Phillip Jose Farmer - Fabulous Riverboat, The - 6

[clong]

Fabulous Riverboat, The (Riverworld - 2)

I had purchased the first two books of the Riverworld series together at a used book store several years back, but then found myself quite disappointed with To Your Scattered Bodies Go. So this had been languishing in my "to be read" stack for a long, long time when I decided to pick it up for a quick read before digging into heavier duty anticipated Chrismas gift reading materials.

I am happy to report that I liked it more than the first book of the series (doesn't it usually seem to work the other way?). Samuel Clemens is not particularly believable, but I found him more sympathetic as a protagonist than Richard Francis Burton. Indeed, while the characters here are often annoying, they are at least drawn in more realistic shades of gray than I remember from the first volume. And at least some of the billiions of women from the history of humanity seem to have some purpose higher than having carnal knowledge of the protagonist. The ending offers no sense of closure whatsoever.

By the end of this volume I can almost begrudingly admit that I have at least a moderate level of interest in finding out who created this world and why and which them is out to thwart their grand plans and why. But the moderately interesting meta story seems to me the limit of what the series has to offer.

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