Just The Caffeine Talking

Ozblogging: The Emerald City of Oz, Part 6

The final battle has arrived!

The combined armies of the Nome Axis march through the tunnel toward Oz. As they march, the Nome King and General Guph do a little scheming of their own. It turns out Guph has given some thought to ways of dealing with the terrifying allies he has recruited, and he explains his plan to the Nome King: while the Whimsies, Growleywogs, and Phanfasms are conquering Oz, the Nome King must recover his Magic Belt as quickly as possible. Then he can use it to wish the other armies back to their homes, leaving the Nomes in sole possession of Oz and all its treasures.

The only problem now is the dust. It seems the tunnel is terribly dusty. As the armies march along all the invaders are plagued by dust in their eyes, noses, and throats. All of them become very thirsty.

Apparently King Roquat, like many would-be conquerors, has no sense of logistics at all. (To be fair, it may be less of a concern to immortal beings with magic powers.) He hasn't provided drinking water for his armies. Apparently nobody has so much as a hip flask.

If the invasion is that slapdash, maybe the Soldier With The Green Whiskers could defeat it after all.

As dawn approaches, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, Jack Pumpkinhead, Tiktok, Ozma, and the rest all gather in the garden where the invaders will soon break out. Ozma has been watching the armies on her Magic Picture. The villains are having a terrible time because of the dust -- and the Scarecrow reveals that it was Ozma who generated all that dust by means of the Magic Belt.

It's H-Hour. The ground breaks open and the First and Foremost of the Phanfasms climbs out, followed by all his terrible warriors. The kingdom of Oz lies helpless before them. The triumph of evil is at hand . . .

. . . but first they want a drink after all that marching through a dusty tunnel. Fortunately, there's a lovely, cool Forbidden Fountain right there.

All the invaders following the Phanfasms make the same mistake. They rush for the Fountain, drink deep, and then forget why they've come. The only one who isn't affected is the Nome King himself, because his underling General Guph rudely elbows him aside to get at the water, and Roquat is so upset by this act of lese-majeste that he forgets his thirst. The Scarecrow and Tin Woodman grab him and throw him into the Forbidden Fountain so that he, too, will forget who he is and why he came.

Ozma politely suggests to the Nome King that he order his soldiers to march home, and he agrees, happy to be obeyed so readily by the Nomes and delighted to be able to do a favor for the lovely Girl Ruler of Oz. The Magic Belt sends the rest of the invasion force back whence they came, and Oz is safe.

Or is it?

Remember, this is 1910. The Wright Brothers have been flying around since 1903, and Count Zeppelin is already working on his fifth dirigible airship. Simply being surrounded by a Deadly Desert isn't enough to protect Oz any more.

Ozma and her court head south to consult with Glinda the Good. The Girl Ruler of Oz never does anything without consulting Glinda, and she always follows Glinda's wise advice. That's how Ozma remains Girl Ruler of Oz. Presumably because if she stopped following Glinda's advice something unfortunate might happen.

Since Glinda has a Magic Book which informs her of everything that happens everywhere (which means she knew all about the invasion plan and doubtless was preparing her own defenses), she knows why Ozma has come to call upon her.

Glinda agrees that Oz is at risk of being discovered by people from the outside world. Fortunately she has devised a powerful magic spell to make the entire country invisible to the eyes of outsiders, so that no one will ever be able to locate Oz again. In fact, so eager is Glinda to serve her lovely Girl Ruler that she went ahead and cast the spell before Ozma even reached her castle.

She just lives to serve, doesn't she?

Presumably at this announcement Dorothy and Agent Diggs (a.k.a. the Wonderful Wizard) exchange significant glances. They're cut off from any help from President Taft -- but presumably Glinda's spell also means the threat from European or Japanese operatives in Oz has been eliminated. For now, they must remain as agents in place.

Dorothy does get one message out, to the Royal Historian of Oz, L. Frank Baum himself. Baum reports sadly that he won't be able to tell any more stories about the marvellous land of Oz now that it is cut off magically from the rest of the world.

Ha!

He's got another eight books' worth of Oz in him. His readers aren't going to let him stop, not while he's still alive. L. Frank Baum can struggle against his fate, but there's no way he can escape from Oz.

Now, while the Scarecrow's plan to thwart the invaders by means of the Forbidden Fountain is certainly clever, it does raise some questions. Ozma refuses to fight for her country, but is perfectly willing to use the Magic Belt to fill the tunnel with dust so the invaders will drink the Water of Oblivion and forget.

