Started: June 12
Finished: June 17
Pages: 287
Do you like your fiction "meta"? Adventures in time and space with Max Merriwell may take the "meta" cake. Pat Murphy was so dedicated to telling this story of fiction, reality, fictional reality and quantum possibility that she wrote two other novels under pseudonyms (There and Back Again "by Max Merriwell", and Wild Angel "by Mary Maxwell") to support it! Or at least she tried: apparently her publishers insisted that those two books appear under her own name. But the earlier novels get their "proper" attribution in Adventures, and Murphy gets her revenge: Adventures features two characters named "Pat Murphy", neither of whom is a self-portrait.
That gives you a flavour of the book, as does the fact that both Max Merriwell and Mary Maxwell both appear as characters, and Susan, a character in Adventures, reads both There and Back Again and Wild Angel during the course of the novel.
Whew. That was sufficiently self-referential that it was difficult to express clearly. I'm sure that Murphy had even greater difficulties keeping it all clear in the novel itself. But she manages: the book comes across as a romp.
Pat Murphy's day job is as a science writer at the Exploratorium. She's written a Nebula-award winning novel (Falling Woman), and is also notable as one of founders of the James Tiptree, Jr award for fiction. If this novel is any indication, she is also likely to be a lot of fun at a party. Or maybe not: maybe we should imagine her as a dour recluse, to make her as unlike as possible to her fiction. I suspect she'd enjoy that.
No comments:
Post a Comment