MURPHY, Pat

(1955-)

   Working name of US writer Patrice Ann Murphy (1955-), who began publishing sf in the 1970s, her first acknowledged story being "Nightbird at the Window" in Chrysalis 5 (anth 1979) ed Roy TORGESON. Her first novel was the obscurely published The Shadow Hunter (1982), in which a Stone-Age man is displaced by a TIME-TRAVEL device into a cruelly alienating future. The theme of displacement, whether through time or across the gulf ofspecies, significantly shapes PM's two most famous works. Rachel in Love (1987 IASFM; 1992 chap), which won a NEBULA and a THEODORE STURGEONMEMORIAL AWARD, tells from her point of view the story of a chimpanzee with enhanced INTELLIGENCE (see also APES AND CAVEMEN) who escapes an impersonally horrific research institute. Nothing in the tale, with the exception of Rachel's cognitively enhanced responses, is in any sense sf, or even unlikely. The Falling Woman (1986), which won PM another Nebula in the same year, concentrates upon a contemporary woman archaeologist who is capable of perceiving, through palimpsests of midden and artifact, figures from the period being investigated at a dig in Mexico, and can observe their ghostlike maintenance of their ancient daily endeavours. A triangle of implications develops intriguingly between one of the Mayans, who speaks to the protagonist, and her estranged daughter, and climaxes in a kind of healing transtemporal embrace.After editing and producing environmental reports and graphics for various Pacific Coast organizations, PM began in 1982 to edit the Exploratorium Quarterly, the journal of the Exploratorium, a San Francisco museum designed to promote a hands-on relationship between human perception and the arts and sciences. Elements of her next novel, The City, Not Long After (1984 Universe 14,anth ed Terry CARR as "Art in the War Zone"; much exp 1988), clearly extrapolate some of the Exploratorium agenda. Set after a plague HOLOCAUST in a physically intact San Francisco, the tale presents its protagonists' capacity to make ART analogous to the shaping of a new reality. If there is a slight air of local patriotism in the book's apotheosis of San Francisco, it is at the same time perhaps something of a relief toparticipate in a vision of the future not bound by CYBERPUNK shibboleths. PM, like Kim Stanley ROBINSON, had been described in the course of the1980s as a Humanist writer, in a formulation which opposed Cyberpunk to Humanism, generally to the discredit of the latter; also like Robinson, she resisted the labelling, which she clearly found procrustean. Her stories have been assembled as Points of Departure (coll 1990), which won a PHILIP K. DICK AWARD, and in Letters from Home (coll 1991 UK) with Pat CADIGAN and Karen Joy FOWLER, each author contributing solo tales to thevolume. Though PM's career seems to be edging away from sf, it can be predicted that, from her coign of vantage, she will continue to fertilize the genre.

   JC

   See also: FANTASY; INTERZONE.