This turned out to be, not the original, but a version produced in the mid-1950s by Farmer (who had entirely forgotten about it) from the third "book" at the request of the publisher Melvin Korshak.
As to the novelette that remained a "standalone" — "Riverworld" — it underwent a slight expansion and was included in Farmer's collection Down in the Black Gang in 1971.
Two volumes were released: On the Riverworld, every human who ever lived and died – from the earliest Neanderthals up to 1983 – is resurrected on the banks of a seemingly endless river on an unknown planet.
Along the river's almost 18 million twisting and turning miles, some 36.6 billion humans are miraculously provided with food, but with no clue to the possible meaning or purpose of this strange afterlife.
Among the denizens of the Riverworld, we meet Sir Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain, Odysseus, Cyrano de Bergerac, Hermann Göring, Tom Mix, and many others, including a modest alter ego of the author himself.
Starting in the "late twenty second century", the Riverworld has been engineered by an alien race to consist solely of a single long river-valley which snakes across its entire surface.
The banks are generally smooth and gentle, expanding into wide plains on either side, then assuming jagged hills before an impenetrable mountain range.
From source to mouth, the original supposition of the river's length is 20,000,000 miles, as said by Alice Hargreaves and attributed to Peter Frigate, shortly after the defeat of Hermann Goering.
The vegetation is lush and of great variety, including trees, flowering vines, several kinds of fast-growing bamboo, and a resilient mat of grass which covers the plains.
The story of Riverworld begins when 36,006,009,637 humans, varying from the first Homo sapiens until the early 21st century, are simultaneously resurrected along the river.
All heart disease, tooth decay, and blindness are gone, all amputated limbs are restored, and all scars, tattoos and other body modifications are removed; whereas certain neurological impulses (for instance, curiosity or chemical addiction) remain intact.
For example, one of the characters depicted in the first book of the Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, is a tormented, drug-addicted Hermann Göring who ends up as a missionary of the Church of the Second Chance, a peaceful religion.
[7] The resurrected awaken with nearly-indestructible containers tied to their wrists, commonly called "grails", which produce food, drink, pieces of cloth, and luxury items, such as alcohol, tobacco, marijuana (and lighters for same), hair care utensils, makeup, and a hallucinogenic chewing gum known as "dreamgum".
Though the grails provide for all needs and the climate is hospitable, further attempts to affect the environment are frustrated by the near-complete lack of metals and ores on the planet.
Because the distribution of populations along the river seems random, the character of these nations can vary wildly within a very short span; one may enter dangerously unknown and potentially hostile territory in less than a day's journey.
In Farmer's books a number of historical figures—including Sir Richard Burton, Alice Hargreaves, Samuel Clemens, Baron de Marbot, King John of England, Cyrano de Bergerac, Tom Mix, Mozart, Jack London, Lothar von Richthofen, and Hermann Göring—interact with fictional characters to discover the Riverworld's purpose.
As this happened only to the wisest and most ethically advanced wathans, the people supposed a process of "passing on", comparable to the Indian religious concept of Moksha.
The repetitive physical environment was to encourage a concern with inward rather than outward circumstances, while the poverty of natural resources was to prevent the development of a higher technology, and the food provided by the grails, the presence of abundant water and potential shelter, and the resurrections were to obviate economy.
[8] Antoine Ruiz of the Université d'Avignon (France) wrote a master's degree memoir entitled Redemption in Philip José Farmer's Riverworld in 1995.
It used elements from To Your Scattered Bodies Go and The Fabulous Riverboat, though it replaced the books' hero, Sir Richard Francis Burton, with an American astronaut and King John of England with Nero as the villain.
In 2010, a three-hour TV film, Riverworld, was produced and released by Syfy (formerly The Sci-fi Channel)[10] in the US and by Studio Universal elsewhere, written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe.
Some stories written by fans and taking place in the Riverworld universe have been published through the official Philip José Farmer website.