The Gods of Riverworld
Page 35
Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcelin, Baron de Marbot: Born 1782 in France, died there in 1854. Like Nur, small in stature but very strong and swift. He served very bravely under Napoleon and was wounded many times. His Memoirs of His Life and Campaigns so fascinated A. Conan Doyle that he modeled his stories of Brigadier Gerard, the dashing French soldier, on de Marbot’s exploits.
Tom Million Turpin: Black American born in 1871 in Savannah, Georgia; died in 1922 in St. Louis. Turpin was a piano player and composer of considerable talent; his Harlem Rag, published in 1897, was the first published ragtime piece by a black composer. He was also the boss of the Tenderloin red-light district in St. Louis.
Li Po: Born in 710 of Turkish-Chinese lineage in an outlying district of ancient China; died in 762 in China. Considered by many to be China’s greatest poet, he was also a famous swordsman, drunkard, lover, and wanderer. In The Magic Labyrinth, his pseudonym was Tai-Peng.
Star Spoon: A female contemporary of Li Po, who suffered much both in China and on the Riverworld.
PREFACE
Those who have not read the previous volumes of the Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, and The Magic Labyrinth, should go to the outline at the back of this book. There the reader can acquaint himself or herself with some events and items only referred to en passant in the book at hand. I have written the outline to avoid lengthy recapitulation. Those familiar with the series so far might also want to read the outline to refresh their memories about certain matters.
I stated in the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth, that it would be the final book in the series. I had intended it to be so, but I did leave myself a tiny escape hatch in the final paragraph. My unconscious knew better than my conscious, and it made me (the devil!) install that little door. Some time after the fourth volume appeared, I got to thinking about the vast powers possessed by the people who had entered the tower and how tempting the powers would be.
Also, as I knew and some readers pointed out, the truths revealed in the fourth volume might not be the final truths after all.
The opinions and conclusions about economics, ideology, politics, sexuality, and other matters re Homo sapiens vary according to the characters’ knowledge or biases. They are not necessarily my own. I am convinced that all races have an equal mental potential and that the same spectrum of stupidity, mediocre intelligence, and genius runs through every race. All races, I’m convinced, have an equal potential for good or evil, love or hate, and saintliness or sin. I’m also convinced from sixty years of wide reading and close observation that human life has always been savage and comically absurd but that we are not a totally unredeemable species.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Lovers
Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life
Lord Tyger
Strange Relations
Tarzan Alive
Time’s Last Gift
Traitor to the Living
The Stone God Awakens
Flesh
Behind the Walls of Terra
The Image of the Beast
Blown
A Feast Unknown
The Gates of Creation
The Maker of Universes
Night of Light
A Private Cosmos
The Wind Whales of Ishmael
The Lavalite World
Jesus on Mars
Dark Is the Sun
The Unreasoning Mask
Inside, Outside
The Alley God
The Book of Philip José Farmer
Dayworld
Dayworld Rebel
THE RIVERWORLD SERIES
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
The Fabulous Riverboat
The Dark Design
The Magic Labyrinth
Gods of Riverworld
Riverworld and Other Stories
Red Orc’s Rage
The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel
PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF
RIVERWORLD
“[Farmer is] an excellent science fiction writer.”
—Isaac Asimov
“Riverworld is a venue where anyone can have adventures with anyone else.… The Riverworld books [are] interested in the play of character and ideas, free from the constraints of realism, place, or time. Or, to put it another way, they’re a venue for Farmer to talk about interesting stuff.”
—Locus
The Magic Labyrinth
“A wide-screen adventure that never fails to provoke, amuse, and educate … His imagination is of the first rank … his velocity breathtaking.… Charts a territory somewhere between Gulliver’s Travels and The Lord of the Rings.”
—Time
“This book, like the series as a whole, offers delight to the sense of wonder and storytelling flow as irresistible as the River itself.”
—Publishers Weekly
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
“One of the most imaginative worlds in science fiction!”
—Booklist
“From the beginning, To Your Scattered Bodies Go gripped me in a way few books have been able to match.”
—SF Site
The Dark Design
“Its publication is an event with a capital E!”
—Parade of Books
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
GODS OF RIVERWORLD
Copyright © 1983 by the Estate of Philip José Farmer
All rights reserved.
A Tor® eBook
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Farmer, Philip José.
Gods of riverworld / Philip José Farmer.—1st Tor trade paperback ed.
p. cm.—(Riverworld series)
ISBN 978-0-7653-2656-0 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3556.A72G6 2011
813' .54—dc22
2010036531
First Tor Trade Paperback Edition: February 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-9352-4
First Tor eBook Edition: February 2011