By sending the pod to the
very important Farr clan, Bailey opens the door to adventure. The Farrs
are cloned siblings -- "sibs" -- of a space explorer, and the pod is part
of a map into unknown space. Together with an adventurer named Gitana,
the Farrs want to discover the secrets of this map, and Bailey is soon
talked into joining them.
His non-Farr perspective
helps the party out time and time again, saving them from spiders, helping
them escape in barrels and confronting a great monster. He even plays in
a riddle game of sorts.
Two homages in one
"There and Back Again" was
Tolkien's subtitle for The Hobbit, and the connections between the
two books are obvious.
Norbits, like hobbits, keep
to themselves and live underground in enclosed spaces. But in Murphy's
space milieu, norbits live in hollowed-out asteroids, and their name is
either from a slurred version of "in orbit" or from the phrase "n-orb,"
indicating one not from Earth. Bailey's journey uses spaceships, not ponies,
and the Farrs travel through wormholes instead of mountain passes.
Of course, it's not just
a simple high-tech Tolkien translation. Murphy is paying homage to more
than one classic fantasy author here, making frequent references not only
to Tolkien but to Lewis Carroll.
Her chapter epigrams are
from "The Hunting of the Snark", and the Farrs' quarry is described as
a "Snark" as well. Gitana’s ship is the Jabberwock, and the group calls
a creature they face in deep space "the Boojum."
What do you have in your
pocketeses?
Murphy weaves all of these
references together with new material, creating a combination different
from the original sources.
Her version of Gollum is
an excellent example of this. Bailey encounters this character, here named
"Rattler," while attempting to escape from a band of extremists who harvest
living bodies for organic parts.
Rattler is grafted together
from these, as well as some mechanical parts, and has both a mysterious
device and the ability to block Bailey’s escape. Bailey bargains for both
the device and his own freedom by winning a haiku riddle contest.
Structurally, the incident
is almost identical to the riddle game Bilbo Baggins plays with Gollum.
But here, the exchange between living being and cyborg raises larger questions
about experiments with technology and the nature of humanity.
Murphy has also evened up
The Hobbit's gender imbalance, making Gitana -- her version of Gandalf
-- and most of the Farr sibs female. By presenting a version of society
more in line with our own, she calls attention to some of the quirks in
Tolkien's story.
Another departure from
The Hobbit is Murphy's heavy use of dialogue instead of description.
Bailey's conversations with the Farrs, Gitana, and a sentient spaceship
named Fluffy create a window on the SF aspects of their world. It's also
irreverent, which is a nice change from an unrelieved flow of "epic" dialogue.
"And now I think I am
quite ready to go on another journey"
There and Back Again is
credited as the work of two authors: Pat Murphy and Max Merriwell. The
latter is a fictional writer which Murphy has created for this and two
upcoming novels.
As Murphy describes Merriwell
in the second of this book's two afterwords -- the first is written by
"Max" himself -- he is an SF writer of the old school, keeping his name
clearly identified with one genre and using pseudonyms for other work.
Merriwell's next novel will
be a historical fantasy, written as "Mary Maxwell." Meanwhile, Murphy is
planning for her pseudonymous self Merriwell to encounter his own alter
egos aboard a cruise ship in The Adventures of Max Merriwell.
This metafictional dimension
makes There and Back Again the beginning of a journey for Murphy
in which she plans to consider what it means to write within genres of
fiction.
Space fiction clearly has
more in common with epic fantasy than one might think -- might Murphy connect
it to other genres as well?
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