Classic Science Fiction Review: Philip Jose Farmer's "To Your Scattered Bodies Go"
A 1972 Hugo award winning novel and interesting read that seems to have influenced a lot of later stuff in subtle ways. The story begins with a number of people waking up naked and hairless next to a river that seems to have no end. Strange, but what's stranger is that each and every person remembers living a full life on Earth and many of the characters can remember their deaths as well. The rest of the novel follows a handful of people ranging from pre-homosapian, to human, and all the way up to an extraterrestrial who had died on Earth during a conflict between the Earthlings and his own alien race in the year 2008. This hodgepodge of characters that includes an obviously fictionalized version Richard Francis Burton survive at first by settling near the river where these devices that they call "grail stones" continue to manifest food, tobacco, a stimulant that they call "dream gum," and a number of other items.
After a while they grow restless and begin to try and understand why they have been "resurrected" by sailing down the river for what turns into months of strange findings and chance encounters with some of histories most well known villains and heroes, because, as they come to find out, practically all of humanity has been "resurrected to this world. Most notably they have a run in with a kingdom headed by the infamous Nazi leader Hermann Goering.
The closer they get to the answers they seek the more dangerous and opaque this strange world becomes. In the end the story centers around one character who makes it his soul purpose to discover who has manufactured this world and why they have done so. He becomes a fugitive, and an insurgent among different groups with different goals, but he keeps his mind set forward towards the river's source.
Why Pick It Up
1. Farmer asks and answers a pretty interesting question, what if everyone who had ever lived in Earth's history had been resurrected to the same world at the same time?
This is the reason I chose to read it, and the reason I stuck around through some pretty short and simple prose, and mostly one dimensional characters. Farmer does a pretty impressive job of imagining how different sexes and races from different completely different eras would manage to cope with resurrection, universal nudity and sexuality, and a backwards method of immortality. Victorian woman and men mix with a range of individuals from neanderthals to aliens in a convincing and well thought out way.
2. Farmer, who was born in 1918, published the novel in 1971, so the novel is a product of a man who grew up during the Great Depression, World War II, and had just watched America experience a series of cultural, sexual, and civil revolutions during the 1960's. All of this history has an evident influence on "To Your Scattered Bodies Go." Farmer questions traditional ideas about sex, faith, and society and ventures forth into territory that would have easily offended the people and society he grew up with in Indiana during the mid 20th century.
3. Farmer pays attention to history, and while he does blatantly follow mainstream stereotypes when writing some of the historical figures that appear in the novel, he also manages to demystify and humanize a couple of them. Farmer paints an admittedly general and brief backdrop of events swirling around the main characters, but, no matter how briefly explained, Farmer has clearly done research on past civilizations. Each time the main characters sail by a cluster of resurrected humanity Farmer presents a small slice of how that cluster has managed their new lives. His explanations are always informed by one or two historical aspects of the resurrected peoples' former cultures. To give an example, Sumerians who have been resurrected nearby Native Americans have adopted scalping techniques from them, and actually use scalps as a currency. Since anyone who dies in this world is resurrected again, scalps are actually easy to come by without the normal consequence of ending another human's life forever. I love history, and culture, and social studies, so this novel was easy for me to dig.
Why Leave It On the Half-Price Shelf
1. If you are not intrigued by the premise of the novel or the study of history and social customs, the book can be a bit trying. Farmer does a great job of giving his characters genuine reactions after they have died and been awakened to this new world, but it is a slow start. Not only is it slow and seemingly aimless, but the prose are short and simple, which can have a sleep inducing rhythm and pace.
2. The writing improves as the novel goes on, but the story declines. The main issue I have is that you are constantly teased with answers to your questions of why and how this world exists, but you are never given a full or clear answer.
I am a big fan of the journey a story can take. I like Stephen King novels and I like Lost, which are both famously disliked by people who want a clear ending. While they are not perfect, what makes King and Abram's works great to me is their ability to create imaginative story lines with rich three dimensional characters who evolve in ways that make sense given the course of their stories. Even though their endings are typically unsatisfying for readers and viewers who want a conclusive explanation or statement, the journey that they take you on is undeniably exciting and well designed.
Farmer, on the other hand, does not make the journey exciting enough to make me feel okay with an up-in-the-air ending. This novel is a series, and I have read that your questions are eventually answered in successive novels, but I was unsatisfied when I impatiently researched and discovered what the answers were. As I said before, the main draw of this novel was the mystery of this world, so not having the mystery solved by the end was deflating.
3. While some of the themes that Farmer explores could be consider progressive for his time, especially for a man that was born in 1918, today they are not quite as risque. In fact much of what he does in "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" would be considered outdated, though I think context is always important. Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" might seem racist now due the usage of racial slurs and stereotyping, but if imagine the world that it was written in we can see that Twain was actually making statements about racial equality and the evils of slavery that were considered very controversial in 19th century America.
My best example of how "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" can be outdated is the fact that no female characters play a prominent role in the novel. Any and all female characters are relegated to the roles of victim or sexual object. The most interesting thing that Farmer does with the women in the book is show how sexuality has changed from one era to another, and how hard that must be for the women of the less sexual era to cope with. However, even in that case, misogynistic tendencies rear the ugly head (no pun intended) because almost no man in this time has trouble coping with the overt sexuality of this world. The male characters need almost no time to adjust to the nudity, and even remark upon how silly, yet understandable the women's prudishness is.
Beyond that, female characters are used and thrown away. If I'm remembering correctly, the last third of the novel does not even feature a single female character.
