To Your Scattered Bodies Go

To Your Scattered Bodies Go was written by Philip Jose Farmer and published in 1971; it won the Hugo award for best Science Fiction Novel in 1972.  Imagine that everyone who was ever born on earth gets resurrected at the same time as a genetic experiment carried out by aliens who want to see what kind of rat race will develop in the human race...In this "heaven" created by the "old ones," can the human race evolve beyond violence?    You know that joke about the frog that carries the scorpion across the river?  This book is kinda like that, only with Richard Burton as frog, and Hermann Goering as the scorpion.  It's a riot where suicide is the only way to move your chess piece body closer to the ultimate goal of shutting down the arrogant "old ones" who are running this reincarnation circus called "Riverworld."  As this is only the first book in the Riverworld Trilogy, I suppose some more answers are out there, somewhere....