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Riverworld: The TV Series
A frank appraisal of the TV series of the Riverworld by Shelby
Peck, who finds a hodgepodge of things that can and can't
be found in the books.
In 1971, he began a series of five books that had a cast of characters that included real people like Sir Richard Francis Burton, explorer, adventurer and translator of 1001 Arabian Nights, Cyrano de Bergerac, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and numerous real and fictional personae.
The five books contain one of the biggest ideas in the history of Science Fiction. Not just a tale of wonder and adventure, but the exploration of human greatness and human weakness. I had read the series when the books first came out but I was again intrigued while reading them over thirty years later. I've only felt this way about Jack L. Chalker's series of books that began with 'Midnight At The Well Of Souls'. First imagine that you and every single person who ever lived from 100,000 BC to 1983 or the present are reincarnated - unless you have died before the age of five. You awake to find yourself on the banks of a river that stretches round and round from one end of an Earth-like planet to the other. You are naked, hairless and physically twenty-five years of age without any previous deformities or disabilities. You look into the sky at noon and see giant stars and at night the sky is ablaze with nebulae, all the colours of the rainbow and thousands of stars. Near you is a stack of towel-like cloth and attached to one wrist is a canister or grail that can be inserted into the top of mushroom-shaped stones - grailstones along both banks of the River that flash like lightning three times a day and voila. When you open your grail, you find food, drink and possibly other goodies that may make your life happier on Riverworld - a place that seems to have been designed to care for billions of human beings along the length of one never-ending river valley. There is vegetation and fish that have been modified to live on the planet but you are the only mammal life to be found. Being human, you wonder who or what created this strange world and if you can, you will try to find out. That was the premise of the ‘Riverworld’ series. Among the billions of humans on this world, many individuals from throughout history, speaking in many tongues, use and adapt what they have or can find to journey up the River to look for a legendary and mysterious tower in the center of a fog-shrouded sea, circled by unscalable mountains, where those that created Riverworld and called the Ethicals can be found. On Saturday, March 22nd, the US SciFi Channel presented a 2-hour adaptation of parts of the first two books in the series and I understand that it will be shown again on Sunday, April 13th. They used a hodge-podge of things that can and things that can't be found in the books. Instead of the protagonist being an historically interesting Sir Richard Francis Burton, they substituted a fictional and uninteresting astronaut, Jeff Hale. I missed Sam Clemen's sub-human companion Joe Miller, the Titanthrop. Hale and others are restored to life and find themselves on an ocean beach, when the planet in the series has no oceans, just a great river. He and others are taken captive by a semi-Roman legion of Vandals, riding in on horses when the only non-human life in the books was that of the alien Monat, Ethicals, fish and worms. Picky? I guess I am and I would assume that in order to finally get the Riverworld story to film, many of the things that were adapted from the first two books may have had to be changed but it still rancored me since they were not true to the books and to the conception of their author, Philip Jose Farmer. The lack of publicity didn't help to make a series possible either. To put the adaptation into capsule form, I would give the following outline: Resurrectees are taken captive by bad guys. Real Big bad guy kills not so big bad guy. Good guy frees captives. Big bad guy and his baddies take Big boat away from Good guys. Big bad guy stakes Good guy to die and starts assault on Good girl. Good guy escapes and frees captive good guys, then while Good guys retake Big boat, Good guy fights and kills Bad guy. Big boat continues up River. At the end we see Mysterious Stranger speaking to a large group of Ethicals like himself. 'Their journey has begun. Will it be completed in time? Will it be completed at all?' You may enjoy 'Riverworld' as one of the many ordinary adventure shows to be found on the Telly and it didn't hurt to have the book finally brought to the attention of this generation but I do wish that they had really made a movie that would grip a TV audience as it gripped the reading public. To me, the movie was ordinary. Shelby Peck
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OTHER CONTENT - June 2003
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Philip
Jose Farmer (1918-) is a prolific writer who has done many wonderful
things in the field of Science Fiction since he began writing during
the last century.
The
first in the series was called 'To Your Scattered Bodies Go', the
second, 'The Fabulous Riverboat', then 'The Dark Design', 'The Magic
Labyrinth' and 'Gods Of Riverworld'.
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