Just The Caffeine Talking

Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 6

Party Like It's 1909!

The guests begin to arrive for Ozma's birthday party, and L. Frank Baum demonstrates an early mastery of the Superhero Crossover subgenre. All the guests are either characters from other Oz books, or from some of Baum's non-Oz fantasies. This book solidly cements all of Baum's fantasies into a single fictional universe. It's tempting to identify this as the first all-star team-up in modern literature.

Actually the "crossover" concept goes back centuries. Consider the stories of King Arthur and his knights. All the secondary characters -- Gawain, Lancelot, Tristan -- were the heroes of their own stories. If they were comic book superheroes each one would have his own title. But the urge to fold them into Arthur's Round Table was too great, so the court at Camelot was a medieval version of the Justice League. (I have a suspicion that Robin Hood's Merry Men are another example, but I don't know enough about medieval comic ballads and folktales to be sure.)

Earlier still, consider the voyage of the Argo. Jason's crew just happens to include nearly every notable hero of ancient Greek legend. Heracles shares an oar with Mopsus, Castor and Pollux have the bench across from Atalanta and Meleager, and Jason has trouble managing them all.

At the very dawn of literature we have the story of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is a great hero. He keeps peace and order in his city. He encounters the wild man Enkidu, and at first they fight. But when they've judged each other's qualities they become fast friends, and overcome mighty enemies together. Sound familiar? It's the ur-plot of every comic book superhero team-up issue ever. That's the first piece of literature known! I'd bet money that in ancient Mesopotamia there was a story-cycle about the adventures of Enkidu, long before his "crossover" appearance in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

As soon as storytellers created more than one fictional hero, the audience wanted to know what would happen if they met. Who'd beat who? The storytellers knew their market, and obliged. Today the Internet allows fan writers to create stories crossing characters over from very different fictional settings. Doctor Who encounters the Enterprise, X-Men meet Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter visits Narnia, Winnie the Pooh meets Dracula . . . I suspect this will be a feature of storytelling as long as humans create fiction.

Anyway. Back to Ozma's party. The guest list:

• The Scarecrow (his face newly repainted and his body stuffed with fresh straw for the occasion)

• Jack Pumpkinhead (who brings Ozma a necklace of pumpkin seeds set with gems)

• Glinda the Good

• Professor H.M. Wogglebug, T.E. (who has composed an Ode in honor of the occasion which the Scarecrow refuses to let him read aloud)

• Billina the hen, and her chicks (all named Dorothy)

• Tik-Tok

• The delegation from Hiland and Loland: King John Dough (a gingerbread man), Chick the Cherub (his androgynous "Head Boolywag") and the rubber bear Para Bruin. Their gift is a gingerbread crown set with pearls.

• A troop of Ryls and Knooks accompanying Santa Claus (Baum really should have saved him for last)

• The wax doll Queen of Merryland and her consort the Candy Man (no, he doesn't make or sell candy, he's made of candy)

• The Braided Man, from Dorothy and the Wizard In Oz (who has brought along some of his finest flutters)

• The Queen of Ev, young King Evardo, and the rest of the royal family, from Ozma of Oz. They've got the best gift of all: a necklace of diamonds set in radium. Since Ozma is an immortal fairy, this isn't the sinister assassination attempt it sounds like to modern readers.

• King Dox of Foxville

• King Bud and Princess Fluff of Noland, and Queen Zixi of Ix (the main characters of the novel Zixi of Ix; interestingly Zixi is the villain of that story, but she's also such a cool character Baum apparently couldn't resist throwing her in)

• King Kik-a-bray of Dunkiton

• Johnny Dooit (who may be delayed by work)

• The Good Witch of the North, in her first appearance since Dorothy's first arrival in Oz

The party is a grand two-day affair, full of adjectives. There's a banquet the first night, with entertainment by some of the guests. Everyone sleeps over at the palace and on the following day there's a big public celebration with a parade, performances by the Wizard and other notables of Oz. The grand finale involves a giant bubble-blower invented by the Wizard, which blows giant bubbles around people. The bubbles then transport them back to their home country, rather like the Rovers in The Prisoner.

It's pretty obvious from this section that L. Frank Baum had some experience managing children's birthday parties, because this is an absolutely awesome idea: "And now for the big final event of the party you all go home!"

