This is the third entry in Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series, set 30 years after the events in the second book. As previously noted, 36 billion humans have been resurrected along the banks of the millions-miles-long River, supplied periodically with food, drink, and other substances via their "grails". And instead of settling into quiet lives of Edenic bliss, a significant fraction of the populace have devoted themselves to finding the secrets behind the planet, held (they think) in a near-impregnable tower at the north pole. And (believe it or not) they can't manage to do this peacefully; much of their effort is devoted to violence, betrayal, and subterfuge against their fellow humans.
Over the intervening decades, there's been a lot of technological progress, but mainly in the service of warfare: lasers, sonar, radar, huge blimps, advanced guns, plastic explosives, and more. New characters are introduced, some famous (Tom Mix, Jack London) and some not. Progress is made, some secrets revealed, but (spoiler) the underlying mysteries of Riverworld remain mysterious. (Two more volumes to go!)
One feature of Farmer's prose this time around: he often provides distances in both normal and metric units, to an irritating extent. E.g., page 14 of my $1.25 paperback edition: "Presently, intense blue flames roared upward from the top of the stone to 20 feet or a little over 6 meters." Over and over, throughout the text.
(The book is ©1977, when there was a push for the US to convert to metric. The seventies were crazy, man.)
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