Pat Murphy (1955– ) is a US writer of science fiction and fantasy who lives in San Francisco and first began publishing notable short fiction with “Nightbird at the Window” (Chrysalis 5, 1979). 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.
After editing and producing environmental reports and graphics for various Pacific Coast organizations, Murphy began in 1982 to edit Exploratorium magazine, the quarterly journal of the Exploratorium, a San Francisco museum designed to promote a hands-on relationship between human perception and the arts and sciences. In the 1980s, Murphy, like Kim Stanley Robinson, was described as a Humanist writer, a position considered in opposition to cyberpunk, although the distinction is not quite so clear-cut, given the inclusion of writers like Pat Cadigan in the cyberpunk movement. Like Robinson, Murphy resisted the labeling, which she clearly found limiting.
“Rachel in Love” (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 1987) is probably Murphy’s most famous work, and won a Nebula and a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. It features as its viewpoint character a female chimpanzee with enhanced intelligence who escapes an impersonally horrific research institute. The story’s focus on its titular character and devotion to contemporary realism make it particularly effective science fiction, and it is even more relevant today, given advances in animal behavior science, the recent retirement of chimps experimented on in the United States, and the importance of redefining our relationship with animals in general.
In an afterword to her collection Points of Departure, Murphy writes, “Many of my stories deal with outsiders, people who are trapped in a world where they do not belong, [including] Rachel, the chimp with the mind of a teenage girl. These are characters who have, in a sense, found that secret door I was always looking for [as a child]. They’ve entered a new world filled with exotic things and strange people; it just happens to be the world in which we live every day.”