Murphy, Pat Books

The Science Explorer Out and About: Fantastic Science Experiments Your Family Can Do Anywhere! (Science Explorer Bk 2)

Pat Murphy, Ellen Klages, Linda Shore, Jason Gorski, Exploratorium (Organization)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Science Teacher Resource Material 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This volume from the Exploratorium in San Francisco is a must resource for all Middle School and Junior High School science teachers. Don't requisition it -- just buy it -- before it's completely out of print and gone! js

Editorial Review:

In a companion to The Science Explorer, both chidren and parents can learn about a variety of objects while enjoying exciting experiments and discoveries inside and outside of the home. Original. 50,000 first printing."

Black Swan, White Raven

John Crowley, Joyce Carol Oates, Pat Murphy, Nancy Kress, Jane Yolen, Anne Bishop

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Better Than SNOW WHITE, BLOOD RED 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Why is this fairy tale anthology out of print? It's got a great collection of stories! I liked practically everything that was in here. SNOW WHITE, BLOOD RED may have been the first volume in editors Datlow and Windling's series of such books, but this fourth one is hands-down more gripping... the stories are better written, in my opinion.

Among my favorite selections from this volume are:
SNOW IN DIRT by Michael Blumlein
SPARKS by Gregory Frost
THE REVEREND's WIFE by Midori Snyder
THE TRUE STORY by Pat Murphy, and
GODMOTHER DEATH by Jane Yolen

I hope BLACK SWAN, WHITE RAVEN is published once more so I can grab my own copy. I have the first three anthologies and haven't read number 2 and number 3 yet, but that was only because I had to finish this one in time to return it to the library. Thank goodness they have it!

If you like this series, then I definitely recommend getting your hands on this one.

Editorial Review:

This is the fourth volume in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's ongoing anthology series that invites modern authors to rewrite classic fairy tales. Like many of the original stories themselves, these retellings are often dark, and many contain erotic subtexts. While some of the authors choose to stick to the more traditional aspects of folklore, others reinvent their tales entirely, such as the seven dwarfs who turn into "Three Dwarfs and 2000 Maniacs" at the hands of author Don Webb. As usual, Datlow and Windling have managed to enlist an impressive roster of professional writers for their project, with headliners such as Joyce Carol Oates, John Crowley, and Jane Yolen. These seasoned veterans are mixed in with some relative newcomers to create a collection that is as diverse as it is unique. --Craig E. Engler

The City, Not Long After

Pat Murphy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

How would artists fight a war? 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

After a plague that killed most of the population, San Francisco has become an artists' colony. A young woman goes to San Francisco to find her mother and to warn the residents of the coming invasion. The artists must fight to defend their city, but they'd rather be painting the Golden Gate Bridge blue.

This is an entertaining, unusual, and well written post-apocalyptic story that gives new meaning to the phrase "the art of war." It includes magical elements that I could've done without, but all in all, I really enjoyed it.

Editorial Review:

Half a generation ago, a gesture in the name of peace turned out to spread plague and disaster. In San Francisco, the survivors are heir to a city transformed. It is a haunted, dreaming place peopled with memories, and in a strange way nearly alive itself. And although it is only beginning to recover from near-ultimate disaster, the city is at risk again. An army of power-hungry men are descending on San Francisco. Teenagers Jax and Danny-boy must lead the fight for freedom using the only weapons they have—art, magic, and the soul of the city itself.

The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1: Sex, the Future, & Chocolate Chip Cookies (The James Tiptree Award Anthology series)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

groundbreaking, provocative, and hot 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

The Tiptree Award is given to speculative fiction (fantasy and science fiction) that pushes the boundaries of gender. The award was named for a writer (James Tiptree, Jr.) extolled for masculine writing, who was later revealed to be a woman (Alice Sheldon). The Tiptree bake sales were created to be an ironic source of funding for the award. Hence the tag line of this subversive anthology: "Sex, the Future, and Chocolate Chip Cookies."

