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Authors, Books, and Authors
Aug. 17th, 2010 02:10 amEver since I went to Clarion, I've been meeting authors. It's a different world, on the other side of the Clarion Portal. (And I've even been lucky to be there in the nascent stages - I've now read and critiqued several first novels that went on to be published.) But this was different. This time, I met the author first, and then read her book.
I've met Pat Murphy - who's immensely interesting and likable - a few times, through Karen Joy Fowler. So the last time, I decided to ask her which of her books she'd recommend as a starter. She asked me a few questions to establish my tastes. "Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell," she said. Since we were at Borderlands, I had hopes they'd have it somewhere.
It turned out to be a fun, many-layered book in which norbit Bailey Beldon leaves his comfortable meteoroid home to go on an adventure with a sib of cloned women. It's The Hobbit reimagined as a space opera, with Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark as a theme, and the whole peppered with wonderful imaginative concepts - like people plunging down wormholes to emerge as mirror images of their former selves, able to draw nourishment only from food of the same chirality. Or a family-friendly feminist version of Islam adopted by the Farr clan of clones, while the people of the planet Ophir became worshippers of the Hindu God Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, and people Indigo evolved a cargo cult.
At the end of the book, there's a further convolution; Max Merriwell is a pseudonym of Pat Murphy's but has his own pseudonyms, Mary Maxwell and Weldon Merrimax.
I loved it. The only problem I had with it was my own - I kept mapping Bailey's adventures onto those of Bilbo Baggins, and thinking what fun it must have been to write this book, which of course pulled me out of it while the adventure kept sucking me back in.
I think I'm going to re-read it.
I've met Pat Murphy - who's immensely interesting and likable - a few times, through Karen Joy Fowler. So the last time, I decided to ask her which of her books she'd recommend as a starter. She asked me a few questions to establish my tastes. "Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell," she said. Since we were at Borderlands, I had hopes they'd have it somewhere.
"It's awesome," said one of the people at the counter. "My own copy is almost falling apart." But they didn't have it. So instead, I bought "There and Back Again by Max Merriwell."
It turned out to be a fun, many-layered book in which norbit Bailey Beldon leaves his comfortable meteoroid home to go on an adventure with a sib of cloned women. It's The Hobbit reimagined as a space opera, with Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark as a theme, and the whole peppered with wonderful imaginative concepts - like people plunging down wormholes to emerge as mirror images of their former selves, able to draw nourishment only from food of the same chirality. Or a family-friendly feminist version of Islam adopted by the Farr clan of clones, while the people of the planet Ophir became worshippers of the Hindu God Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, and people Indigo evolved a cargo cult.
At the end of the book, there's a further convolution; Max Merriwell is a pseudonym of Pat Murphy's but has his own pseudonyms, Mary Maxwell and Weldon Merrimax.
I loved it. The only problem I had with it was my own - I kept mapping Bailey's adventures onto those of Bilbo Baggins, and thinking what fun it must have been to write this book, which of course pulled me out of it while the adventure kept sucking me back in.
I think I'm going to re-read it.
