"The Fabulous Riverboat" by Philip José Farmer (1918-2009)

 

Publisher: Berkley Medallion

Copyright: 1971

ISBN: None listed

"The Fabulous Riverboat" is the second novel in the Riverworld series, which is set sometime in the far future when all people who ever lived on earth are resurrected along the banks of an enormous river. No one knows why they were resurrected, or by whom but some are determined to find out.

This novel has it has as its primary character Samuel Langhorne Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) who is determined to get to the headwaters of the river, and to do so decides to build a paddle-wheel riverboat.

Some of the other characters you'll meet are the Viking chief Erik Bloodaxe, Lothar Von Richthofen (brother to the Red Baron), Prince John Lackland (brother to Richard the Lion Hearted), Odysseus, and Herman Goering also makes another appearance.

I my opinion this novel wasn't quite as good as "To Your Scattered Bodies Go", which I reviewed 2 weeks ago. This is primarily because the time span is in the order of a number of years, but should be many decades. The main reason I come to this conclusion is because they were using technology that would not have been known, or even thought of during the time of Clements. It is true this is explained somewhat by the fact that other more modern engineers assisted him, but it still did seem a little too much of a stretch. The techniques used to build the riverboat also seemed to advanced, to be able to be performed with essentially very rudimentary tools and techniques. I'm sure there are many who will disagree with this, but that's why I said it was my opinion.

In addition to this the characters themselves didn't seem to be quite as well-developed as they were in the first book. This may be because a lot more people have read Clements' books as opposed to those of Burton and therefore have a context to frame his character, but I still feel it would've been nice to see more character development. On the other hand there was some good interaction between Clements and some of his neighbouring peoples with regards to discussions about race, and how Clements portrayed this in his novels.

Race relations do play a large part in the latter part of this novel, so a reader should be prepared for some rather strong language, if that is a concern.

Even with these draw backs, I did enjoy the book as it has been many years since I first read it.