"To Your Scattered Bodies Go" Philip Jose Farmer

'He had died. Now he was alive. He had scoffed all his life at a life-after-death. For once, he could not deny that he had been wrong. But there was no one present to say, "I told you so, you damned infidel!" '
 - Richard Francis Burton upon waking in the resurrection bubble

'Know a man's faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.'
― Philip José Farmer, To Your Scattered Bodies Go

I chose this cover art because that is how I remember the book from the first time I read the River World series.  I'm not sure how many times I have read this book, or when I first read it, but I am guessing I learned of it from a guy I dated in the 80s.  It seems like his style of book.

Farmer incorporates questions of religion, the afterlife, language, history and sociology into this story of a world where all Earth's inhabitants, who were killed out by an alien species in 2004, are resurrected on a single planet and all at the same time.  They are provided food, clothing, alcohol, tobacco and drugs through a system of grail stones along the shore of a river that winds its way for thousands upon thousands of miles from north pole to south pole and back.

The question is why were they resurrected?  Who or what managed this?  If this were an after world, then what was expected of them here?

If you are interested in the story, then read the book.  I want to make a few observations that may or may not be plot related.

In such a world, who will be the leaders? The explorers? The thinkers? and so on.  Of course, it will be the people who did those same things on earth.  This story follows the adventures of Richard Francis Burton, almost discoverer of the source of the Nile, and Hermann Göring, notorious officer of the Third Reich.  Of course, Burton wants to find the source of the river on Riverworld, but somehow he and Göring are tied together in some way.  I'm sure there is some significant counterpoint the two play for each other, but it is beyond my literary knowledge, or possibly general knowledge, to understand what.

This is simply a fun book to read even if one ignores the serious discussions between Burton and the people he meets, and mostly I read it for that.  To show my lack of perception, I never noticed that one of the non-well-known figures in the book had a name with Farmer's initials, Peter Jarius Frigate, and some analyses claim this was Farmer inserting himself into the story.

There have been several instances lately of me reading books in succession where the one published later clearly took elements from the first.  I see many of the elements of "Scattered Bodies" that are taken from other works.  For instance, in "Moby Dick," Ishmael is the only one that sees the boarding of the mysterious men who are later revealed to be the crew of Ahab's boat as he joins the whale hunts in person rather than from the safety of the ship.  In "Scattered Bodies," Burton is the only one who wakes in the resurrection bubble and sees the beings that are caring for the bodies there.  To me there is an unmistakable echo of the former in the latter.

Going the other direction, I see images from "Scattered Bodies" in the movie "The Matrix."  Both stories draw on Plato's allegory of the cave, as do so many works, but in these two the awakening images are remarkably similar; that is, the scene Burton awakes in the resurrection bubble and sees an unending array, or should we say matrix, of hairless bodies suspended between rods must have been the image used for the scene where Neo awakens in his pod within the Matrix.

I find that I am not so strong in the analysis of literature nor in recognizing themes that inform subsequent works and I wonder if the current reading of Rabkin's "Fantastic Worlds, Myths, and Tales," where he emphasizes the reuse of stories in the literature tradition over time that is helping me make these connections.  Or is it that I have always looked for these similarities and simply have the wherewithal to know I should be looking for these connections?