Gods of Riverworld (1983) is a science fiction novel, the fifth and last in the series of Riverworld books by Philip José Farmer. It was reprinted in 1998 by Del Rey under the title The Gods of Riverworld.
This book concludes the chronicles of the adventures of such diverse characters as Sir Richard Burton, Alice Pleasance Liddell, Aphra Behn and Tom Turpin through a bizarre afterlife in which every human ever to have lived is simultaneously resurrected along a single river valley that stretches over an entire planet.
Although Farmer's 1980 novel The Magic Labyrinth was originally intended to be the last in the series, Farmer continued it in this novel, which picks up with the characters who have just arrived in the alien-built tower at the headwaters of the river from which this constructed world gets its name; they must decide how to use the resurrection machinery they now control, and also solve the mystery of the murder of the mysterious stranger.
Famous quotes containing the word gods:
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)