Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell

by Pat Murphy Narrated by Johanna Ward

Overview

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.

Susan Galina and her friend Pat are relaxing on a luxury cruise ship heading from New York to Europe via Bermuda. Trouble begins when one of the passengers, author Max Merriwell, receives a threatening note that appears to come from one of his own pseudonyms. Susan hears wolves howling, passengers are seized with a dancing mania, and monsters lurk in the corridors. An eyewitness reports a murder that seems not to have happened. While others struggle to understand these strange events, Pat seeks the explanation in quantum physics, in this suspenseful, funny, and fast-paced science fiction romp.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Library Journal

Newly divorced and seeking a change in her life, Susan Galina accompanies her friend Pat on a vacation cruise that turns into a bizarre encounter with shifting realities and multiple possibilities. As the ship enters the Bermuda Triangle, mysterious occurrences challenge the perceptions of the passengers, and Susan must face her own uncertainties before she can sort out the chaotic forces that threaten her friends and her newfound happiness. Murphy (There and Back Again, Wild Angel) here completes her triptych of novels that pays homage to classic tales of adventure and whimsy with an eerie mystery that recalls the works of Lewis Carroll and the theories of quantum physics. Highly recommended for sf collections. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

As promised last time out, Murphy ties together both of her latest books (There and Back Again, 1999, and The Wild Angel, 2000) in this quasi-metafiction involving the I Ching, parallel universes, wolves, personal growth, literary games, and whatall. Laid-off, recently divorced librarian Susan Galina, having won a trip aboard the cruise ship Odyssey, takes her friend, physics graduate student Pat Murphy, along too. Also aboard ship, to teach a writing workshop, is "Weldon Merrimax", a.k.a. SF writer Max Merriwell-he writes fantasy as Mary Maxwell and mainstream-noir as Weldon Merrimax. Soon enough, the ship enters the Bermuda triangle. Susan becomes acquainted with the ship's attractive, competent security officer, Tom Clayton, and meets an unpleasant character called-Weldon Merrimax. Later, Tom must investigate when another passenger complains that Weldon Merrimax has fleeced him at cards. And then Mary Maxwell shows up, befriending the insecure Susan. Once again Tom goes into action when witnesses describe how Weldon Merrimax murders Pat Murphy-not Susan's physicist friend, but apparently a character out of a book by Mary Maxwell. Still another . . . but you'll get the idea. Will Weldon achieve his obscure aims, and will Susan shrug off her inhibitions and get together with Tom? And just how many Pat Murphys are there? Amusing, sometimes, and well handled but not really puzzling or enlightening: the sort of book where, halfway through all the shenanigans, you'll either care desperately or not at all.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169777239
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/2007
Edition description:	Unabridged

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