Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality

by Pat Murphy

  That morning, she had found a piece of paper slipped under her door. A hexagram and a note written in a looping, feminine hand: “When a door has been opened, one can undertake the most dangerous things.”

  She didn’t know what would happen next.

  BAD GRRLZ’ GUIDE TO PHYSICS

  WHAT NEXT?

  I’ve been thinking about my dissertation and thinking about my advisor and thinking about how little I want to deal with defending my ideas to him. I’ve been thinking about Max’s comments on my theories, when he thought they were a science fiction novel.

  So I have a plan. I’m going to write a novel. It’ll be about a group of people on board a cruise ship. It’ll be about a writer whose pseudonyms show up and make trouble. It’ll be about reality and the stories people tell and the nature of both.

  I think it will be an interesting novel to write. It contains so many possibilities. So far, all I have is the beginning.

  A woman is wandering in a corridor, lost and confused. She is on a cruise ship about to set sail. She clutches a map, but the map doesn’t tell her which way to go. In her experience, maps are not always useful. The map is not the territory. In fact, the map rarely shows the most interesting parts of the territory.

  As she walks down the corridor, she hears a man talking about writing and talking about names and talking about who he is and who he isn’t. She begins to listen.

  That’s all I have so far. I’m sure the rest will become clear in good time.

  Afterword to Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell

  BY PAT MURPHY

  “The scientists try to tell us that the universe is made up of atoms and molecules; actually, the universe is made up of stories.

  —Muriel Rukeyser

  Max Merriwell is a fiction writer; Max Merriwell is a liar. So is Mary Maxwell. So is Weldon Merrimax. So is Pat Murphy. And so are you.

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

  For many years, I worked at the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art, and human perception. My background is in biology, but during my time at the Exploratorium I wrote about all branches of science, including physics and chemistry and human perception. Learning about perception made me realize the fundamental truth of Rukeyser’s statement.

  When I came to the Exploratorium, I assumed (like most people, I think) that the world I see around me is the real world. After working at the Exploratorium, I no longer believe that to be true.

  I see the world because light bounces off things in the world around me and enters my eyes. The eye’s cornea and lens focus the light to make an image on the retina, a layer of light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye. The cells of the retina send a message to my brain. My brain interprets those signals to create a mental image of the world.

  I don’t see the real world. I see a mental image constructed by my brain.

  Optical illusions—those tricky pictures where straight lines seem to bend, where sizes are distorted, where your eyes and brain are fooled into seeing the world as it isn’t—reveal some of the limitations of this mental image. At the Exploratorium, you can watch a person shrink as they walk across a distorted room, Also known as the Ames room, this three-dimensional optical illusion was invented by ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames, Jr. in 1934. Your brain expects the room to be rectangular. Unwilling to recognize that the room is an unfamiliar shape, your brain fabricates a plausible story to make sense of what it sees—the person is changing size.

  Many people treat optical illusions as amusing tricks, but they are much more. Optical illusions actually reveal the profound workings of your visual system. Researchers into visual perception use these puzzling pictures to figure out how your brain fabricates its fictions about the world.

  What you see is your brain’s interpretation of the world. The same is true for what you hear, feel, taste, and smell. All your perceptions are constructions of your brain, stories that your brain tells you about the signals it receives.

  What’s more, the same is true of your memories. The work of memory researchers shows that the memory of an event is malleable. Your brain constructs a memory from bits and pieces of what you saw and heard and felt at the time, then modifies that construction based on ideas and suggestions that come along after the event you are remembering has taken place.

  Essentially, your memories are stories that your brain tells and retells, rewriting as it goes along. This is something that many people find disturbing. Understandably so. Memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus writes: “Human beings feel attached to their remembered past, for the people, places, and events that we enshrine in memory give structure and definition to the person we think of as our ‘self.’” If we accept that memory spills over into dreams and imagination, then how do we know what’s real and what’s not?

  We don’t.

  Reality is a slippery thing. According to pataphysical philosopher Yves Rrognac, “The mind is a machine for manufacturing reality.” So reality, in turn, is manufactured by the mind. When I first realized how slippery reality was, I found the discovery to be rather disturbing. But eventually I came to realize that this slipperiness could be the source of a great deal of power and fun. That, I think, is when Max Merriwell, Mary Maxwell, and Weldon Merrimax came along. The book you are holding is the end of a three-year metafictional experiment, which began with There and Back Again (by Max Merriwell), continued with Wild Angel (by Mary Maxwell by Max Merriwell), and culminated in Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell.

  Though I have had a great deal of fun playing with reality in this book, I have maintained a certain respect for the laws of physics. The science described by Pat Murphy (the character) in her Bad Grrlz’ Guide is accurate. I did not make up any of the stuff about virtual particles popping in and out of the quantum vacuum. The physicists made that up on their own.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the end of a long process and many people helped me along the way.

  The crew of Princess Cruises’ Dawn Princess made my voyage with them quite enjoyable. Captain Attilio Guerrini, First Engineer Officer Martin Ross, and Security Officer Jimmy Green were kind enough to spare time from their busy schedules to tell me about their work.

  Karen Fowler, Angus MacDonald, Daniel Marcus, Carter Scholz, Michael Berry, Richard Russo, Michael Blumlein, Ellen Klages, Richard Kadrey, Paul Doherty, Linda Shore, and Avon Swofford took the time to read and thoughtfully comment on all or part of this manuscript. I could not have completed this project without their help. Laurie Brandt offered support and insight along the way. My friend Gary Crounse provided a pataphysical point of view upon request, an attitude that proved invaluable in completing this project.

  I want to thank Bad Girls Ellen Klages and Linda Shore for the good times we shared while working on the proposal for the Exploratorium’s Bad Girls’ Guide to Science. I hope someday we get to write the book! Special thanks to Ellen Klages for the memorable evening we spent inventing the recipe for the Flaming Rum Monkey, a dangerous drink for dangerous women.

  I thank my husband, Dave Wright, who provided love and support throughout this long project. I thank Beth Meacham, my editor at Tor Books, for being courageous enough to see this project through to the end, publishing each book in turn, never wavering from the course. I thank Betsy Mitchell and Open Road Media for republishing my books in electronic form. And I thank all my readers for coming along for the ride.

  Afterword to Bad Grrlz’ Guide to Reality

  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.

  About the Author

  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.

  W
ild 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.

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