Afterword
While of course an author would like to believe that his every word remains engraved forever on the hearts of his readers, it may be that some of the events of the previous four Riverworld novels have grown dim in some memories. Here is a brief look at the adventures that have led up to Gods of Riverworld: Richard Francis Burton, the famous (or infamous) English explorer, linguist, author, poet, swordsman, and anthropologist, dies in a.d. 1890 at the age of sixty-nine. Contrary to his expectations, he awakes from death. He is in a vast chamber containing billions of bodies floating in the air. All those he sees are human except for one near him. This body is humanoid but definitely not that of a member of Homo sapiens. Before Burton can escape from the chamber, he is rendered unconscious by two men who appear in some kind of aerial craft.
When Burton again awakes, he is lying naked on the bank of a wide river in a narrow valley surrounded by high, unscalable mountains. His body is like the one he had when he was twenty-five, minus its scars. He is only one of an estimated thirty-five billion who have been resurrected under an unfamiliar sky on the banks of a river ten million miles long.
The resurrection is not, as events will show, caused by supernatural means. It has been effected by scientific devices invented by beings unknown during the early part of the first book, To four Scattered Bodies Go. The people responsible for this, the Ethicals, planted recording machines on Earth long before the first humans evolved from the apes. (Or so Burton and others are told during the course of the series.) These machines have recorded every human being from the time of his or her conception continuously to the moment of death. And, as is discovered in the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth, the souls (called wathans by the Ethicals) are artificial. There is no such thing as a natural soul; these have been provided by the Ethicals.
In the early days on the Riverworld, its inhabitants believe that everybody from approximately 2,000,000 b.c. to a.d. 2008 has been resurrected. It soon becomes apparent that children who had died on Earth at or under the age of five, the mentally retarded, and extreme psychopaths have not been raised on the Riverworld. These, Burton finds out from a renegade Ethical, have been resurrected on a planet called the Gardenworld. And it is revealed in a later volume that only those from approximately 99,000 b.c. to a.d. 1983 have been placed on the River-world. After this current Ethical project is over, those who died after a.d. 1983 will be raised.
The Ethicals are the heirs of several preceding cultures, some nonhuman, which had assumed the task of recording and resurrecting the sentient species of many worlds throughout the universe. If they did not do so, all sentients who died would be forever dead.
Some Ethicals, disguised as Terrestrials, have spread throughout the Riverworld the religious concept of Going On. A Valleydweller cannot Go On unless he or she attains a certain high ethical standard—in other words, a certain state of being "good." At the end of a hundred years this project will be phased out, and those who have not arrived at a certain ethical development will die forever. The wathans of those who have reached this stage will be absorbed by the Godhead.
This concept is planted by the Ethicals and transmitted through various religions—for instance, the Church of the Second Chance. The -missionaries of the Church also teach their disciples to speak Esperanto. A language that everybody can understand is necessary because of the mixture of peoples from many times and places.
Burton and some others are early on visited by an Ethical who won't reveal his identity. Burton and others call him X or The Mysterious Stranger. X (revealed as Loga, a member of the Ethical Council of Twelve, in The Magic Labyrinth) is thwarting the plans of his fellows. He gives various reasons for this, but the true reason for his becoming a renegade is told in the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth. X is recruiting some of the resurrectees to help him in his plot. Among these are Burton, Sam Clemens, Cyrano de Bergerac, a gigantic titanthrop called Joe Miller, and other exceptional men and women.
The River, they find out, starts from a small sea at the north pole of this planet, winds back and forth down one hemisphere, circles the south pole, and winds back and forth on the other hemisphere, finally plunging back to its source, the north pole sea. A vast tower built by the Ethicals rears up from the bedrock at the bottom of this sea. It is the headquarters of the Ethicals and contains the circuitry and the huge protein brain of the Computer. It also houses in a central well those wathans held while the dead are stored in the physical recordings. When a person is resurrected, the wathan immediately reattaches itself to the raised body. This entity, the wathan, contains all the memories that the body also has, duplicates them, as it were, and also provides self-consciousness for the mind of the body. Without the wathan, the physical part of the individual would lack self-consciousness and the means to keep its identity.
The first volume, To four Scattered Bodies Go, is mainly concerned with showing the setup of the Riverworld and Burton's efforts to escape the Ethicals. These have found out that he was awakened in the resurrection chamber by their unidentified renegade colleague. Burton commits suicide 777 times while fleeing the Ethicals, but is finally caught. He is questioned in the tower by the Council of Twelve, one of whom is the renegade. His memory is taped so that the Council may see the renegade through his eyes. But the renegade has secretly rearranged various circuits in the Computer, and he has also arranged it so that the Council believes that Burton's memory of his questioning has been erased. He returns to The Valley with a complete memory.
In the second volume, The Fabulous Riverboat, Samuel Clemens, the American writer, dreams of building a great paddlewheeled riverboat on which to travel up The River to its source. From there he will go on foot to the seagirt tower. He can't start fulfilling this dream for a long time because the planet is poor in iron and other heavy metals. X arranges to divert a large iron-nickel meteorite into The Valley, and Clemens uses this for the needed metal. His boat is stolen by his partner, King John of England, brother to Richard the Lion-Hearted. Sam vows to build another boat, catch up with John, and get vengeance.
In the third volume, The Dark Design, Clemens finishes his second boat after many hardships and attempts by others to steal this one, too. After he leaves, another group at the base builds a dirigible and flies it to the tower. Only one of the crew can get inside the tower, and he does not come back out. On the way back, one of the crew is discovered to be X, but he escapes, and the airship is blown up by a bomb he planted.
In the fourth volume, The Magic Labyrinth, the two heavily armed riverboats meet. Both are sunk in the battle, and their captains die along with most of their crews. Burton and some of X's recruits survive. They go up The River as far as they can in a small boat, then climb the massive and rugged mountain range ringing the north polar sea. Burton is convinced that one of the party is X. After the party gets into the tower through an entrance secretly installed by X, Burton does find out who X is.
However, in the long absence of all its Ethical and Agent tenants (slain by X), the unattended tower mechanisms need some maintenance. Not getting it, a valve that admits seawater is stuck, and the protein brain of the Computer is threatened. If it dies before the valve can be repaired, the entire project will be doomed, and all the body-recordings will perish.