To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer

To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer

To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer

Book 1 of the Riverworld Series

Welcome to Riverworld. It is not like our world – or any world that can be imagined by anyone but Philip Jose Farmer. It is huge and mysterious. It has a central river, rimmed by mountains, with a hidden source and an unknown end. Reborn there is every last soul who ever lived on Earth-from prehistoric apemen to moon-dwelling future civilizations. Reborn there is Sir Richard Francis Burton, translator of The Arabian Nights, explorer, brawler, scholar, womanizer-adventurer. His quest to discover the end of the river, the meaning of the world’s existence – and lovely Alice Hargreaves (the real-life model for Alice in Wonderland) form a science fiction adventure that is already recognized as a classic.

Titles by Philip Jose Farmer available in Panther Science Fiction

The Award-winning RIVERWORLD saga

TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO

THE FABULOUS RIVERBOAT

THE DARK DESIGN

THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

RIVERWORLD AND OTHER STORIES

THE STONE GOD AWAKENS

TIME’S LAST GIFT

TRAITOR TO THE LIVING

STRANGE RELATIONS

DARK IS THE SUN

JESUS ON MARS

Philip Jose Farmer shocked the world of Science Fiction in 1952 with the publication of his novella The Lovers in Startling Stories. It told of the romance between a man and an alien parasitic insect which had taken the form of a woman, and with this story Farmer introduced real sex into a world of Science Fiction which needed this uplift. The Lovers won him a Hugo Award in 1953; his second Hugo came in 1968 for the story Riders of the Purple Wage written for Harlan Ellison’s famous Dangerous Visions series; and his third came in 1972 for the first part of the Riverworld Series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go. Leslie Fiedler, eminent critic and professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has said that Farmer “… has an imagination capable of being kindled by the irredeemable mystery of the universe and of the soul, and in turn able to kindle the imagination of others – readers who for a couple of generations have been turning to science fiction to keep wonder and ecstasy alive.”

1

His wife had held him in her arms as if she could keep death away from him.

He had cried out, “My God, I am a dead man!” The door to the room had opened, and he had seen a giant, black, one-humped camel outside and had heard the tinkle of the bells on its harness as the hot desert wind touched them. Then a huge black face topped by a great black-turban had appeared in the doorway. The black eunuch had come in through the door, moving like a cloud, with a gigantic scimitar in his hand. Death, the Destroyer of Delights and the Sunderer of Society, had arrived at last.

Blackness. Nothingness. He did not even know that his heart had given out forever. Nothingness.

Then his eyes opened. His heart was beating strongly. He was strong, very strong! All the pain of the gout in his feet, the agony in his liver, the torture in his heart, all were gone.

It was so quiet he could hear the blood moving in his head. He was alone in a world of soundlessness.

A bright light of equal intensity was everywhere. He could see, yet he did not understand what he was seeing. What were these things above, beside, below him? Where was he? He tried to sit up and felt, numbly, a panic. There was nothing to sit up upon because he was hanging in nothingness. The attempt sent him forward and over, very slowly, as if he were in a bath of thin treacle. A foot from his fingertips was a rod of bright red metal. The rod came from above, from infinity, – and went on down to infinity. He tried to grasp it because it was the nearest solid object, but something invisible was resisting him. It was as if lines of some force were pushing against him, repelling him.

Slowly, he turned over in a somersault. Then the resistance halted him with his fingertips about six inches from the rod. He straightened his body out and moved forward a fraction of an inch. At the same time, his body began to rotate on its longitudinal axis. He sucked in sir with aloud sawing noise. Though he knew no hold existed for him, he could not help flailing his arms in panic to try to seize onto something.