The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
Several centuries in the future, humans from Earth have established a logging colony and military base named "New Tahiti" on a tree-covered planet whose small, green-furred, big-eyed inhabitants have formed a culture centered on lucid dreaming. Terran greed spirals around native innocence and wisdom, turning the ancient society upside down.
The story has many themes, as well as the creation of the ansible, an instantaneous communications device that plays a critical role in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle. (The invention of the ansible places the novel first in the internal chronology of the Hainish Cycle, although it was the fifth Hainish novel published.
I think that this version is just the best of all the ones I've ever seen.
Have you seen the movie ? If you did maybe you'll remember Cyrano/Depardieu talking about his nose :
« C'est un roc !… C'est un pic !… C'est un cap !… Que dis-je, c'est un cap ?… C'est une péninsule ! »
Located at an indeterminate distance from the Sol system and millennia in the future, the Riverworld is an Earthlike planet whose surface has been terraformed to consist solely of one staggeringly long river-valley. The river's source is a small North Polar sea, from which it follows a course tightly zig-zagging across one hemisphere before flowing back up the other along an equally labyrinthine path to return to the same sea. The river has an average depth of 2.5 km, and is shallow near the shore but plunges to enormous depths towards the channel. The banks are generally smooth and gentle, expanding into wide plains on either side, then climbing into ever more jagged hills before leaping up into a sheerly impenetrable enclosing mountain range, taller than the Himalayas. The valley averages 15km in width, but variations on the basic geography exist, including narrows and occasional widenings into lakes with islands. From source to mouth, the river is 32 million kilometres (or 20 million miles) long (Books I , II, & III state the river is 16.09 million km long).
The weather is absolutely controlled; there are no seasons, and daily variations are metronomic. The only animal life consists of fish and soil worms. The vegetation is lush and of great variety, including trees, flowering vines, several kinds of fast-growing bamboo and a resilient mat of grass which covers the plains and continues on along the riverbed for as far down as anyone has ever been able to reach. The Riverworld has no visible moon, but a great number of stellar objects in the sky, including gas sheets and stars which are close enough to see a visible disk. These objects provide enough light for "valleydwellers" to see at night and have led to speculation, by valleydwellers and fans, that the Riverworld is located in the galactic core.
In each area, there are initially three groups of people: a large group from one time period and place, a smaller group from another time and place, and a very small group of people from random times and places (most of the twentieth and twenty-first century humans are spread across the river as part of this last group). 
Anyone who died at an age younger than 25 is resurrected into a body equivalent to that lesser age, which then ages at a normal rate before stopping at 25. No one who was less than five years old at death is resurrected on the Riverworld (it is eventually revealed that children under the age of five were resurrected on another planet, Gardenworld). In addition to all the benefits of their Riverworld-bodies, the resurrected human race is effectively immortal as, should an individual die, they will soon find themselves once again reincarnated, whole in body, somewhere else along the banks of the river. Some people even utilize this "Suicide Express" to travel randomly.
The resurrected each awaken with a container tied to their wrist. Made of a nearly indestructible material, these containers are commonly called "grails" and produce food, drink, pieces of cloth, and occasional luxury items, such as alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, hair care utensils and an hallucinogenic drug called "dreamgum". To operate, grails have to be placed onto large, mushroom-shaped "grailstones", found at regular intervals along the riverbanks, which produce an electrical discharge to power the grails three times per day (corresponding to the times of breakfast, lunch and dinner). As agriculture is absent and impossible on the Riverworld, the grails are vital to an individual's survival (though if they do die, they are resurrected with a new grail). A grail is genetically coded to its owner, thus it is impossible for anyone else to open one. Nevertheless, "grail slavery" is not uncommon, in which a person is held captive and the contents of their grail, after being retrieved by the owner, are taken by force by the captor. The slaver will usually provide the slave with enough food to keep them alive, as once a person dies their grail becomes useless.
Though the grails provide for all needs and the climate is hospitable, any further attempts to affect the environment are frustrated by the near-complete lack of metals and ores on the planet. The only building materials available are bamboo, wood, and human or fish bones and hides. Pockets of flint (eventually to be depleted) provide material for tools. With technology limited to the paleolithic level, the bordering mountains are completely impassable, thus the only possible directions of exploration are either upriver or downriver.
The reason behind the existence of Riverworld is initially a complete mystery. In Farmer's books a number of historical figures - including Sir Richard Burton, Alice Hargreaves, Samuel Clemens, King John of England, Tom Mix, Mozart, Jack London and Hermann Göring - interact with fictional characters in a quest to discover the purpose behind the creation of Riverworld and their reincarnation. Another character, Peter Jairus Frigate, bears a striking resemblance to Farmer himself, and shares his initials. There are two versions of the character - one who appears early in the sequence, and another, being the "real" version, who concludes that the first was his brother who died as a baby, resurrected and used as a spy by the creators of the Riverworld.
Humanity's creators are a race of aliens known, among their human allies at least, as "the Ethicals." The only alien Ethical who is seen in the stories is Monat Graatut, who poses as an ally and friend of Richard Francis Burton. Monat is a tall long limbed humanoid alien who would be instantly recognizable as non-human. The Ethicals were the ones who originally brought Wathan technology to Earth, installing both a generator and a collector. The collector would catch and store Wathans--and the human personas and memories accumulated by them--for later retrieval.
The original Riverworld story was titled Owe for the Flesh and ended with the protagonist (called Richard Black in this version) finding the tower at the end of the river. Farmer entered a scifi contest run by Shasta Press and subsidized by Pocket Books, submitting his 150,000-word entry. He won the contest, but received no money. The work was never published and was lost in its original form. A later, revised manuscript (itself lost for decades) was discovered and published in 1983 as River of Eternity.
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