Riverworld Odyssey

Dust jacket illustration by Mark Wheatley. 

Published by Meteor House Press.

Note: There is a limit of one copy per person/household.

For over a decade, our readers, fans of Philip José Farmer from all over the world, have been clamoring for us to publish a Riverworld book.

Riverworld—Farmer’s best-known and most-beloved series. Riverworld—the first book of which, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), garnered Farmer the coveted 1972 Hugo Award for Best Novel at the 30th World Science Fiction Convention. Riverworld—the high concept series from one of science fiction’s greatest imagineers, a world covered in a meandering river millions of miles long, on the shores of which every human being who ever lived has been resurrected…

Samuel Clemens. Sir Richard Francis Burton. Alice Hargraves. Baron de Marbot. Tom Mix. Peter Jairus Frigate. King John of England. Jack London. Li Po. Hermann Göring. Cyrano de Bergerac. Lothar von Richthofen. Odysseus. Joe Miller.

Now, Meteor House is delighted to announce Riverworld Odyssey.

Clocking in at almost six hundred pages, Riverworld Odyssey is a journey through every piece of associated fiction, every pertinent essay, letter, article, and speech, every item of ephemera we could gather, in one Brobdingnagian volume, to tell the story—the history—of one of science fiction’s greatest series.

What is not included:

• The main series proper: To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, The Magic Labyrinth, and Gods of Riverworld.
• The authorized short stories by authors other than Farmer in the shared-world anthologies Tales of Riverworldand Quest to Riverworld.

What IS included: everything else.

The early history of Riverworld; the journey from Farmer’s last-minute decision to enter the ill-fated Shasta Prize Novel contest in 1952, to the publication of To Your Scattered Bodies Go, almost twenty years later; and the series beyond the end of the fifth and concluding novel, Gods of Riverworld…much of it in Farmer’s own words.

Our odyssey through Riverworld is a riverboat tour with four stops: The Contest, The Relaunch, The Quest Completed, and Riverworld Revisited. At each stop along the river, we go ashore to partake of the aforementioned fiction, essays, and speeches.

Fiction by Farmer includes the novel River of Eternity, first written in 1952, but not published until 1983 by science fiction specialty publisher, Phantasia Press; the earliest published Riverworld stories, “The Day of the Great Shout,” and “Riverworld”; the excerpt “Riverworld War”; and the stories Farmer wrote for the two shared-world anthologies in the 1990s, “Crossing the Dark River,” “A Hole in Hell,” “Up the Bright River,” and “Coda.”

Introductions, essays, and speeches by Farmer provide significant historical insight to the series. Letters to luminaries such as Fred Pohl, Ejler Jakobsson, Richard Posner, Phyllis Grann, and Roger Zelazny include four different outlines describing forthcoming Riverworld tales.

Outlines:

• “In The Valley”
• “The Boss”
• “The Storming”
• “Riverworld Dawn”

Essays and Speeches:

• River of EternityAuthor’s Introduction
• “Riverworld” Introduction
• “Riverworld War” Introduction
• “This Is Your Afterlife”
• “The Source of the River”
• “Buddha Contemplates His Novel”
• “IfI.P.”
• Tales of RiverworldIntroduction

Fellow shipmates on our riverboat odyssey have kindly supplied essays exploring different aspects of Farmer’s celebrated series and career, including Alex Berman, John Gregory Betancourt, Michael Croteau, Tracy Knight, Paul Spiteri, Bruce Sterling, and Mary Turzillo.

The gorgeous wraparound cover painted by Mark Wheatley features Peter Jarius Frigate, Alice Hargraves, Sir Richard Francis Burton, and Joe Miller attempting a shortcut across Riverworld in a hot air balloon.

Available as a Signed Hardcover Limited Edition (signed by Berman, Betancourt, Croteau, Knight, Spiteri, Sterling, Turzillo, and Wheatley), the hardcover features a leatherette cover with gold foil stamping and custom printed color end papers (wait until you see those!). This is another high-quality collectible in the tradition of Meteor House’s prior limited-edition hardcovers.