Guest Post - Ryan Boudinot on His Favorite Books from Childhood

Ryan Boudinot

I loved science fiction as an adolescent but I tended to avoid canonical SF authors. I’ve never read anything by Isaac Asimov and only a couple books by Heinlein and Bradbury. A college roommate tried to turn me on to Philip K. Dick but it was only after I read Valis a couple years ago that I started enjoying his oeuvre. For as long as I can remember I’ve had this knee-jerk reaction against canonized books of any genre, owing to my equation of the status of “classic” with that which is officially sanctioned by authorities who seek to neuter books of transgressive material. I recognize this now for the straight-up snobbery that it is, but as a kid the time I steered clear of anything my teachers approved of.

Instead I lurked at the fringes of the sf genre, and no writer epitomizes this fringe to me more than Philip Jose Farmer. I fell hard for Farmer’s Riverworld series. It’s about a planet on which everyone who ever lived on earth is simultaneously resurrected on the banks of a river that stretches between the planet’s two poles. Over the course of the five novels, we meet such real-life historical characters as Samuel Clemmons, Hermann Göring, Tom Mix, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Jesus (though there are lots of guys walking around claiming to be Jesus, naturally). Nineteenth century British explorer Richard Burton plays a significant role in the series, as does a stand-in for Farmer himself, a science fiction writer named Peter Jarius Frigate. It’s up to these characters to figure out how the hell they all ended up on this strange planet and who is really calling the shots. At one point Clemmons builds a river boat. There are thrilling fights with rapiers, though if you die on Riverworld you’re just resurrected again somewhere else on the planet. Everyone carries around canisters called grails which, three times a day, they insert into mushroom-shaped kiosks in order to receive rations of food, marijuana, and other helpful supplies. Among the humans are aliens with multiple testicles who--

Cremaster Cycle

Okay, I’m going to pause it here. Describing the Riverworld series is a lot like describing Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle. It just sounds so far-fetched in summary. An elevator pitch of the Riverworld novels might reasonably lead one to believe such a thing could never be artfully pulled off. No one would buy it (in both senses of the term). And yet Farmer somehow manages to craft a convincing world full of rollicking adventure and metaphysical questions. I remember reading a library copy of the third book, The Dark Design, in sixth grade and being completely out of my depth yet so engrossed and committed to seeing the book through. I finished the series while on vacation with my parents in Iowa City, where I recall enthusiastically summarizing the plot to my dad’s college roommate’s son, who just looked at me like I had lost my mind. Reading Riverworld I felt like I belonged to a secret society, a fellowship of blown minds.

I still think about the Riverworld series often. It sank down deep into my writing mulch and occasionally yields something useful for my own work. In my novel Blueprints of the Afterlife there’s something called a mystical refrigerator that offers forth an endless supply of food on a mesa in Arizona. I can trace this device back to the magical food-providing technology Farmer devised so that his characters wouldn’t starve or stay sober for too long. His novels were wonderful examples of how a writer can take the preposterous and make it seem real, and if I’m lucky enough to wake up on the banks of the river next to Philip Jose Farmer in the next life, I’ll be sure to thank him for writing them.