Santa Claus takes charge of making sure Button-Bright gets home (since he knows where everyone lives), and passes the word to Polychrome's father to let down his rainbow in the Emerald City. Dorothy, however, doesn't appreciate bubble-riding, and plans to return home via Magic Belt. Ozma agrees to wish her home while she's asleep, so she'll wake up back in her bed in Kansas. And that's it.

Rereading Road to Oz, it's startling how little story there really is. We have one mild moment of tension when Dorothy and friends encounter the Scoodlers, but otherwise it's entirely a tourism narrative. They go places, they see things, they meet people. No conflict, no mystery, no real goals. It's barely a story at all. Perhaps Baum himself felt that this was rather thin stuff, because his next book is chock-full of suspense and conflict. We'll tackle that one next.

Steampunk and the End of the Future

Two weeks ago I attended the Arisia convention in Boston and had a wonderful time. One thing which was impossible to miss was the prevalence of steampunk costumes among some of the attendees, especially the younger ones. Maybe this was just because the guests of honor were Phil and Kaja Foglio, creators of the steampunk graphic novel series Girl Genius, but I'm not so sure. Steampunk is huge right now, and not just in the self-referential world of science fiction fandom.

Once upon a time, science fiction was the literature of the future. When Hugo Gernsback started publishing his "scientifiction" magazine, the stories were intended as straight prediction: here's what will be invented in the next few years. Since the set of writers who were also inventors was small, the tone quickly changed from prediction to speculation: what if we could fly to the Moon? What if there was a pill to prevent pregnancy?

In time, writers and readers gained a bit more sophistication, and science fiction stories combined their technological predictions with actual drama: what if we could fly to Mars and how would these characters react? What if you built a machine that could think and how would it interact with these other characters?

All these what-ifs were set in the future, either near or far. They were roadmaps to a territory that the writers and readers confidently expected to occupy. The future belonged to America, at least as far as American science fiction writers and readers were concerned. Oh, there were plenty of dystopias and apocalypses, but most of those were intended as warnings: "here be dragons" signs on the way to our future.

But now? The last Space Shuttle landed a year ago. A Presidential candidate who advocates a return to lunar exploration is mocked like Robert Goddard. For two election cycles the rhetoric has all been about America in decline. We hear that China will soon be the world's biggest economy, while we seem mired in debt and stagnation.

And what does this have to do with steampunk? Steampunk is science fiction without the future. Instead of asking what if about the future, about things that might happen, it asks what if about things that didn't happen. What if the Victorians had computers? What if they had visited other worlds? (And how would the characters be affected by these changes.) It also looks back to the spirit of the Industrial Revolution era -- which of course looked to the future.

It's hard not to see a connection. If the future isn't ours anymore, then our science fiction looks to the past, romanticizing the days when the future was ours. If we can't own the future, we can at least relive the days when we did.

Does this mean that an uptick in the Dow would spell doom for steampunk as a sub-genre? Or, like science fiction itself, which provided hopeful escapism from the Great Depression and a world war, will steampunk break loose from its origins to become a full-fledged genre in its own right?

We'll have to wait and see . . . in the future.

 

Feedback Wanted

This is a slightly odd request: I want to know which of my stories people like least. I'm a terrible judge because if I didn't like them I wouldn't have written them. So which are my worst? Use the comments or email as you prefer.

Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 5

We're going to summarize a lot here, because there's a long boring section between the time Our Heroes get into Oz and their arrival at the Emerald City. Most of it is taken up with introductions. Dorothy introduces her companions to Tiktok and Billina, who have come to welcome them. Then she introduces everyone to the Tin Woodman at his tin castle.

There is a nice bit in the illustrations: the Tin Woodman has (tin) statues of all his friends and companions in the castle gardens, and J.R. Neill cleverly draws the statues as being in the style of the original W.W. Denslow pictures from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He also very clearly draws Toto looking disparagingly at his earlier incarnation.

With the Tin Woodman now part of the growing party, they head for the Emerald City. Along the way they stop off to visit Jack Pumpkinhead, who lives in a house made from an enormous hollowed-out pumpkin. And again there's something very interesting in the illustration: Neill has drawn what are obviously electric power lines leading to Jack's pumpkin house! There's no mistaking: the wires end at ceramic insulators and everything.

