River world

Mundo del Río is the name of the fictional planet in which a series of science fiction books by the writer Philip José Farmer take place.

Works

The series is made up of five novels, plus a book of short stories. Of the five novels, four of them are part of the original tetralogy, while the fifth is a later addition:

• To your scattered bodies (1971), which won the Hugo Prize in 1972.
• The fabulous river boat (1971).
• The dark design (1977).
• The Magic Maze (1980).
• Gods of the World of the River (1983).
• The World of the Rio and other stories (1979).
• River of Eternity (1983).

History

The story is set in the River World, a planet reshaped by enigmatic beings (called the Ethicals) into the shape of a gigantic river surrounded by steep mountains impossible to climb. On its shores, the mysterious Ethics resurrect the 36,000 million human beings who have lived on Earth from Prehistory to the 20th century, with an end that humans cannot understand. In the development of the plot, a distinction is made between historical nationalities (for example, the Spanish conquerors) based on the contemporary topics of Anglo-Saxon culture over other cultures. A renegade Ethical recruits a group of agents, revealing to them that the precious gift of resurrection is actually part of a gruesome alien sociological experiment, and that if the humans fail to reach the Tower of Mists, the Ethicals' base, then they will be subjected to a second death, this time final. In this way, a diverse group of characters (Richard Francis Burton, Alice Liddell, Mark Twain, Jack London, Cyrano de Bergerac, the extraterrestrial Monat, the cavemen Kazz and Joe Miller, the tocharian Loghu, etc.) undertake the fight to double the hand to the almighty Ethicals, and gain control of the fabulous supercomputer that controls the resurrections.