So why not use the Belt to make them forget as soon as they start out? Or use it to bend the tunnel into a closed loop so that the armies will march forever and never come to their breakout points? (She did something very similar to a Kansas highway in Road to Oz, so it's obviously within the Belt's power.)

Given the powers at her disposal, it becomes obvious that suckering the invaders into drinking the Water of Oblivion was Ozma's goal all along. The Forbidden Fountain not only prevented the invasion, it destroyed the minds of three powerful and aggressive kingdoms, neutralizing them for generations if not longer. Nice job, Ozma!

(And remember what started the whole affair? King Roquat was bored and wanted to get revenge on the Oz people. Who put the idea of an invasion into his head? Maybe . . . someone with a Magic Belt and a Magic Picture?)

Ozma will return in The Patchwork Girl of Oz.

Ozblogging: The Emerald City of Oz, Part 5

The Grand Tour of Oz concludes with a visit to the two "Defensive Settlements" of Oz.  These are the towns inhabited by the Flutterbudgets and the Rigamaroles, respectively.

Flutterbudgets are the easily-panicked people of Oz, who go into fits of terror worrying about everything bad which might happen. Their neighbors the Rigamaroles are calmer, but no less annoying.

Rigamaroles tend to manifest a form of verbal communication which, while entirely and completely in keeping with the universally accepted and, indeed, praised principles of English grammar, nevertheless strays from what are generally regarded, at least among the more linguistically skilled elements of society, as the twin virtues of succinctness, which is to say the avoidance of unnecessary, repetitive and extraneous verbiage, and directness, or the eschewing of digression, confusion, and excessive ornament, in everyday expression.

In other words, they talk too much.

Our heroes are extremely glad to get away from those two towns, and with relief arrive at the tin castle of Nick Chopper, Emperor of the Winkies (aka The Tin Woodman). He proudly shows off his gardens, with a bed of tin flowers and a fishpond inhabited by tin fish.

The Tin Woodman has some bad news for Dorothy, though. He has had word from Ozma about the Nome King's plot. The tunnel is nearly ready, but Ozma refuses to organize any form of defense against the invaders. She believes the people of Oz can't stop their powerful foes, so instead she's going to make like Gandhi and practice peaceful resistance. The loyal Tin Woodman is heading for the Emerald City in the morning to perish alongside his beloved Girl Ruler.

Now here is where Baum has to make all of his characters a bit stupid. Dorothy actually remembers the Magic Belt, but instead of using it to wish the tunnel closed again, or wish the Nome King and his evil allies transformed into bacteria or whatever, she only thinks of using it to evacuate her friends and family to Kansas. (Not even the reliably ruthless Wizard of Oz thinks of using the Belt to stop the invasion.)

But nobody wants to go back to Kansas. Enslavement by sadistic monsters or death is still better than Kansas. Did Kansas run over L. Frank Baum's dog or something?

They do stop off at the Scarecrow's magnificent new house, built in the shape of a gigantic ear of corn standing proudly erect. The walls inside are decorated with crows made of black diamonds.

With one more stop to collect Jack Pumpkinhead, the travelers make a swift return to the Emerald City. Ozma is there waiting for them, suicidally calm and completely unwilling to do anything to protect her country. Her Magic Picture shows her that the tunnel is finished, and only a thin crust of earth separates the Nome King's Axis of Evil from the heart of Oz itself. The actual exit point of the tunnel is in the Royal Gardens, just in front of the Forbidden Fountain. (Pay attention to the fountain.)

Using the Magic Picture, our heroes observe Roquat and his allies planning their assault. They will leave the Nome Kingdom at midnight, and arrive in Oz at daybreak. Which means, by the way, that Oz is only about thirty miles across. We know that the Emerald City is in the center of Oz. An army of tens of thousands of Nomes, Growleywogs, Whimsies, and Phanfasms can't go much faster than 3 miles per hour, therefore it's only 18 or 20 miles from the Nome King's realm to the Emerald City. Assume at least 2 miles for the Deadly Desert, and a mile from the Desert to the Nome King's headquarters. That leaves 15 miles from the edge of Oz to the center.

In other words, you should be able to see the Emerald City from just about any place in Oz.

I don't buy it. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz it took Dorothy several days to walk from the center of Munchkin territory to the city. Even allowing for the fact that she was a little child at the time and there were stretches of wilderness to get past, this still seems way too small. There just isn't room for all the wacky wayside tribes, randomly hostile freaks, deserted wilderness areas, and peaceful villages in a country no bigger than Rhode Island. Either the Nome King's army can march much faster than mortal soldiers can, or the Royal Historian of Oz wasn't thinking when he wrote that line.