Consider what this implies: someone (and I'd bet it's the Wizard) has built a generating plant in the Emerald City. Oz is electrified! In an earlier essay I mentioned the complete harmony of fantasy and technology in the Oz books, and this is another example. No pseudo-medieval fairyland here! Everything's up to date in the Emerald City.

There's also a weirdly grim little scene outside Jack's house -- the first thing Dorothy and Co. encounter is a row of gravestones, each marking the spot where Jack has buried one of his spoiled pumpkin heads. Interestingly, as with Princess Langwidere in Ozma of Oz, Jack's heads have different personalities. Some are cleverer than others, for instance. In a nice nod to continuity, all of Jack's replacement heads are carved for him by Ozma, who of course was his original creator back when she was a boy named Tip.

Now since Oz is a fairyland where no one ever dies, this suggests that anyone, not just magically-animated pumpkinhead men, can switch body parts if they feel like it. Since personal identity is not bound up with one's brain, Dorothy could theoretically lop off her own head and tie on the Scarecrow's highly intelligent one, or one of Jack Pumpkinhead's pumpkins. She could trade heads with the Wizard or General Jinjur. Bodies in Oz seem to be like computer game avatars -- however much you alter them, the essential "you" is unchanged.

More introductions: Cowardly Lion and Hungry Tiger, and finally the whole crew enter the Emerald City, where Dorothy has to introduce everyone to everyone else. This becomes a rather irritating feature of Oz books from here on out: whenever a new character arrives in the land, Baum can go on for pages and pages of introductions. Thankfully, his cast eventually gets so large he has to stop and just take it as given that if you've read this far into the series you know who everyone is.

The Shaggy Man is pleased to learn that there is no money in Oz, which means the people there enjoy their labors and never become proud or haughty. This is another change from the days of the Wizard, when it was explicitly stated that in the Emerald City one had to pay for everything. Of course, that was before the place was run by a fairy princess with magical powers.

There's a more plausible reason why nobody uses money in Oz: it's simply not practical. Everything in the whole kingdom is covered in gold or encrusted in jewels. Even simple household items would be worth J.P.Morgan's fortune in the outside world. If you're using gold and emerald as building materials, their value as money must be about on a par with asphalt. This means one would need tons of the stuff to make even ordinary purchases. They could use paper money, I hear someone thinking. Yes, but keep in mind that in Baum's day -- and indeed right up to the 1960s -- paper money was simply a convenient token representing "real" gold in a vault somewhere. So paper money in Oz would be absurdly inflated in value because of the abundance of gold and other precious things. Instead the Ozites have what amounts to a command economy, run by the fiat of their lovely Girl Ruler. The system works because it is under the command of a benevolent magical princess instead of, say, one of the Kim family of Pyongyang.

Finally in Chapter 20 Ozma turns up and reveals why she has brought Dorothy to Oz: it's Ozma's birthday and she's having a party! Now given that Ozma has the use of Dorothy's Magic Belt she could have just wished her there in an instant, but apparently Ozma was having a Tip moment and felt like jerking her friend around a little.

His dunk in the Truth Pond has affected the Shaggy Man. He's been trying to keep silent, but now he must admit that he lied to Dorothy when they first met. It turns out the story about avoiding Butterfield because someone there might give him money was a hoax. His real reason was that he stole the Love Magnet from a girl there.

Consider the implications! Until now there's been a strict (well, mostly strict) division between "fairy countries" like Oz, where magic works, and "civilized countries" like Kansas, where it doesn't. But apparently in Butterfield, KS, there was a young woman with a Love Magnet. If the Love Magnet could work there, what about other magical items? What about, say, Dorothy's Magic Belt? Ozma's been keeping it for her because she assures Dorothy that it wouldn't function outside of the Oz Continuum. But this now turns out to be less than true. Perhaps the Lovely Girl Ruler had other reasons for wanting to keep her lovely girlish hands on a device of apparently limitless magical power. But nobody thinks of this. Instead they decide that since the Shaggy Man doesn't need the Love Magnet, they'll hang it over the gate of the Emerald City to ensure that all visitors have the right attitude. Evidently hanging around with Glinda has taught Ozma a thing or two.

Next time: the big party!

Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 4

After escaping the Scoodlers, Dorothy and Company come to the end of the road, literally. It reaches the edge of the Deadly Desert, an expanse of gray sand which completely surrounds the Land of Oz.