In "Birth Days" by Geoff Ryman, a geneticist trying to cure homosexuality discovers reproductive freedom. It's a sweet, surpising and pointed story. Richard Calder's "The Catgirl Manifesto," is a faux-academic piece in which Lolita-like catgirls cause social havoc with their deadly allure -- sexy and creepy as hell. Ursula K. Le Guin weighs in with a characteristically wry essay, "Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love." She points out that Margaret Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE is actually a science fiction novel, but that Atwood's publishers were terrified to bill it as such, given the reputation of the genre.

In a clever juxtaposition, three versions of the "The Snow Queen" fairy tale are included, inlcuding the original Hans Christian Andersen version in a new translation (not at all as you remember it!); "Lady of the Ice Garden" by Kara Dalkey, set in feudal Japan; and Kelly Link's "Travels with the Ice Queen," which has a distinctly modern (ok, postmodern) spin, and may be one of the best fairy-tale retellings I've ever read.

These excellent stories and essays are from the 2003 winner of the Tiptree Award (Matt Ruff for SET THIS HOUSE IN ORDER), and the short-listed selections (which are announced at the same time as the winner, and given almost equal billing). Other contributors include Karen Joy Fowler, Joanna Russ, Suzy McKee Charnas, and Pat Murphy.

This is a thoughtful, entertaining, and frankly long-overdue anthology. If you like sexy, challeging, and utterly captivating writing, this is the book for you.

Editorial Review:

This debut anthology features short fiction, novel excerpts, and essays that have won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Created in 1991 to honor the innovative fiction of Alice Bradley Sheldon (who wrote under the pen name James Tiptree), the Tiptree Award is presented to speculative fiction that explores and expands gender roles—and in the process touches on the most fundamental of human desires: the need for sex, for love, and for acceptance. This collection includes thought-provoking essays by Suzy McKee Charnas, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Pat Murphy, and Joanna Russ.

The City, Not Long After

Pat Murphy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A wonderful book, worth reading & re-reading! 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I've read this book a number of times since I first discovered it a few years ago. The story & characters stay at the edge of my memory and as the details get blurry, I take it out & read it again. Pat Murphy's description of San Franscisco as the artists transform it, is so vivid that I can see their art and understand its impact. It's an entrancing book -- I wish it had a sequel.

minimal-footprint war story - art vs. military 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 6 people found this review helpful.

So there's this plague, see, that wipes out about 99.9 percent of the population. San Francisco is a big artist commune - one group paints the Golden Gate Bridge blue. An army decides to take over. The ensuing war is one of the oddest battles ever fought - soldiers, cut down by tranquilizers, have the word DEAD painted on their cheeks, and are warned via a letter that if they don't consider themselves hors-de-combat, they may very well die for real next time. Other soldiers are dived-bombed with water balloons full of jasmine perfume and LSD. Probably the lowest body count of any book featuring battle scenes. I read this book on a whim and fell madly in love with it. I have to reread it again soon.

Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell

Pat Murphy

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Susan Galina is lost--and that's just the beginning of this thoroughly enjoyable journey. On the cruise ship Odyssey, Susan and her friend Pat meet writer Max Merriwell and are drawn into a series of mysteries fueled by the alarming possibility that Max's pseudonyms are somehow taking on lives of their own. The lines of reality become more blurred every day, forcing Susan to face some private monsters while Pat constructs an elegant quantum physics explanation of the growing chaos.

There's plenty of wackiness and just plain fun--trance-inducing conga music, wolves on the recreation deck, and the Flaming Rum Monkey--but Adventures in Time and Space is more than simply a wild ride through intersecting possibilities: it's also an exploration of personal relativity, the power of individual choice to create any number of potential realities. Readers should be ready to enter into the spirit of the game: as one character says, "Reality is a much more flexible concept than most people think." Murphy's clear prose, sharp wit, and keen observations of the dreams and fears of the human heart make the most of all the possibilities. --Roz Genessee

Wild Angel

Pat Murphy

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Though Wild Angel, Pat Murphy's frontier fantasy, deals with both wolves and westward expansion, readers of her lycanthrope novel Nadya should not expect a retread. This playful homage to the Tarzan books and American tall tales travels a lighter, more sparkling road.

