Science Fiction & Fantasy Award Winning Book Group discussion

This month's read is To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer.

It was the winner of the 1972 Hugo Award, which is why we're reading it.

This is the thread for anyone who has read the book and wants to discuss it, so there may be spoilers.

This book is giving me very strong Ringworld vibes.

I'm not sure I can quite articulate why... I think it's that the characters are very similar and have similar views of the world. Highly competent and assertive men; beautiful but somewhat useless women. And the assumption that people will all just kill each other at the drop of a hat...

My library had an audiobook version of this one and I'll start it tomorrow. I think that I've only done 3 audiobooks so far so we'll see how this works out.

Audiobooks are so slow, that's my only real problem with them.

OK - I'm nearly at 50% and so far most of what these people have done is get high, get laid, and emote about their sexual relationships. All the characters are vaguely unpleasant and I don't care who they sleep with. I'm hoping once this boat gets moving things will improve.

Started listening to the audiobook of this (as I can't find it anywhere! Not in my local libraries and nowhere in charity shops). I think chapter 2 may have one of the best opening passages I've ever read. "God was standing over him as he lay on the grass by the waters and the weeping willows. He laid wide eyed and as weak as new baby born. God was poking him in the ribs with the end of an iron cane." That's just fantastic. So far I'm really liking it, fantastic writing, vivid, crazy, insane imagery. Great stuff!

That's great, Andrew, I'm glad you're enjoying it. Looking forward to hearing what you think of the plot when you get a little further in...

Well the audiobook didn't work for me. I couldn't get past Ch 2. Bought a used paperback online and it's supposed to be here Tuesday. I have several days off before the end of the month so I should be able to get through it quickly.

Better late than never as they say. Style wise this reminds me of Ringworld. They feel like they could have been written by the same person. Burton is a bit (Ha!) of a Marty Stu. The story so far reminds me of the Barsoom books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It's a fast read and so far I find it mildly interesting.

I was feeling a bit more charitable towards this book when I finished because it's clear that it's just the first part in a series. It's terrible as a stand alone novel, but no awful as an opening act. Maybe the rest of the series picks up.

I cannot believe this beat The Lathe of Heaven which is a marvellous book - and clearly a hundred times better than this. Perhaps it's because Lathe feels more like a fantasy book, and the Hugo audience had more space-adventure and hard SF nerds back in the day.

I just finished it like a moment ago, on audiobook. It was on YouTube, and I spend it up by 1.5x speed to make the 8 hours (!) go quicker, not that it affected my listening to it.

Well, I really, really like it. I think it's fantastic, although not perfect. I was hooked from almost the first, very weird chapter, and from then on I just found it riveting. I think the concept is extraordinary, it's a genius, albeit it complete mad idea, so broad in scope and conception. I loved the idea of everyone from every period on earth who had ever lived or died, including neatherdhal man and an alien not even born here, merging and mixing together. I find that concept fascinating, and genuinely quite touching, to see all of humanity mingled together and what kind of forms it takes. The fact that Farmer actually bothered to produce some pretty heavy scientific justification for the planet, not just wave it all of in a kind of pseudo mystic science babble explanation, is hugely impressive to me, and the worldbuilding it manages to do is superb.


The level of thought and detail that has gone through in the resurrection process, starting out nude, finding these grail packages, the algorithmic process of assorting different clusters of peoples down the river, it's really well done. I also loved the notion of Richard Burton going on the delightfully named "Suicide Express", killing himself again and again and again and popping up at random at various bits of the planet. That's such a great and interesting concept, and I love the fact it randomises where each person ends up after post-post-death. In fact throughout I kept thinking what a brilliant open world video game this would be, they're like respawning spots! Although throughout as well I kept thinking how good it would be as a tv show, it's got and episodic feel to it with some great cliff-hangers and a great mystery behind it. It's an interesting plot too. At one point it almost becomes a kind of Huckleberry Finn/Heart of Darkness plot, with a bunch of characters trailing down a long river meeting people as they go. In other sense, and this really shone out to me by the end, it's an interesting and fascinating religious analogy. This is clearly the afterlife, although I think it could very be some kind of Garden of Eden. Burton is taking on a kind of Adam role, the Ethicals are clearly Angels, the "Mysterious Stranger" is a clear reference to Satan (that was Mark Twain's naming of him in the story he wrote of that name), with it being a kind of reverse creation story, a Gnostic retelling of religion in which man has to disobey the weird afterlife the god has forced him into, with the active help of the serpent (Satan, after all, was nothing if not a renegade "ethical", i.e, a fallen angel), The Ethicals also mention some vast supercomputer boss which controls them, which is a clear metaphor for god. There's also the shared mutual religious quest idea in the use of 'grails' and the search for 'the grail'.

