Gods of Riverworld

Loga is murdered by assailants unknown on the very first page. The survivors of the expedition to the dark tower now have complete access to the facilities within, and without him, have no guide to using them. The computer will accept most of their commands, and they experiment to find out what they can and cannot do.

What they can do is a great deal. The computer allows them to do virtually anything they can think of. Only Nur exercises any restraint, and soon the tower is thronged with resurrected old friends - and friends of friends of old friends. Tai-Peng resurrects an old lover, and she brings back some of the men who raped her to reap revenge. Burton uses the computer to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper, and finds Jack and his victims resurrected in the tower. Frigate secretly watches the rivervalley, and when he finds someone who is truly evil, is sorely tempted to act as judge, jury and executioner.

But Loga has been alive and watching all along. He set up the whole scenario to test his recruits and see how they would cope with such power. It becomes obvious, as was intimated in the very first novel, that he is completely insane. With this, the fifth novel turns the assumptions of the first four in the series around in an unexpected way. Throughout the earlier novels, the concept of the overwathan is believed to be true by all the characters, the idea being that you or I can live forever as part of the godhead, but each individual must achieve a certain level of understanding, compassion and sophistication before this can happen. Here, a much simpler idea is put forward. Any of the candidates upon the banks of the river can live on, just as they have been doing on the Riverworld. But how do you decide who should be allowed immortality? By running an experiment, letting all those souls be reborn and in effect, letting them dig their own graves. The universe can support any number of immortals, but would you want to share the future with a Hitler or a Genghis Khan? That is the true purpose of the Riverworld, to sort out those who should live on from those who are incapable of change, and would make the future unbearable for everyone else.

The riverdwellers recruited by X have a choice now - one denied those remaining along the banks of the river. Eventually, a ship will arrive from Gardenworld, and the computer will be out of their control again. It will decide who should live and who should die, based upon the analysis of their Wathans. Burton suggests that they do not wait - they can leave the Riverworld, taking the resurrection technology along with them, and make their own future on a distant planet...

The End

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Apparently... but...

Like Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov (posthumously) and many others, Philip Jose Farmer has opened up his creation for other writers to explore. There is a collection of short stories set within the Riverworld universe called "Quest for Riverworld", which has yet to appear in any bookshop I've visited. There is also the possibility that the man himself has more to say on the Riverworld and will write a sixth volume. I certainly hope so!