Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell [Hardcover]

Pat Murphy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 6, 2001

Cruise into murder, mayhem, and alternate realities.

Award-winning author Pat Murphy takes us aboard a luxury cruise ship and into the strange confluence of time and space known as the Bermuda Triangle, in an engaging science fiction romp that recalls the work of Kate Wilhelm.

Susan Galina and her friend Pat have escaped their normal lives into the elegant, isolated world of the Odyssey, a luxury cruise ship heading from NY to Europe via Bermuda. Pat is working on her doctoral thesis in quantum physics, and Susan is recovering from a recent and unhappy divorce.

To Susan's delight, she discovers that her favorite author, Max Merriwell, is also aboard ship, teaching writers' workshop. Susan's life becomes even more interesting when she meets Tom Clayton, the handsome chief of security. This cruise looks very promising indeed.

But the pleasant shipboard vacation turns dark as the Odyssey passes into the Bermuda Triangle. Each year, Max Merriwell writes three novels: a science fiction novel under his own name, a fantasy novel under the pseudonym Mary Maxwell, and a mystery novel under the pseudonym Weldon Merrimax. The trouble begins when Max receives a threatening note that appears to come from Weldon Merrimax, Max's own pseudonym. Susan hears wolves howling in the night, the ship's passengers are seized with a dancing mania, and monsters lurk in the ship's corridors. An eyewitness reports a murder—but the victim of the crime is not on the passenger list and the body is nowhere to be found. While others struggle to understand these strange events, Pat seeks the explanation in quantum theory.

Out of these elements, Murphy builds a suspenseful, funny, fast-paced novel of shifting and intersecting realities that is a joy to read.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Susan Galina is lost--and that's just the beginning of this thoroughly enjoyable journey. On the cruise ship Odyssey, Susan and her friend Pat meet writer Max Merriwell and are drawn into a series of mysteries fueled by the alarming possibility that Max's pseudonyms are somehow taking on lives of their own. The lines of reality become more blurred every day, forcing Susan to face some private monsters while Pat constructs an elegant quantum physics explanation of the growing chaos.

There's plenty of wackiness and just plain fun--trance-inducing conga music, wolves on the recreation deck, and the Flaming Rum Monkey--but Adventures in Time and Space is more than simply a wild ride through intersecting possibilities: it's also an exploration of personal relativity, the power of individual choice to create any number of potential realities. Readers should be ready to enter into the spirit of the game: as one character says, "Reality is a much more flexible concept than most people think." Murphy's clear prose, sharp wit, and keen observations of the dreams and fears of the human heart make the most of all the possibilities. --Roz Genessee

From Publishers Weekly

In this cerebral equivalent of a roller-coaster ride from Nebula-winner Murphy (Wild Angel), Susan Galina, a quiet librarian with a repressed imagination, faces all sorts of amusing, thought-provoking challenges on a cruise through the Bermuda Triangle. Susan falls for the ship's security officer, attends a writing class taught by Max Merriwell (her favorite author), is stalked by one of Merriwell's seemingly autonomous, pseudonymous alter egos, and along the way reinvents herself. The novel's surface, however, is not smooth; it loops back onto itself beautifully. Pat Murphy is on the cruise and also a character in a book by Merriwell, as well as the author of these Adventures. The title of these Adventures is the title of a book that Merriwell dreams that he has written. The narrative is replete with absorbing ponderings on the nature of reality and the nature of the novel. "Fiction writers are all liars," Merriwell says at one point. "People tend to forget that." Furthermore, all people are liars rewriting their own lives, whether with small lies or more complex ones. Characters in novels are lies who can lie, but they can be just as real as people outside novels. In this book obsessed with books, the questions of who is in charge, who is real and whether the answers to those questions matter will leave readers pleasantly dizzy. (Nov. 6)Forecast: In addition to literate SF fans with a sense of humor, this good-natured romp should appeal to those whose tastes run to the metafictional.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (November 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312866437
• ISBN-13: 978-0312866433
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,211,194 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars almost a masterpiece, May 10, 2005

By 

clifford "akitonmyers" (Portland, OR, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (Hardcover)

This book started out amazingly well. I found myself really getting pulled into an intriguing plot that was left ambiguous enough to willingly drag me along as a reader. Pat Murphy set up a situation on a cruise line involving two single women, a crusty old science fiction writer and members of the crew. The interactions at first between these protagonists were so craftily done that I found myself feeling like I was not only getting to know them, but also wishing that these were my own friends.

However, then Murphy takes a very childish turn about 80% of they way through the book and instead of remaining sophisticated starts getting just plain goofy. I think that this was the point of the story, and I understood why she did what she did, but I felt all of a sudden like I was reading a book written for 7th graders and not a fitting ending to a great start. In fact it was a pretty lazy ending. Also, the characters that I was enjoying reading so much fell apart as well and became cardboard imitations of them selves.

If you have not read Connie Willis before, I would recommend that you start with her before Pat Murphy. I was even thinking at the back of my mind that Murphy might have been an alias for Willis before it started falling apart. `To Say Nothing of the Dog' might be the best science fiction book written in the last two decades and would be a much more satisfying read I promise you.

