[[[Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond]]] Edited by John Joseph Adams & Douglas Cohen
47North, $14.95, 380pp, 9781611099041.

 

Despite a best attempt otherwise, the following review may contain spoilers.

 

“I built the road of yellow out of bricks all bright and new” brags the Great Fantastical Bum in the eponymous filk song.

 

The first to “reimagine” Oz was its creator, L. (for Lyman) Frank Baum, who collaborated on an adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into a Broadway musical (long before Wicked, itself much-altered from its source novel, a warped, revisionist prequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) and even into a multimedia lecture/slide show/film. The huge success of the Broadway musical play (greatly changed from the book – it cut out the Wicked Witch and – I’m not making this up – replaced Toto by a cow named Imogene) impelled Baum to churn out 13 sequels (plus six shorter follow-ups) to his originally solo tale.  He was succeeded as “Royal Historian of Oz” by Ruth Plumly Thompson, who wrote 21 Oz books (exceeding Baum’s own output), and there were also three more by his illustrator, John R. Neill, in the canon.

 

The most famous “reimagining” of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is, of course, The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 film musical starring Judy Garland (no less the wonderful for its dropped adjective, and arguably more popular than Baum’s fable).  While Toto remained a little dog, Dorothy’s footwear was refitted from silver to ruby slippers, the Wicked Witch of the West was given green skin and her Winged Monkeys were redubbed Flying Monkeys, and Glinda was relocated from the South to the North.  (I confess to having been, as a small child, frightened by the Wicked Witch of the West.  Later – and after Margaret Hamilton became the rather less scary Cora the Coffee Lady for Maxwell House – I came to appreciate her almost comic performance.  Incidentally, contrary to common belief, the entire film was in Technicolor – Kansas really is sepia.)  Between Baum’s and MGM’s, there were several other film versions, the most-cited being 1925’s Wizard of Oz, which was purportedly co-written and co-directed by Frank Joslyn Baum, L. Frank’s son, and featured Oliver Hardy as the Tin Woodman.  The most notable renovation of Oz was the Broadway and subsequent film musical, The Wiz, an all-black take on the story.  (The film version, starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Lena Horne and Richard Pryor) was further tweaked, set in Harlem and a New York City analogue – urban renewal, as it were.)  Homages and spoofs (more rooted in the celebrated film than in Baum) have ranged from the (then) Sci Fi Channel’s steampunk miniseries Tin Man (wherein Oz becomes the Outer Zone, or O.Z.) and the tv Western Paradise to shtick on Stargate and Futurama (we’ll quietly ignore Zardoz), while the video game Emerald City Confidential gave Oz a film noir treatment (with Dorothy as a femme fatale).  The beloved MGM film has also spawned innumerable gags in comic strips – such as the Scarecrow skipping hoofing the Yellow Brick Road and instead buying a brain on eBay… and why the Yellow Brick Road is yellow (“Bad Toto!”) – and more than a few underground comics.

 

The Oz mythos – of the books, rather than the classic film – has also been visited by some of the giants of sf/fantasy:  L. Sprague de Camp’s Sir Harold and the Gnome King, Philip José Farmer’s A Barnstormer in Oz and even Heinlein’s Number of the Beast.  Now along comes the latest reinvention of the marvelous Land of Oz, Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, an anthology of 15 original stories inspired by L. Frank Baum’s books, edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen.  Treading in Baum’s footsteps, and those of Dorothy and her “queer friends,” are contemporary luminaries Orson Scott Card, Jeffrey Ford, Ken Liu, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Robin Wasserman, Tad Williams and Jane Yolen, among others.  (Gregory Maguire, author of the aforementioned Wicked, contributes not a story from that series, but a foreword to the volume.)

 

The authors, it should be noted up front, mine the breadth of Baum’s opus, featuring characters from his Oz books after the first: Jack Pumpkinhead, Princess Ozma, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, the Glass Cat, Wogglebug, Jellia Jamb, Polychrome, the Queen of the Field Mice, the Shaggy Man and the Nome King, among others unfamiliar to those whose Oz is limited to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

 

In “The Great Zeppelin Heist of Oz,” Rae Carson and C.C. Finley present a prequel of wily Oscar Z. Diggs’s arrival in the Emerald City quite different from that in the current film Oz the Great and Powerful, while Orson Scott Card’s “Off to See the Emperor” offers up a young Frank Joslyn Baum and a proto-Dorothy (the name Theodora is a cognate) who “pre-imagines” the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion and the Wizard in a charming fable about love lost and found.  In another story set before the events of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, “The Cobbler of Oz,” Jonathan Maberry spotlights a saccharinely sweet Winged Monkey’s quest to help the titular shoemaker repair a certain pair of magical silvery shoes… goodness nearly overwhelmed by a dark irony.

