Space: Desert Planets

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Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Riverworld wasn't a planet at all. It was a comparatively narrow strip 20 million miles long. The mountains that line the sides of the strip are just there to act as the bars of the crib. The reason why polities are small there is because agriculture and mining are impossible meaning that territorial acquisition is pointless.

As I recall the books it was a planet (possibly a re-engineered Earth). The River ran from the Arctic to the Antarctic and then turned around and went back, again and again. If you could climb the mountains you could then climb down again and be up to 20,000 miles up or down river. But the mountains were too high.

In the later books people take an airship to the control center at a polar sea.