Gods of the River World

Gods of the River World is a science fiction novel, the fifth and final in the River World series of books, written by Philip José Farmer. It was reprinted in 1998 by Del Rey under the title The Gods of the River World.

The book concludes chronicling the adventures of Sir Richard Burton, Alice Pleasance Liddell, Aphra Behn, and Tom Turpin through a strange afterlife in which every human being who has ever lived is resurrected throughout their lives. a valley that stretches over an entire planet.

The original saga had four volumes (To Your Scattered Bodies, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, and The Magic Labyrinth), and culminated in Burton and his cohorts taking possession of the mighty powers locked in the supercomputer of the Tower of Mists. However, Farmer added this fifth volume.

Plot

This work begins with the mysterious murder of the renegade Ethicalist. Burton and his people, restless because they know they are the only residents of the Tower of Mists, set out to find the murderer, but he seems to want to play cat and mouse with them. Before long, the group becomes more interested in the powers of the Tower of Mists, and begins to resurrect human beings at will within it. Things get complicated when the resurrected keep resurrecting more and more people, creating a major demographic problem within the Tower... Plus the possibility of Burton and his crew being overthrown. In this sense, the novel is an interesting repetition of the theme of the sorcerer's apprentice, and a continuation of the previous volumes.