Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (73 page)

In 1990, I began work on a project that was both an enormous joke and a serious metafictional experiment. It started with Max Merriwell.

In some universe that is separate but parallel to ours, Max Merriwell is a prolific novelist. Each year he writes three books: a science fiction novel under his own name, a fantasy novel under the pen name Mary Maxwell, and a mystery under the pen name Weldon Merrimax.

In the universe in which we live, Max Merriwell is a pen name of mine.

When I first started thinking about Max Merriwell, he wanted to write a particular novel titled
There and Back Again
, a parody of Tolkien’s
The Hobbit
, retold as a space opera. In Max’s tale, the central character is a “norbit” who lives in the asteroid belt of our solar system, a quiet backwater in a busy galaxy. The norbit lives in a hollowed-out asteroid and flies about the asteroid belt in a steam-powered rocket. One day, he finds a message pod adrift in the asteroid belt. Soon, he is swept up on an adventure across the galaxy in the company of a notorious woman space pirate and a group of clone sisters, members of the galaxy’s richest and most powerful clone family.

Max’s pseudonym Mary Maxwell, also wanted to write a novel. She wanted to write a new version of the Tarzan legend. In Mary Maxwell’s novel, the main character is a young girl who is adopted by the wolves in gold rush California.

I thought about all this for a while and realized that I, too, wanted to write a novel. The novel I wanted to write was about Max Merriwell. Max, the prolific writer described above, is hired to teach a writing workshop on a cruise ship. The ship enters the Bermuda Triangle; events from novels that Max has written begin to bleed through into the reality of the cruise ship; and Max’s pseudonyms show up and make trouble.

Oh yes, somewhere along the way, I realized that Pat Murphy was a character in all of these novels. In
There and Back Again
, she is a curator of alien artifacts. In
Wild Angel
, Patrick Murphy is a Pinkerton investigating a stagecoach robbery. And in
Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell
, Pat Murphy is a graduate student in physics who explains impossible events using quantum mechanics.

I found all this very funny, but the project was more than a joke. Why parody
The Hobbit
? Why rewrite Tarzan? Because these are fantasy classics that I remember vividly from my childhood. I remember them so well, in part, because there was no space for me in them.

When I was growing up I read constantly. I read a great deal of science fiction and fantasy in which the starring roles were filled by boys and men. Tarzan was the adventurer and Jane was just a sidekick. Hobbit men were swept up in adventures and the hobbit women chided them when they came home.

As a child, I would think about stories I had read whenever I was bored. And I would rewrite each one so there was a place for me in the story. To do so, I had to mentally edit the text or imagine myself as a boy. I became quite adept at both. In the version of Tarzan that I told myself, a scrawny fourth-grade girl accompanied the Lord of the Jungle on every adventure.

As an adult, I understand why this reimagining is important. I read Carolyn Heilbrun’s book
Writing a Woman’s Life
and realized the importance of stories in shaping how we think about the world and about ourselves. Heilbrun wrote,

It is a hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what conventions demand. Whatever their force or medium, these stories have formed us all…

Gently parodying Tarzan and
The Hobbit
in Max and Mary’s novels let me create new and transformative works that adjusted what I saw as troubling flaws in the originals. In these books, women are the heroes and the adventurers, the movers and shakers—not the ones who stay home or wait to be rescued.

For some time, this series of novels remained a joke that I was telling myself. Then I shared the joke with Beth Meacham, an editor with Tor Books. And before I knew it I was hard at work on
There and Back Again by Max Merriwell
.

While I was working on that book, I had a sign over my desk that said
This is not a Pat Murphy novel. This is a Max Merriwell novel.
Writing as Max Merriwell proved to be wonderfully liberating. You see, Max loves his own work. He welcomes, without criticism, each new idea that comes along. He’s off on an adventure, and he’s having a grand time.

Writing
Wild Angel by Mary Maxwell by Max Merriwell
was equally interesting. Since I was still writing under the influence of Max Merriwell, it was a rollicking adventure tale. But I was always aware as I was writing that I was a woman who was writing as a man who was writing as a woman. This awareness colored the way I approached many scenes.

In the final book,
Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell
, the tangled threads come together. Working with material from
The Hobbit
and Tarzan met my goal of transforming the classic tales that I grew up with; the final book addresses the transformative nature of stories themselves—the fundamental reason for writing all three books.

“You are the stories you tell yourself,” Mary Maxwell explains to Susan, the main character in
Adventures in Time and Space
. You invent your world; you invent yourself. But you need the right stories to help you on the way.

I said at the beginning that this project was an enormous joke and a metafictional experiment. I’m sorry to say that not everyone shared the joke. This omnibus volume contains two of the three novels.
There and Back Again by Max Merriwell
is no longer in print.*

Fortunately, I wrote each of the three books to stand alone, as well as to contribute to a greater whole. When I wrote them, I believed that stories had the power to change the world. And I believe that still.

Pat Murphy

*The Estate of J. R. R. Tolkien and Pat Murphy have agreed that Ms. Murphy and her publisher, Tor Books, will discontinue the publication of Ms. Murphy’s book
There and Back Again
, which the Estate contends is an infringement of J. R. R. Tolkien’s classic work
The Hobbit
. Ms. Murphy and Tor contend that Ms. Murphy’s novel does not infringe but is rather a transformative feminist commentary on
The Hobbit
and thus constitutes clear fair use, but have nonetheless agreed to discontinue the publication of Ms. Murphy’s book in an effort to avoid further dispute.

Pat Murphy has won numerous awards for her thoughtful, literary science fiction and fantasy writing, including two Nebula Awards, the Philip K. Dick Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She has published eight novels and many short stories. Her works include
Rachel in Love
;
The Falling Woman
;
The City, Not Long After
;
Nadya
; and
Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell
, a novel that
Publishers Weekly
called the “cerebral equivalent of a roller-coaster ride.” Her children’s novel,
The Wild Girls
, received a Christopher Award in 2008.

In addition to writing fiction, Pat writes about science for children and adults. She has authored three science books for adults and more than fifteen science activity books for children. Her science writings have been honored with the American Institute of Physics Science Communication Award, the Science Books and Films Prize for Excellence in Science Books, the Pirelli INTERNETional Award for environmental publishing, and an award from
Good Housekeeping
.

In 1991, with writer Karen Fowler, Pat cofounded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender roles. This award is funded by grassroots efforts that include auctions and bake sales, harnessing the power of chocolate chip cookies in an ongoing effort to change the world.

Pat enjoys looking for and making trouble. Her favorite color is ultraviolet. Her favorite book is whichever one she is working on right now.

David Wright

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Wild Angel Copyright © 2000 by Pat Murphy

Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell Copyright © 2001 by Pat Murphy

Cover design by Kelly Parr

978-1-4804-8328-6

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

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