Set in the California gold country between 1850 and 1863, the novel follows the adventures of Sarah McKensie, orphaned at age 3 by a stagecoach robber. Sarah is adopted and nursed by the she-wolf Wauna (who has lost her litter of pups to the same brutal man) and is accepted into the wolf pack. As she matures, Sarah learns to assist in the pack's well-being by contributing human tools--a found knife, a bow and arrow, and a lariat stolen from a would-be cowpoke--to the hunt.

With her best friend and pack-sister Beka at her side, Sarah becomes a local legend--the Wild Angel of the Sierras, rescuer of imperiled travelers. Sarah's altruism is motivated less by compassion than by curiosity, bafflement by the settlers' inability to perceive the world around them, and a passion for biscuits.

Surrounding Sarah is a kaleidoscopic cast: an artist with a shady past; a young Indian shaman; a mesmerist-cum-temperance crusader; a circus impresario with a pack of poodles and an elephant named Ruby; a young woman on the lam from her strait-laced aunt; the hilarious fraternal order E Clampus Vitus (or "Clampers"); Samuel Clemens (in a brief and thwarted cameo); and, of course, two hiss-worthy villains--one human, one lupine.

Throughout this tale of coincidence, chance reunions, heroism, villainy, romance, revenge, and adventure, Murphy weaves deft comedic touches--including Sarah's unforgettable improvisation during a staging of "The Drunkard." Even the one continuity blip near the end of the novel reads not as authorial carelessness but as a knowing wink to the plot-and-character-juggling serial writers of the past.

Murphy has written Wild Angel as a novel by alter-ego/imaginary friend Max Merriwell written as Mary Maxwell. The conceit isn't necessary for enjoyment of the novel, but the three explanatory afterwords, by Maxwell, Merriwell, and Murphy, are pure jam.

Before embarking upon this delightful novel, readers would be well advised to check their realism at the door and adopt the motto of the Clampers--Credo Quia Absurdum, "I believe because it is absurd." --Eddy Avery

Nadya (Wolf Chronicles)

Pat Murphy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

lovely! 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Nadya is a wonderful book. It is the story of a young woman who happens to be a werewolf looking for love and herself. She explores animal/human and woman/man binaries. She approaches love openly, without defining herself as any sexuality. The book is full of wonderful imagery and strong characters such as Dmitri's school-teacher in Russia, to the young, wild girl Jenny, to the Indian chief and the settlers in the home Nadya finally finds. I would recomend this book to ages 14 and up for anyone struggling with who they are and what others would like them to be.

Editorial Review:

Nadya embodies the 19th century idea of the Other: she is a woman, and she is an animal. Comfortable in her skin(s), a child of nature in many ways, she cannot fit into the artificial structure and mores of 19th century America. Although Nadya responds without artifice or duplicity to others (Rufus Jones, Elizabeth Metcalf), the priceless honesty she offers is undervalued and rejected. Nadya's search for a place in which she can safely be herself, woman and wolf, takes her across the plains, deserts, and mountains of western America. Fleeing to the utmost extremity of the continent, she stops and stands her ground on the Oregon shore.

Alien Sex: 2

Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, Connie Willis, Pat Murphy, Leigh Kennedy

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The James Tiptree Award Anthology 3: Subversive Stories about Sex and Gender (The James Tiptree Award Anthology series)

Karen Joy Fowler

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

An excellent study in science-fiction. 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book for a sci-fi class I was taking and was very impressed. The stories selected are each unique in their own way and make a statement not only about science fiction, but about gender and women's issues.

Editorial Review:

Returning again to the fertile ground of sex and identity, this third entry in a successful and controversial anthology series continues to celebrate thought-provoking and provocative fiction that explores and expands gender. Through their subversive, engaging stories, Tiptree Award–winning authors offer fascinating speculations on the ever-increasing mutability of our public—and private—selves. James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon, whose lasting contributions to the gender-bending genre are honored with this annual award, now in its 15th year. Previous winners of the Tiptree Award include Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, M. John Harrison, Kelly Link, Joe Haldeman, and Joanna Russ.