I remember correctly from one of the later books). NwhyteI am always a bit nervous about returning to books I enjoyed when I was much younger.

Philip jose farmer to your scattered bodies go