If you have read both Willis and Pat Murphy and are looking for similar authors, I would recommend that you branch out into mysteries and try `Break Up' by Dana Stabenow or `Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet' by MC Beaton. One other author of note similar to what Pat Murphy is attempting here would be `Practical Magic' by Alice Hoffman.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Light-hearted metafictional fun and romance, December 11, 2001

By 

Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (Hardcover)

Pat Murphy concludes her light-hearted metafictional trilogy with _Adventures and Time and Space with Max Merriwell_. Max Merriwell is an SF writer who also writes fantasy as Mary Maxwell, and hard-boiled mysteries as Weldon Merrimax. Murphy's previous two novels were _Wild Angels_, ostensibly by Max Merriwell writing as "Mary Maxwell", and _There and Back Again by Max Merriwell_, a retelling of _The Hobbit_ as SF.

The previous books were quite light in tone, and this new book is also fairly frothy, and it's also quite fun. The main character is Susan Galina, a recently divorced librarian from San Francisco, who has won a free cruise to London. She has invited her friend Pat Murphy, a graduate student in Physics, who doesn't seem to resemble the author externally -- at any rate, I don't think the real Pat Murphy has spiked blue hair. Also on the cruise is Max Merriwell, who has agreed to give a writers' workshop in exchange for his ticket. The other main character is the ship's security director, Tom Clayton, with whom Pat immediately tries to set Susan up, abetted by Tom's friend Ian, a computer expert who handles the ship's new electronic ticketing system among other things.

The ship is to pass through the Bermuda Triangle on its way across the ocean. This is the trigger for a series of mysterious events -- the appearance of both of Max's pseudonyms as real, drinks-buying (and inventing) people; the appearance of characters from _Wild Angel_, including more versions of Pat Murphy; an apparent murder; and a crisis involving radical physics concepts as explained by the character Pat Murphy, such as the affect of consciousness on quantum states, and different possible interpretations of uncertainty and the Many Worlds theory.

Alongside this metafictional skullduggery there is the not very suspenseful but nicely portrayed developing romance between Tom and Susan, and the simple story of the cruise across the Atlantic, with pleasant landscapes described in Bermuda and the Azores. There are also interludes discussing the physics (in the Pat Murphy persona) and writing (as Max Merriwell describes the process). All is brought to a satisfying, if slightly convenient, conclusion. An enjoyable read, nothing Earth-shaking, but quite fun.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The last in the trilogy, May 6, 2007

By 

Henry W. Wagner (Rockaway, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (Mass Market Paperback)

Adventures finds Pat Murphy in the final stretch of her three book exploration of the nature of fiction and identity, a journey which began with a tribute to Tolkien's The Hobbit (1999's There and Back Again) and continued with an equally intriguing Burroughs homage (2000's Wild Angel). As with many journeys, however, the trip home is somewhat of an anti-climax. This is surprising, considering that Murphy revisits so many of the themes and motifs that made the first two parts of this trilogy so enjoyable.

Adventures is the story of Susan Galina, who, seeking to heal wounds inflicted by her recent divorce, agrees to join her friend Pat Murphy on a trip aboard the luxury cruise vessel Odyssey. Free spirit Pat plans to continue work on her doctoral thesis on quantum physics while on board, while shy and retiring Susan, an avid science fiction/fantasy fan, hopes to catch up on her reading. To that end, she has brought two novels, entitled There and Back Again and Wild Angel, with her.

As a bonus, Max Merriwell, the author of both these books, is also aboard, scheduled to teach a creative writing class. Merriwell (whose name invokes that of prolific dime novelist Frank Merriwell) has gained notoriety by writing science fiction (like There and Back Again) under his own name, fantasy (like Wild Angel) under the name Mary Maxwell, and best selling detective novels under the name Weldon Merrimax.

The cruise proceeds smoothly until the ship enters the Bermuda Triangle. Merriwell receives a threatening note signed by, of all people, Weldon Merrimax. Later, several passengers witness a man claiming to be Merrimax apparently killing a male passenger named Pat Murphy who is either a stowaway or a figment of someone's imagination. Susan has an encounter with Merrimax, and also with a woman named Mary Maxwell, both of whom characteristically disappear soon thereafter. Events also occur onboard which echo those chronicled in the Merriwell novels she's been reading, events which suggest that different realities are bleeding over into each other, causing no small amount of chaos on board the cruise ship.

While the first two installments in this trilogy were enjoyable celebrations of story, Adventures has a less lively, more clinical feel, as Murphy reiterates points which were already clearly made in those novels. Against a backdrop of a quantum reality where infinite possibilities overlap, Murphy again makes her point that reality is what we make of it, that life is journey upon which we can endlessly reinvent ourselves. She endlessly chews on these notions, even going so far as to provide a scientific explanation of events in excerpts from fictional Pat Murphy's "Bad Grrlz's Guide to Physics", portions of which alternate with the regular text. For those who haven't gotten the message yet, Murphy clarifies the point in her Afterward, stating:

"We are all fiction writers: we are all liars. Without knowing it, we make up stories about the world. And then we believe that are stories are true and ignore our own roles in creating the version of the world in which we live."

What's really disappointing about the conclusion of this grand experiment is that Murphy virtually ignores the magic she tapped into in the first two books, choosing instead to emphasize her own cleverness over that of the artists who inspired her. Those novels, which updated classic genre stories, felt more like collaborative efforts between Murphy and her literary heroes, true hybrids which transcended their already worthy source material. Based on the tantalizing excerpts of Mary Maxwell's Here Be Dragons, Max Merriwell's The Twisted Band, and Weldon Merrimax's Tell Me No Lies which appear at the head of each chapter, Murphy might have a few more surprises in her bag of tricks. Here's hoping that's the case.