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To Your Scattered Bodies Go
In the first volume of the series, Richard Francis Burton, (That's the victorian explorer, not the actor who married Liz Taylor!) dies aged 69 in the Trieste of 1890. As an atheist all his adult life, he is shocked to find himself resurrected and restored to youth. He awakes surrounded by millions of slowly turning bodies, bodies that are in the process of being restored. What he sees is enough to convince him that the resurrection is not supernatural, but the result of some science he does not understand. Masked figures put him back to sleep, despite his best efforts.
On the "day of the great shout", the day when humanity awakes from death on the banks of the river, Richard Burton is one of the very few capable of rational thought. Although the trauma of resurrection overwhelms him at first, running screaming from a vision of a vengeful catholic god, his first actions are to mobilise the people around him for mutual defense.
And what a strange group these people are.. Alice Hargreaves, the woman whose early years were immortalised as a dream of sorts by Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll... Kazz, a hairy neathanderal with a sloping forehead but an active mind. Monat, a creature from the system of Arcturus, who was apparently responsible for the death of everyone on the planet Earth in the year 2008... Peter Jairus Frigate, a science fiction writer of the twentieth century, (P.J.F. or the author of Riverworld being post-modern long before the term became commonly misunderstood!)
X, the mysterious stranger, contacts Burton, as he does many others. He needs help to stand against the "Ethicals", those responsible for the resurrection. The Stranger is one of them, but is not WITH them. He tells Burton that the Ethicals are immortal beings, and that humanity has been resurrected only as an experiment to entertain them. Once the experiment is over, the billions of souls along the riverbank will die once more, and for the last time. Burton flees the Ethicals, and on the riverworld, the fastest way to travel is death. No one dies permanently, they are "translated" somewhere else along the River.
Every time Burton dies, he awakes in a new location. His unwanted companion on these travels is Hermann Goring, whose conscience is extracting a heavy price for the power that he once sought under Hitler. The two are resurrected together whenever they have died within days of each other. Richard Burton takes the Suicide Express seven hundred and seventy seven times, until he is finally captured by the Ethicals. Questioned by the Ethical council of twelve, Burton is given an alternative explanation for the existence of the Riverworld. The resurructees are "candidates", whose souls (or Wathans as the ethicals call them) need more time to attain the perfection required to join with the Overwathan, otherwise known as God. The mysterious stranger, they say, must be mentally ill to oppose the other Ethicals. Burton is not convinced by their arguments. As far as he is concerned, X bothered to talk to him and this "council of twelve" did not.
The Ethicals put Burton to sleep, assuring him that he will not remember anything of this encounter, or of his first awakening in the pre-resurrection chamber. He is reborn in the rivervalley, remembering everything, and in a place where his original companions are. X is obviously more capable than the other Ethicals believe.
Onward to: