River of Eternity

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River of Eternity
Cover of first edition
Author(s)	Philip José Farmer
Cover artist	John Pound
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science Fiction
Publisher	Phantasia Press
Publication date	November 1983
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	205
ISBN	0-932096-28-X
OCLC Number	10284904

River of Eternity is an early version of what became the Riverworld series by Philip José Farmer.

The original "Riverworld" story was a 150,000-word novel titled Owe for the Flesh, which ended with the protagonist (called Richard Black in this version) finding the tower at the end of the river. In the mid-1950s, Farmer entered it in a science fiction novel contest run by Shasta Publishers and subsidized by Pocket Books. He won the contest but received no money. The work was never published and was lost in its original form. Farmer revised and retitled the book River of Eternity, but that version remained unpublished as well and was thought lost. In the 1960s, Farmer reworked the material yet again into the magazine novellas and serials that would form the final Riverworld sequence. Then in 1983, a copy of the River of Eternity manuscript was discovered in a garage and published by Phantasia Press. Farmer recounts the whole story in his introduction to the Phantasia edition of River of Eternity.

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