This is Farmer's second offering in his outstanding Riverworld series, five books that must be read together in sequence for the whole story. He continues to develop this fabulous world of a millions mile long river, snaking around and around a planet, hemmed in on each side by unscaleable mountains which force all to live in the river valley. Into this artificially formed world, all humanity who ever lived and died has been resurrected, with no clue as to the how or why, or by whom. The books in the series tell the stories of those who are driven to find answers to those mysteries.
In 'The Fabulous Riverboat', Farmer leaves for a while the quest of his protagonist from the first book, Sir Richard Burton, and focuses on another fascinating 19th century personality - Samuel Clemens, AKA Mark Twain. Clemens is driven by a dream of finding iron on this mineral-poor planet from which he can build a riverboat such as he piloted on Earth, to take him to the headwaters of the river where emerging clues seem to indicate answers can be found to this confounding after-life. The Clemens we meet here is bitter, angry, and filled with guilt, and his ultimate motivation is to find those responsible for the mass resurrection of humanity, and to strike whatever blow he can against them in retaliation for bringing him back from the peace of the grave. With the help of a powerful "Mysterious Stranger", who may be a renegade member of the race responsible for this resurrection and Riverworld, Clemens is able to find the minerals he needs, and to form a colony dedicated to the project of building his fabulous riverboat.
Complications abound, however. The first and greatest is a partnership of necessity that Clemens must form with the deceitful and despicable King John Lackland, the most notorious of all the old kings of England. Then there is the need to concentrate on developing the military might to hold and defend this unique area of the river that contains the minerals necessary to fulfilling his dream. And finally, there is Sam's personal, guilt-ridden agony over making the hard, amoral choices that have to be made if he is going to succeed in his quest.
The strength of these books lie in the opportunities that the premise provides for having historical persons from widely different periods interact with each other. In 'The Fabulous Riverboat', we meet Lothar von Richthofen, brother and flying comrade of the Red Baron, Erik Bloodaxe, 10th century Viking leader, Odysseus, Cyrano de Bergerac, Hitler's toady Herman Goring, mountain man "Liver Eating" Johnson and more. Together with some well-drawn original characters, these make for a fascinating story.
This book does not suffer as much from stilted writing as did the first book of the series, but I still would describe the writing style as merely competent. The characters and story are the strength of the book, and more than sufficient to provide both the thrills and intellectual stimulation to make reading it worthwhile.
After taking you on a thrill-ride of battles, assassinations, double crosses, and assorted intrigue, 'The Fabulous Riverboat' will leave you with a cliff-hanging ending that should send you scrambling to read the next book in the series (The Dark Design).