What I really like as well is the way in which, in some ways, it's a deconstruction of the religious idea of an afterlife, and how horrific and/or absurd it is. Everyone, if they were plucked from all of history and presumadely resurrected at the same time would have such unbelivable differences in viewpoints, and even language it seems amazing to think it could all be peace and harmony. Riverworld is in fact far more sensible than the usual religious idea of afterlife simply because it allows everyone, regardless of their morality, to be resurrected. Again, that makes sense. Afterlife only really morally works if either everyone or no one gets a chance. If everyone gets a second life, good or bad, then everyone could screw up or be rewarded just the same. A level playing field where action decides morality, not whether you happen to have been on the list of good believers and therefore got your reward of going to celestial Disneyland for winning the game of 'living a good life' better than other people. In fact, it suggests the real test of morality is not our actions when we are horribly bound both historically and biologically to the unbelievably tiny fragments of our lives on Earth, a pathetically small amount of time to work out whether you've found the right way of living or have discovered the right god, but in fact only under conditions of basically perfect abundance. If everything is basically taken care for on a material level, and where death is not the end at all, then what's your excuse for behaving like an asshole? It gradually becomes apparent that there isn't one. Thinking about it too, one can imagine just how appalling Heaven would become if it turns out Torquemada pops up in Heaven as well as Francis of Assisi, just because both believed in a Catholic conception of God, the morality of any place which allowed a monster like Torquemada to get a good ending just because of belief alone would be egregious to any sane thinking person. But if the criteria of Heaven is just in fact living an ethical life regardless of belief, then, by definition, it renders the very point of belief worthless, no longer dependent at all on believing in the right sky daddy in the first place. Either way, morality ends up in a secular conclusion. Riverworld nicely circumvents that by just having them all come at once. I actually found the sideplot of Herman Goering managing actually having to confront his crimes and managing to find some salvation really comforting and beautiful, a sort of victory for the belief that people are not born evil, and that even the worst could be reformed in some way. Again, that's the nice aspect of resurrection, it does indeed allow a second chance. Then again, it's also horrible in many ways. Constantly dying but having no ability to actually end it all is really rather terrifying, a doom loop spiral, an inescapable gilded cage from which terminal boredom and tedium is simply guaranteed. In that sense one can see why Burton is so obsessed with getting to the tower. Struggling your whole life against tyranny, if one arrived in heaven, it would be necessary to do the same again (one recalls Bakunin's great aphorism, "If god did exist, it would be necessary to abolish him").

My main problems with it are as follows. One, it's horribly sexist, IMO. Every single woman character, and only a few men, is described by how sexy they look. The prevalence of the idea that as soon as men and women are around each other, butt naked, that men fucking women is the only answer, is kind off problematic. Also, homosexual or bisexual or even asexual relations appear to be non-existent. An extremely masculine heterosexual culture appears to be the norm throughout, with women in some occasions apparently just ready to have sex as soon as possible. Well...alright then. :/ Also, the idea that paradise might just be sex and drugs is embracing the worst kind of 60s hippy indulgence culture (the kind of focus on souls and spirituality that's in the book too shows as well it's really a product of its time, the post 60s high some people were still on). There's some very weird and rather dodgy gender politics in the whole "you wanted it even though you didn't, the drug was revealing your inner desire" stuff, which one should really avoid with a ten foot barge pole. There's also a kind of weird tendency for applying racial taxonomies to different peoples, noting their racial or ethnic group by "features" which distinguish them out in some way as part of that unique ethic or racial group. I get why he did it, it's probably the only way to convey the notion of a universally mixed humanity other than just saying "a brown skinned person" or a "black skinned person" over and over again, but it still strikes me as rather iffy. Despite it being set on an insane sci-fi planet, there's a kind of colonial, imperialist attitude that, depressingly, still seems to reign supreme in Burton's character. He's very much a Heinleinlian "competent man", immediately authorative over the weaklings around him (notably women, and men who are either squeamish at violence or intellectuals), which I think borders into outright authoritarian, paternalistic and faintly overbearing kind of characters. Also, to have your main protagonist an admitted anti-Semite (yes, even one with Jewish friends and who did stick up for Jews on occasion) is quite a daring thing to do, one that I'm not quite sure is justified in the text. Sure, next to Goering, someone like Burton's anti-Semitism appears basically banal, but that's not a really high mark. I guess it's a testament to Farmer as a writer that he made this man our protagonist, gave him such a hideous flaw, manages to (sort of) call him out for it, yet also leave us with enough sympathy for him still to want to see how his journey ends up.

So I think it is very dated, and despite the massive, ludicrously ambitious, creative, imaginative premise, still falls at some hurdles. But otherwise I do think it's amazing, and I'm very glad I listened to it. As one can see, it gave me a lot to think about and digest, and I apologise for the essay.

I love the essay - and I'm glad you got so much more out of this novel than I did!

