River of Eternity is an early version of what became the Riverworld series by Philip José Farmer.
The original "Riverworld" story was a 150,000-word novel titled Owe for the Flesh, which ended with the protagonist (called Richard Black in this version) finding the tower at the end of the river. In the mid-1950s, Farmer entered it in a science fiction novel contest run by Shasta Publishers and subsidized by Pocket Books. He won the contest but received no money. The work was never published and was lost in its original form. Farmer revised and retitled the book River of Eternity, but that version remained unpublished as well and was thought lost. In the 1960s, Farmer reworked the material yet again into the magazine novellas and serials that would form the final Riverworld sequence. Then in 1983, a copy of the River of Eternity manuscript was discovered in a garage and published by Phantasia Press. Farmer recounts the whole story in his introduction to the Phantasia edition of River of Eternity.
Famous quotes containing the words river and/or eternity:
“Hard by the lilied Nile I saw
A duskish river dragon stretched along.
The brown habergeon of his limbs enamelled
With sanguine alamandines and rainy pearl:
And on his back there lay a young one sleeping,
No bigger than a mouse;”
—Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849)
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there. For there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)