In the course of the books the Deadly Desert becomes more and more Deadly. The first time we see it, in The Land of Oz, it's just a desert. Glinda chases Mombi out into the desert and gives her a magical beat-down there, but there's no indication the desert is anything more than a trackless barren wilderness. I guess Mr. Baum decided a garden-variety desert wasn't cool enough, because in Ozma of Oz we first see that the Deadly Desert is literally fatal to cross, unless you've got a Magic Carpet like Ozma's.

Now Dorothy encounters a helpful sign:

ALL PERSONS ARE WARNED NOT TO VENTURE UPON THIS DESERT
For the Deadly Sands will Turn Any Living Flesh
to Dust in an instant. Beyond This Barrier is the
LAND OF OZ
But no one can Reach that Beautiful Country
because of these Destroying Sands

Which means they're stuck. The Shaggy Man points out there's no use going back, and the Desert prevents any forward progress. So they camp for the night, and after the children are asleep the Shaggy Man sits up thinking. He finally figures out a solution to the problem and goes to bed himself.
   
In the morning he uses the power of the Love Magnet to call upon his "powerful friend" Johnny Dooit. (Apparently the Love Magnet doesn't just affect people near the Shaggy Man. Once you are exposed to it, you love him FOREVER. This proves Oz is not a roleplaying game setting, because I'm sure every gamer reading this is already thinking of ways to abuse the Magnet's power.)

Johnny Dooit is a "funny little man" with a beard so long he has to wrap it around his waist, and a huge chest of tools. He is a Heroic Mechanic who can do any job. As soon as the Shaggy Man explains their predicament, Johnny gets to work. In just a few minutes he fells trees, saws them into boards, and hammers the boards into a sand-boat, complete with sail and rigging. (Mysteriously, the sand-boat doesn't rate Capitalization.) As soon as the job is done he slams the lid of his tool chest down, and while Our Heroes are blinking from the noise, he vanishes.

I always thought Johnny Dooit was a pretty neat character, and it's too bad Baum never re-used him. He's omnipotent in a turn-of-the-century, Tom Swift sort of way. Apparently another Oz fan named Chris Dulabone agrees, because he wrote a self-published novel about Johnny; I haven't read it and can't vouch for the quality, but it's nice to see there are other Johnny Dooit admirers out there.

Even with Johnny Dooit's sand-boat, getting across the desert isn't easy. The wind is brisk, and Johnny's design turns out to be very fast, so that the Shaggy Man is hard-pressed to keep control of the sand-boat as it rips across the deadly gray sand. Several times they're in danger of tipping over, which would end the story right away.

The voyage ends in a tremendous crash as the Shaggy Man is unable to stop the boat in time and it slams full-speed into a line of rocks marking the Oz side of the desert. Johnny Dooit neglected to put air bags in his vehicle, but since Oz is a fairyland where no one ever dies, the worst that happens is that one of Dorothy's teeth is jarred loose by the impact.

Noting an abundance of yellow flowers and trees, Dorothy deduces they have crashed in the Winkie Country, one of the four component kingdoms of the Land of Oz. She tries to explain to her companions about the Tin Woodman, who is Emperor of the Winkies, but they are skeptical.

Let me repeat that: her friends the Shaggy Man (who owns a Love Magnet and currently has a donkey head), Button-Bright (who currently has a fox head), and Polychrome (who is a rainbow fairy) are skeptical about the idea of a Tin Man.

This is a plot element which comes up far too often in fantasy fiction for my taste: people in a completely fantastic setting nevertheless refuse to believe in fantastic explanations for things. There's even a page devoted to this in the ever-useful Tropes Wiki. My favorite example in fiction is in the middle books of the Harry Potter series, in which a whole society of wizards and witches refuse to believe in an evil sorcerer, insisting that warnings from Harry and Dumbledore (the greatest wizard in Britain, according to his trading card) are just them trying to get attention.

At this point, by an absolutely predictable coincidence, they stumble across the Truth Pond. It even has a helpful sign. The Shaggy Man and Button-Bright quickly get rid of their animal heads. The Shaggy Man has a player-character moment when he remarks how useful it would be if they could take the Truth Pond along with them, but a pond is pretty hard to carry. (And yet nobody thinks of the next best thing: taking some water from the pond in a bottle.)

Next time: things get metallic!