 

About a third of the entries might be categorized as sequels to Baum’s core books.  Much-Hugo-nominated Seanan McGuire’s “Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust” gets downright noir as a cynical, hardboiled Dorothy is tasked by her ex-lover Empress Ozma to solve a murder in Downtown, Emerald’s dark undercity.  There’s another murder investigation in Tad Williams’ “The Boy Detective of Oz: An Otherland Story,” equally a sequel to a story in his Otherland series, set in a virtual reality version of Oz, whereas David Farland’s “Dead Blue” introduces a cyberpunk Oz of technomages, nanobots and brain-boosting cybernetic implants, with the Witch “an ageless cyborg.  Her green skin powered her system by converting sunlight to energy using chlorophyll.”  (Farland, by the way, is not the first to describe the Tin Woodman, formerly a lumberjack named Nick Chopper, who successively replaced his body parts with tin ones, as a cyborg.)  In “A Meeting in Oz,” Jeffrey Ford brings an older, wretched and embittered Dorothy to a deserted, shattered Emerald City for an unhappy reunion with the Wizard, and Simon R. Green’s melancholy “Dorothy Dreams” has an aged, infirm Dorothy escape in a dying dream to the warm and wonderful Oz of her youth.

 

Alternate versions, or analogues, of familiar characters vary from amusing and ingenious to shameless, even perverse.  In Robin Wasserman’s  graphic, non-fantasy story, “One Flew Over the Rainbow,” as might be surmised from the title, Dorothy and her friends are recast as mental patients – Dorothy has been committed by her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, who live in a “gray, lifeless world,” and her sparkly silver combat boots confiscated; Tina, the counterpart of the Tin Woodman, is a cutter; Crow has scrambled brains; and Roar is large, but timorous – the Witch as the ward’s head nurse and the orderlies dubbed “monkeys;” the Wizard, “who can get anyone anything,” “lived in green.”  (The east wing’s doughnut-eating outpatients are, of course, Munchkins.)  Ken Liu’s “The Veiled Shanghai” translates Dorothy (here a Europhile Chinese girl, Dorothy Gee) and all (the Lion is an ex-Boxer hoping to regain his lion-like courage) to 1919 Shanghai amid the tumult of the May Fourth Movement (a precursor of and inspiration for Tiananmen Square), a darker, magical version (she’s not on Kansu Road anymore).  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is considered by many a political allegory, and, aptly, the Great Oz is an unveiled stand-in for Sun Yat-sen, while the Wicked Warlord of the West is inspired by Yuan Shikai, a betrayer of the revolution.  (For a report on Wasserman’s and Liu’s readings from their stories at the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series, see here.)  In “Blown Away,” Jane Yolen transforms Oz into the Emerald Circus, where Dorothy crashlanded and became a performer.  (As, in Baum, Ozma was, for a time, a boy named Tip, it’s a clever touch that her counterpart here is a bearded lady.)

 

Rachel Swirsky’s “Beyond the Naked Eye” reworks Dorothy’s and her companions’ trek over the Yellow Brick Road to see the Wizard and have their respective wishes granted into a reality/game show with elements of Survivor and The Amazing Race called WISH (hosted by Glinda).  But beyond that, it’s about a jeweler (his loupe sees imperfections magnified) who is recruited into a palace coup by Ozma loyalists against the Wizard, a tyrannical usurper and fraud.  In “A Tornado of Dorothys,” Kat Howard depicts Dorothy’s path not as a game but as a story that traps a succession of girls.  (“Oz needed a Dorothy,” says Glinda)

 

Several of the “detours,” besides McGuire’s (where Ozma is a petty tyrant and Emerald City has a downtrodden underclass) and Swirsky’s, are into a decidedly dystopian Oz.  This vision is most evident in Dale Bailey’s “City So Bright,” wherein the Wizard is a fascistic usurper who terrorizes the lowly and has dissenters and worker organizers killed.  Thus it is a relief to encounter him as a kindly Senator in Williams’ Oz-Kansas amalgam, and to have the Land of Oz depicted in Theodora Goss’s “Lost Girls of Oz” as a haven for the abused, as a plucky girl reporter discovers, with the Wizard (aka Oscar or Mr. Diggs) aiding Ozma in her rescues.  (He was, after all, “really a very good man… just a very bad Wizard.”)

 

While following the Yellow Brick Road, from Kansas to the Deadly Desert, from Emerald City to Shanghai, into cyberspace and to places not on any of Baum’s maps, the stories are faithful in their fashion (or refashion) to Baum’s world:  the magical footwear remains silver, even if they’re combat boots (or the more stylish pair worn by the grown-up Dorothy on illustrator Galen Dara’s cover), the Monkeys Winged, Glinda (if not always Good) the Witch of the South, and Toto a dog (though briefly a talking one and, in one story, taxidermied), never a cow.  It’s abundantly clear that the authors love and cherish Baum’s wondrous stories (as Baum himself once commented “Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me.”), but some Oz purists may be horrified by several of the transformations – the editors themselves issue a parental advisory.  Less orthodox Ozophiles, however, likely will newly appreciate the inexhaustible richness of Baum’s immortal creation.

 

“The Silver Shoes have wonderful powers…. All you have to do is to knock the heels together three times…”