h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I just thought i'd mention the Riverworld series by Phillip Jose Farmer, i remember reading and enjoying the series immensely. they actually star Samuel Clemens, along with Richard Francis Burton, Alice Hargreaves (real life model for 'Alice' in wonderland) and a few others whose names i forget or who aren't famous.
What basically happens in the books (i think there were five) is the resurection of every single person that has ever lived during mans existence on earth between, i think, 50 000 yrs bc to 2500 odd ad.
they are brought back to life on a foreign planet which has a sizeable river running the full way around. oh, and you can't die. If you get killed you reappear 24hrs later somewhere else along the banks of the same river. in perfect health as always.
The heroes of the story journy to find the source of the river, for at the poles or the planet, where the river should meet, towers are noticed. But who built them and why? And for that matter why resurect everyone anyway?
For these questions and more do our brave gaggle of adventurers seek answers. I enjoyed them, as i said, i thought they seemed well reserched as well, haveing read this article just now, so i thought i'd mention it as sammy boy is in it quite a bit.

This reminds me of another work of fiction... an alternate history of the US by Harry Turtledove. He asks the question "What if the South had won the Civil War?", and takes it through some wonderful plot twists. Lincoln never gets assasinated, and goes on the stump for communism. Theodore Roosevelt raises his Rough Riders, but they gain fame not against Spain, but Canada. And Clemens features quite prominently in the series, as the editor of the San Francisco newspaper. The characters are all extraordinarily well-researched (Turtledove holds a doctorate in history) and very real.

I started reading that book a little while ago -- "The Guns of the South", it's called (I have it on a shelf several yards away from where I'm sitting right now). It was very interesting, but I found it a very slow read and for some reason I found myself not "pulled in". I do, however, think his Worldwar series is fascinating--another alternate fiction deal in which aliens land on Earth around the beginning of World War II and attempt to conquer the planet, causing all humans to finally band together to fight back.