RIVERWORLD UPDATE: Well, the movie version's been turned into a parade of victims. The original characters have been partly replaced--
Sir Richard Francis Burton is gone, and in his place an American astronaut. The characters we meet at rebirth are quickly enslaved by a local warlord, which serves as a tablet upon which the victimization theme is writ. An African woman who died on a slave ship has been added as a chatacter, and a Polish Jew who died in a German concentration camp. A citizen of Imperial Rome has also been added as a counter-example of the individualist - he is cruel and purely self-interested, to the detriment of everyone else.
I don't object to those characters, per se, but I do object to the constant theme of victimization that pervades our culture.
UPDATE: The citizen of Rome turned out to be the Emperor Nero---perhaps the most famously self-interested person in history. Did I call that, or what?
UPDATE 2: Another amusing thing: The astronaut who replaces Burton supposedly dies in 2009. This means that he's not a historical personage. The whole point of the Riverworld books is that the lead characters were nearly all historical personages.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, for instance.
Alice Pleasance Liddell, for another. It seems a shame to sacrifice Burton, the first Christian to see Mecca, for a fictional character.
UPDATE 3: I do like that they have some of the moderns, the citizens of democracies, splitting off for themselves and making a Galt's Gulch of it.
UPDATE 4: There's quite a bit of swordplay in this little epic - the astronaut Hale will have to face Nero at some point. Burton could have faced Nero and then some - as an experienced swordsman of the late 19th century he would have had centuries of research and canon to draw on that would be completely unknown to Nero. But today swordplay is a dead art, Hale would be most unlikely to know anything of it. But I'm guessing there's going to be some plot dodge whereby he manages to be a master swordsman.
