GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

GODS OF RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer

Author’s Preface

Those who have not read the previous volumes of the River-world series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, and The Magic Labyrinth, should go to the outline at the back of this book. There the reader can acquaint himself or herself with some events and items only referred to en passant in the book at hand. I have written the outline to avoid lengthy recapitulation. Those familiar with the series so far might also want to read the outline to refresh their memories about certain matters.

I stated in the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth, that it would be the final book in the series. I had intended it to be so, but I did leave myself a tiny escape hatch in the final paragraph. My unconscious knew better than my conscious, and it made me (the devil!) install that little door. Some time after the fourth volume appeared, I got to thinking about the vast powers possessed by the people who had entered the tower and how tempting the powers would be.

Also, as 1 knew and some readers pointed out, the truths revealed in the fourth volume might not be the final truths after all.

The opinions and conclusions about economics, ideology, politics, sexuality, and other matters re Homo sapiens vary according to the characters’ knowledge or biases. They are not necessarily my own. I am convinced that all races have an equal mental potential and that the same spectrum of stupidity, mediocre intelligence, and genius runs through every race. All races, I’m convinced, have an equal potential for evil or good, love or hate, and saintliness or sin. I’m also convinced from sixty years of wide reading and close observation that human life has always been both savage and comically absurd but that we are not a totally unredeemable species.

Dramatis Personae

Thirty-five billion people from every country and every age of Earth’s history were resurrected along the great and winding River of Riverworld. The reader will be relieved to hear that only a few of them will play a part in this story.

Logo: A grandson of King Priam of ancient Troy, born in the twelfth century b.c., slain at the age of four by a Greek soldier during the fall of that city. Resurrected on the Garden-world by nonhuman extra-Terrestrials and raised there. He became a member of the Ethical Council of Twelve, which was charged with creating Riverworld and resurrecting there all human beings who had died between 99,000 b.c. and a.d. 1983. He became a renegade and involved various Terrestrial resurrectees in his plot to overthrow the other Ethicals and their Agents and to subvert the original plan for the destiny of those reborn in Riverworld.

Richard Francis Burton: An Englishman, born in 1821, died in 1890. During his lifetime a cause celebre and bete noire. A famous explorer, linguist, anthropologist, translator, poet, author, and swordsman. He discovered Lake Tanganyika; entered the Muslim sacred city of Mecca in disguise (and from the experience wrote the best book ever written about Mecca); did the most famous translation of A Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights), full of footnotes and e’ssays derived from his vast knowledge of the esoterics of African and Oriental life; was noted as one of the greatest swordsmen of his day; and was the first European to enter the forbidden city of Harar, Ethiopia — and leave alive.

Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves: Born in England in 1852, died there in 1934. Daughter of Henry George Liddell, domestic chaplain to the Prince Consort, vice-chancellor of Oxford University, dean of Christ Church,’Oxford, and co-editor of the famous Scott-Liddell A Greek-English Lexicon, which is still today the standard Classical Greek-English dictionary. When ten years old, Alice inspired Lewis Carroll to write his Alice in Wonderland and to base his fictional Alice on her.

Peter Jairus Frigate: An American science fiction writer, born 1918, died 1983.

AphraBehn: An Englishwoman, born 1640, died 1689. She was a spy for Charles II in the Netherlands, and later a famous—or infamous—novelist, poetess, and playwright. The first English woman to support herself solely by writing.