I completely agree with your problems with the novel, espcially the sexism. All the interactions between men and women sound like they were written by someone who has heard of love and sexual morality, but never experienced either. Burton's 'love' for Alice seems to me to be just lust, and he quickly loses interest in her after she gives in to him. Alice's sexual morality seems to be just hysterics because it's 'bad' - no feelings or philosophy about intimacy, family, loyalty, chastity or anything!

I must admit I actually groaned when Goering appeared in the book, "Not space Nazis!". I'm not sure where he's going with the Nazi/anti-semitism themes. The whole of Burton's anti-semitism seemed irrelevant to the rest of the plot for me. Almost as if Farmer was a big fan of the real Burton, and arguing with people who criticised him for being anti-semitic? But them all the people are inexplicably circumcised, so maybe the Jewish theme will be a big part of Riverworld for some reason?

I liked the idea of every society from all of history mixing together, but I didn't feel like it was well done. Farmer just can't do a convincing portayal of anyone who thinks differently than him. Burton, a Victorian English gentleman, is like you say a 'Heinlein' man. He thinks and acts like a certain type of 60s American. Alice is a cypher. Goering could've been interesting - I'm glad you got something out of his slow change of heart, but it was too shallow for me - the book doesn't really explore what he did, why he thought it was the right thing to do, and why he changed his mind.
Everyone else is just so many faceless natives.

The resurrection on Riverworld didn't really raise any religious questions for me - especially not about any afterlife because it was so clear so quickly that the resurrections were entirely material, planned by material beings and done via scientific methods. Nothing supernatural here, and, as you say, no questions of morality because everyone is resurrected. It's a science experiment, not an afterlife. I guess I just don't see a giant computer as being meaningfully analagous to God, or a planet crafted and populated by mortal beings as anything like heaven.

I guess I agree with some of your points. I think he at least tried with the caveman character to try and give a broader perspective, but I also agree that in many ways he's slightly underwhelming, considering the scope of the world he's created. Still, I just find it a brilliant concept. I loved the Goering stuff I have to say, the monologue he gives when they're with that religious guy, I just thought was phenomenal piece of writing, and to me more than explained why, that all the demons and untapped neuroses of his life on Earth coming back to haunt him, and the process of constantly dying forcing someone who relive them and actually confront them.

I know it's not literally religious, I just said i think it's an interesting metaphor for how we approach the afterlife. After all, the characters, especially when they first reawaken, constantly talk about how disappointed they are that this doesn't look like the one they were promised, or how surprised they are that one even existed. It's quite clear Farmer at least posed the question in order to knock it down later, but I think it's a clear thread throughout. They're not "mortal beings" after all, they cannot die and they're constantly provided for. The point, as the religious guy mentions, is that it is clearly designed to be a testing ground for spiritual development, why else after all would they be here? I mean, it's called "ressurection", you can't get a stronger religious connotation than that! I think Burton even calls the dwellers of Riverworld "Lazarians" at one point. And no, a computer on it's own would not be god, but patently, one so hugely advanced and omnipresent it has the technology to do this is so god like it might as well be. I also though there was a nice sort of god parody going on there, God is little more than a algorithmic machine, albeit one very powerful, and his angels are sort of a glorified bunch of middle men, tinkering around his insane little pet project and smoothing out errors. Again, i thought that was cleverly done. I also don't think, from Farmer's perspective, the story would even be that much without it, if it didn't have religious undertones then why bother even having the theme of resurrection from death and an afterlife?

Hmm, I don't think I see it. I mean, the fact that the characters find their re-awakening disappointing supports my point that this is nothing like an afterlife. It's just more life.

The characters are mortal and they do die. They are then recreated. There's an interesting philosopical question there, a bit like the question about the Star Trek transporters - if the original person is destroyed in the transporter and a new version created at the destination, is it the same person? Likewise, if you create Burton on Riverworld with all the memories of Burton from Earth, is it the same Burton?

We don't know why they're on Riverworld - I guess the creators have their reasons which will become clear through the rest of the series (I don't know if I trust the mysterious strangers explanations yet). But there isn't any spiritual testing happening - or at least, none that's any different from the sort we have on Earth anyway: just trying to deal with the people around us. (Perhaps, Earth is even a harder spiritual test, since you have to make your living and many moral dilemmas are forced by necessity whereas on Riverworld every necessity comes for free).

"a computer on it's own would not be god, but patently, one so hugely advanced and omnipresent it has the technology to do this is so god like it might as well be."
I don't think so - or at least it might be a god but not God. Even a computer this smart is still a created thing and finite and therefore nothing at all like the Creator who is infinite.

I guess our differences of opinion might explain why the book worked so much better for you than for me. The religious parallels worked for you as a parody and thought experiement. For me they just didn't seem to grasp any of the religious concepts at all, so the parallels were quite shallow.