Episode One: The Return of Dorothy!
The third in L. Frank Baum's immortal Oz books, Ozma of Oz is the first of what can be called a "sub-trilogy" of stories. Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard In Oz, and The Road to Oz all chronicle journeys by Dorothy through weird countries with the ultimate goal of reaching Oz itself. This is the best of the three, if only because it introduces one of the best villains in the Oz series (and the only one to become a recurring character): The Nome King.
But we'll get to him in good time. Our story begins with Dorothy accompanying her poor sick Uncle Henry on a voyage to Australia. (Evidently Uncle Henry's doctor is trying to kill him.) One gets the sense that Dorothy's perennially hard-up Uncle Henry must have had a couple of good years down on the farm if he can afford to take time off for a sea voyage. This is reflected in John R. Neill's drawings, too: where Denslow drew Dorothy as an old-fashioned looking pioneer girl in a gingham dress, Neill gives her a much more stylish look, kind of a miniature Gibson Girl in a short frock and sun hat.
Dorothy's ongoing battle with meteorology enters another round when the ship is struck by a storm at sea. In an unusually boneheaded move, Dorothy wanders out on deck to look for Uncle Henry. Once again we see that fear is not in her vocabulary: she feels only "a sort of joyous excitement in defying the storm."
The storm doesn't take this lying down, and blows Dorothy and a nearby chicken coop overboard. Fortunately the coop floats, so Dorothy climbs aboard and with lunatic good humor chuckles "Why, I've got a ship of my own!"
The storm dies down and Dorothy curls up and goes to sleep. Fortunately she's in tropical waters and isn't about to die of hypothermia. When dawn comes she discovers she has a fellow passenger in the coop: Billina, a yellow hen who managed to avoid getting blown away in the storm. Billina can talk, which comes as a bit of a surprise to both of them. Soon the coop washes ashore on a white sand beach in an unknown country.
While Billina scratches around looking for food the way chickens do, she comes across an ornate old golden key buried in the sand. Dorothy tucks it into her pocket, and then goes in search of her own breakfast.
What she finds is one of Baum's most charming inventions: trees that bear lunch-boxes and dinner-pails as fruit. They have sandwiches, soup, pickles, pie -- all linked to the inner surface of the lunchbox by stems. The leaves of the trees are paper napkins. It's a very science-fictional concept, really. Just the sort of thing some future genetic engineer might pull off. I'm particularly impressed by the detail of the little stems connecting the foodstuffs to the box; that shifts the whole concept about four notches over toward science fiction. The existence of lunch-box trees convinces Dorothy that this must be a fairy country. Billina is skeptical.
Just then the owners of the carry-out trees arrive: the Wheelers. These are another of Baum's races of randomly hostile freaks, but they're quite memorable. They have wheels for hands and feet, and zoom around very effectively, making threatening noises. They also dress like Elton John, which is pretty terrifying. Dorothy and Billina take refuge from them among some rocks on the seashore, where the Dalek Effect1 keeps them safe from the Wheelers.
Among the rocks Dorothy finds a door with a lock, and unlocks it with the key she found. And inside is . . . Tiktok the Machine Man!
Tiktok is made of copper and filled with clockwork, which needs to be wound up. He has three separate systems for thought, movement, and speech, and they are independently powered. Unfortunately Tiktok can't wind himself up -- not because it violates the laws of thermodynamics; he just can't reach the keyholes.
He's a great character, delivering all his lines in a monotone which lets him get away with a lot of deadpan humor. He is also one of the first sympathetic and friendly robots in fiction, predating Eando Binder's Adam Link by almost thirty years. (He isn't actually called a robot because Karel Capek didn't get around to inventing the word until 1920.)
Tiktok is the first "mechanical man" who seems to have been conceived of as a character rather than a walking metaphor. You can look for all sorts of hidden symbolism about industrialization or mechanization, but at the end of the day Tiktok is just another lovable, true-hearted oddball from Oz. The fact that he's mechanical (as opposed to being, say, stuffed with straw) is just a detail.
I've already written about the fusion of magic and technology in the Oz books, and Tiktok is a prime example. He's a manufactured object, made in the kingdom of Ev by the firm of Smith & Tinker -- but of course he's a machine which can only work in a fairy country.
He describes his creators and what became of them. Smith painted a picture of a river so realistic that he fell in and drowned, while Tinker constructed a ladder which reached to the Moon, climbed up there, and found he liked it so much he pulled the ladder up behind him and decided to stay.
John R. Neill did a wonderful illustration of Mr. Tinker reaching the Moon by ladder, with clouds, stars, and birds in the background, and the Man in the Moon welcoming Mr. Tinker in through a shuttered window set in the cratered disk of the Moon. Somehow the image of the Moon as some sort of gigantic house was very striking to me as a kid reading the Oz books for the first time. It was only a few years later that the phrase "That's no moon . . . " entered the public consciousness. I wonder if George Lucas was an Oz fan.
Incidentally, the firm of Smith & Tinker really exists: it's a company that produces Alternate Reality Games and new media fiction. Evidently Jordan Weisman really was an Oz fan as a boy.
Tiktok informs Dorothy that she's in the Kingdom of Ev, just across the desert from Oz. Ev doesn't sound like a happy place. The late King Evoldo was a psychopath who beat his servants until they died -- but beating Tiktok only kept him well polished. The King sold his wife and ten children to the Nome King, but came to regret it. He locked up Tiktok, threw the key into the ocean, then jumped in after it and drowned. (How Tiktok knows what happened after he was locked up is a testament to Smith & Tinker's incomparable workmanship.)
He also brings Dorothy up to speed on the events of The Marvelous Land of Oz (Billina doesn't believe any of it), and then takes care of the Wheelers, who are still lurking about. It turns out that having wheels for hands means they can't really harm anyone, and their fearsome reputation is all a bluff. A few whacks from a dinner pail sends them packing.
The trio of Dorothy, Tiktok, and Billina set out for Evna, the capital city of Ev, where the royal palace stands. We'll pick up the thread there next time.
1Do I really have to explain this?
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