Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (Hardcover)

by Pat Murphy (Author) "Susan was lost..." (more)
Key Phrases: Weldon Merrimax, Mary Maxwell, Max Merriwell (more...)

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.

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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 (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,147,647 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	C. Elgin "akitonmyers" (Palo Alto CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

3 of 3 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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Fun!, October 23, 2001

By	"aaron_the_weird" (San Leandro, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Like all of the novels by Pat Murphy/Max Merriwell/Mary Maxwell, this is a fun book that takes you to odd places inhabited by even odder people. It's a lot of fun, has some interesting insight into how people invent their own lives, and says a few things about Quantum Physics as well. Enjoy!