The Phanfasms demand the right to be the first wave of attackers out of the tunnel. The First and Foremost boasts that Oz will be a desert wilderness when his malevolent Erbs get through with it.

Ozma really is too peaceful to fight. She won't harm another living thing, and she won't let anyone else do so either . . . except, of course, for the invaders. This is beyond any practical pacifism, it's suicide. A Girl Ruler should at least try to help her people escape these monstrous invaders. Ozma is definitely not doing her duty here. The people of Oz should offer Jinjur the throne again. She'd go down fighting, at least.

Dorothy is curious about one thing: what is the Forbidden Fountain, anyway?

Ozma explains that it's yet another work of Glinda the Good. She made it when a previous ruler of Oz was cruel and wicked. The water of the Fountain erases all memories. So the evil king of Oz drank it, forgot everything, and settled down to rule much more benevolently. His people were still mistrustful, so the King made everyone drink the water to forget his previous harsh regime.

That's right: Glinda the Good erased the minds of everyone in Oz. (Which means, of course, that only Glinda actually knows how things were before the mass brainwipe. Was that ruler really wicked and cruel? Or just . . . uncooperative?)

The Scarecrow has a brilliant idea, but won't tell anyone but Ozma. I guess he wants his friends to remain terrified and miserable as long as possible. We'll find out his plan next time.

Ray Bradbury

I never met him, but that's not important. Most writers aren't especially interesting in person. The most fascinating parts of their lives happen inside their heads. Flamboyant characters are good material for writers, but seldom make good writers themselves. (Example: Christopher Marlowe had a romantic and exciting life, and got knifed to death before he was thirty. He left behind two great plays and some poetry. His pal William Shakespeare led a very boring and prosaic existence and cranked out at least a dozen great works plus a like number of merely excellent ones.)

Ray Bradbury is called a science fiction writer, and (more importantly) called himself one. He wasn't ashamed to be seen in the halls of a hotel swarming with fans in Klingon costume. I think it's significant that he was one of the headliners of the current issue of The New Yorker -- a special science fiction issue boasting a cover illustration of a raygun-armed space ranger blasting his way into a literary sherry hour. Unlike several of his fellow contributors to that issue, Bradbury never denied the space ranger; if anything, he embraced science fiction's pulpy roots even when he was selling to the "slicks."

For that, all of us owe him a tremendous debt. If he had been more willing to trim his sails to fashion, he probably could have been more successful. But he wrote what he loved and taught others to love it as well.

Most of the giants of the field most of us grew up reading are gone now -- Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Hal Clement, Arthur C. Clarke, L. Sprague De Camp, Philip Jose Farmer, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, Gene Roddenberry, Fred Saberhagen, Jack Williamson, Roger Zelazny, and many others I'm no doubt forgetting. But it's not in the spirit of science fiction to mourn the past. They all looked to the future, and so should we.

We must become new giants.

Ozblogging: The Emerald City of Oz, Part 4

Dorothy and her traveling companions camp for the night after visiting the Fuddles, and we get to see the Wonderful Wizard do some actual wizarding. Agent Diggs is evidently a quick study, for in just a year of Glinda's tutoring he has mastered some pretty impressive magic.

He's still a humbug at heart, though. His feats of real sorcery are done with all the stagecraft of his old stage illusions. Borrowing a pair of ordinary handkerchiefs from Aunt Em and the Shaggy Man he creates two large and well-furnished tents for the party. Then he sets Dorothy to watching an empty kettle over the fire -- which, when opened again, proves to contain enough food for a hearty dinner.

Dorothy also reverts to old habits: she wanders away from camp and gets lost, accompanied by Billina and Toto. As usual, she encounters more wacky wayside tribes.

First she gets captured by the Spoon Brigade, an armed troop of spoons who guard the little Kingdom of Utensia. Utensia is inhabited living kitchen utensils, under the lackadaisical rule of King Kleaver. Dorothy's visit to Utensia is a hurricane of kitchen-based wordplay as she is put on trial. This section is definitely intended as a bit of "bonus material" for adults reading the book to children, and some of the puns are really very funny. It reminds me of the trial scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland. Eventually Baum runs out of jokes and the King decides to discharge Dorothy from his court. She'd rather resign, and the spoons escort her back out of Utensia.

