There and Back Again

There and Back Again, by Max Merriwell is a 1999 science fiction novel by Pat Murphy, retelling J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit as a space opera, combined with Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. It was published by Tor Books. Murphy has described it as "both an enormous joke and a serious meta-fictional experiment", with "Max Merriwell" being a science-fiction author who exists in an alternate reality, and whose writing is different from Murphy's own; the book is the first in a series of three novels which are all purportedly written by "Merriwell" under various pseudonyms. Synopsis When asteroid-dwelling "norbit" Bailey Beldon discovers a lost message beacon, it leads Gitana the pataphysicist to recruit him for a grand adventure that takes him far from home.