From Utensia the lost trio wander to the town of Bunbury, which turns out to be inhabited by living pastry. The houses are made of crackers and breadsticks, Understandably, the Bunburyites are very nervous about the arrival of three hungry outsiders. Dorothy is reasonable, and contents herself with eating part of a waffle fence and a broken wheelbarrow made of "nabiscos" (which was a brand of crackers sold by the new Nabisco company in 1901). The bun people, like the utensils, are incorrigible punsters.

While Dorothy can get by eating domestic junk, Toto has less restraint and devours four of the citizens of Bunbury. The trio hurry away from Bunbury, followed by the angry cries of its people.

Their final stop is the town of Bunnybury, which is nearby and doubtless causes much confusion to the Oz postal service in these pre-ZIP Code days. Bunnybury is populated by sentient, civilized rabbits. Toto and Billina are not allowed into the walled rabbit town, but Dorothy has a safe-conduct letter from Ozma which gets her past the gatekeeper. He magically reduces her to rabbit size (another Alice echo!) and takes her to meet the King of Bunnybury. The King explains that he and his people are another product of Glinda's magic. She gave the rabbits their civilization and intelligence. 

She creates intelligent species for fun.

The King isn't happy, though. He misses his old simple life as an ordinary forest bunny. He complains endlessly about the burdens of life in a marble palace, and the bothersome responsibilities of ruling a village of intelligent rabbits. Dorothy offers to ask Glinda to transform him back into a wild rabbit again, and the King eagerly accepts.

Except . . . he does like his fine clothes, and hopes Glinda will allow him to keep them when she changes him back. He also has some favorite pieces of furniture he'd like to take to his forest burrow. And the royal dance troupe is very entertaining; and he enjoys the protection of his brave royal guards; and the royal jugglers are without peer . . .

Just as Dorothy is about to leave, the King changes his mind. He'll remain as ruler of Bunnybury. But his visitor takes the opportunity to squeeze him a little: she insists that he give up all his whining and complaining. The King agrees, and Dorothy leaves Bunnybury and returns to her normal size.

I suspect Mr. Baum was getting in a gentle dig at people who always long for the "good old days" when life was simpler. What's amusing, of course, is that he was writing in 1910, which many people nowadays consider the halcyon "good old days" before the apocalypse of World War I and the century of conflict that followed.

Looking back to the Golden Age is inevitable for humans. Consider: when you're little, you live in a world where all your needs are taken care of by powerful, wise elders. As you grow older, you have to do more for yourself and you discover flaws in your elders' power and wisdom. When you're an adult you're completely on your own, and you live in a world run by people your own age, just as foolish and ignorant as you are. Obviously things were better in the past.

Meanwhile . . . General Guph reports back to King Roquat, all puffed up with the success of his diplomatic mission. The King is somewhat alarmed by the allies Guph has recruited. The Growleywogs and Whimsies are bad enough, but the Phanfasms are downright scary.

Guph brushes his fears aside, and here we see why Roquat is the King. He has obviously read his Machiavelli. Borrowed forces aren't as good as your own, and a powerful ally may become an oppressor. Guph is too wrapped up in his dreams of military glory to consider the larger picture.

Still, Roquat is impressed and decides to go ahead with the venture. He's willing to let his allies plunder Oz themselves, but he wants to take Ozma and Dorothy for his own captives. He's going to turn them into ornaments for his underground Liberace palace. After what we've seen of the Growleywogs, Whimsies, and Phanfasms, this is actually a little reassuring. Spending an eternity as a tchotchke has got to be better than whatever they might come up with.

But the Nome King hasn't reckoned with the intelligence-gathering capabilities of Ozma's government. The lovely Girl Ruler uses her Magic Picture to spy on Roquat, and discovers his plan to dig a tunnel under the desert.

At this point, one would expect her to get Glinda on the horn and assemble some kind of pre-emptive strike force. An Ozian "Dirty Dozen" perhaps: Tiktok, Jinjur, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, and maybe some of Glinda's lovely girl mercenaries for backup. Eggs, explosions, pithy one-liners, and a climactic showdown in the tunnel as the timer ticks down to zero . . .

Nope. Ozma's gone all Neville Chamberlain:

"Then she dismissed from her mind further thought of the tunnel, for that time, and began to wonder if Aunt Em would not be happy as Royal Mender of the Stockings of the Ruler of Oz. Ozma wore few holes in her stockings; still, they sometimes needed mending. Aunt Em ought to be able to do that very nicely."

The legions of Hell are on the march and she's thinking about stockings? Help us, Jinjur, you're our only hope!

Next time: the tension increases!