A Barnstormer in Oz

1982 Berkeley trade p/b cover

I mentioned Philip José Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz briefly before, alongside Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (see Keith Laumer ... and Oz, Sept. 2007).

Both are revisionist views of L Frank Baum's Oz mythos. I read Wicked a few years ago, and despite the rave reviews, I found it very ponderous. Its central thrust is that the Wicked Witch of the West (called Elphaba by Maguire, after "LFB") is a more complex character, driven into the role of wickedness by resistance to the Wizard's tyrannical policies concerning the rights of sentient animals in the world of Oz. Even though I like the Oz books and films, I didn't find much connection with them, because the majority of the events in Wicked are a prequel to the arrival of the well-known Oz characters. The whole handling seemed to me a very dull polemical exploration of the portrayal of good and evil, and the problems of Animals (sentient animals) vs ordinary animals, all countersunk by a study guide at the end posing various questions on the moral issues raised. Wicked just drips with its own sense of Significance.

A Barnstormer in Oz, which I finally read today, is completely different in tone. It's essentially a hard SF take on fantasy, whose central premise is that Oz is far more complicated than the Baum portrayal (within the book's mythos, it's written by Baum after interviews with Dorothy, but spun for the children's market).

Dorothy's son, the stunt pilot Hank Stover, flies through a mysterious green cloud and lands in Munchkinland. He's initially detained - for reasons of disease quarantine - and immediately finds the place to be a complex and sophisticated culture. The Munchkins are not infantilised dwarfs, but pygmy descendants of Ostrogoths who passed through a dimension portal to the Oz analogue of Earth, Ertha; they speak a slightly Latinised Germanic language, which he has to learn. The country is run as a benevolent dictatorship by the centuries-old Queen Glinda the Good, with some democracy at a regional level, and is a bizarre mix of cultural features: for example, there are strict rules for population control via a herbal spermicide, but the same spermicide allows wide pre-marital sexual freedom (Hank, though he yearns for Glinda, rapidly forms a relationship with the blonde guard Captain Lamblo). Despite the mediaeval formality, Munchkin culture has extremely syncretic Christian / Norse / pagan religious practices, some of which Hank finds abhorrent, such as its primitive tribal funerals with painted naked mourners and ritual bloodletting. The issues of sentient animals are addressed in far more concrete details than in Wicked, such as the taboos on killing sentient animals, and the accommodations that let sentient carnivores indulge their instincts under certain circumstances.

Hank, as a pilot with wartime experience and an armed Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane, rapidly finds himself involved a key player in two conflicts that are brewing, both involving territorial ambitions. One involves an invasion of Erakna the Uneatable, a new Wicked Witch with armies of sentient hawks and flying monkeys. The other is an attempt at invasion by the USA, which in a project instigated by Warren G Harding has discovered how to open the portal to Ertha, and sends in an expedition force ostensibly seek diplomatic contact to "protect" Oz (an offer that Hank knows will rapidly repeat America's exploitative history when the US visitors realise Oz's wealth of precious stones and metals). Despite his loyalties as an American, Hank takes the side of Oz. This is helped along by his plans to marry Lamblo, and the friendly but cynical manipulation by Glinda, who spots him as a powerful wildcard who is free to use guns and explosives that would be taboo for Oz inhabitants.

During the military campaigns, which involve an undercover attempt with a couple of folksy rogues to assassinate Erakna, Hank encounters more mysteries about Oz. The chief one is his attempt to understand the nature of 'firefoxes', a form of ball lightning that possesses animals and inanimate objects with sentient intelligence (hence the lion, scarecrow and tin man) - in a thunderstorm, the same happens to Hank's biplane Jenny. He concludes that firefoxes and anomalous creatures such as the flying monkeys are the creations of the "Long-Gones" (reminiscent of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones), the original inhabitants of the Oz dimension.

The US invasion is forestalled first by Glinda's devastating attack on the ill-equipped military expedition - as this is 1924, an era before large-capacity passenger air transport, the US sends a small suicide mission arriving through the portal in a multifarious collection of co-opted commercial aircraft. Although further missions seem inevitable, the US is ultimately warned off by a terrifying demonstration of Glinda's ability of precise magical teleportation from Ertha to Earth. The book ends with a magical battle to the death between Erakna and Glinda, who Hank ultimately concludes would be better named "Glinda the Ambiguous".

The Wikipedia article mentions critical disagreement:

Inevitably, critics have disagreed on the value of Farmer's contribution to the literature of Oz. Jack Zipes called the novel "splendid," while Katharine Rogers considered it "revision to the point of debasement."
- A Barnstormer in Oz, retrieved 27 Sep 2012

I go with the "splendid". It was an enjoyable and intelligent afternoon's reading, with interesting footnotes on Farmer's ideas about the evolution of the Munchkin and Quadling languages mentioned in the book, as well as an analysis of the flora and fauna of Oz in terms of other Earth regions and cultures scooped up in the dimensional warp.

See the Official Philip José Farmer Web Page for other reviews, some of which mention other Oz adaptations. The Royal Timeline of Oz also has an extensive collection relating to the literary history of Oz and its various spinoffs, both faithful and revisionist: see, for instance, The Dark Side of Oz and Beyond the Deadly Desert.

- Ray

Keith Laumer ... and Oz

Rather on the topic of the rights and wrongs of copying books, Baen Books has an interesting publication strategy. Its Baen Free Library makes available online selected works on its lists, primarily SF, arguing that the advantage of publicity for lesser-known authors more than offsets any loss from giving away the text free.

Keith Laumer (1925-1993) is one example. A writer who brought to his work an interesting background, an academic career followed by military and diplomatic service, he's little read these days. He wrote fast-moving SF stories and novels, in a hardboiled but, at its best, elegant style reminiscent of Raymond Chandler. The end of his life was unfortunately marred by a stroke that left him physically incapacitated as well as impairing his writing abilities (in which state -presumably his judgement was affected too - he insisted on reediting many of his works, to their detriment).

The Baen Free Library Keith Laumer section has several of his novels and short story compilations. Odyssey is typical in tone, featuring among other works the picaresque Galactic Odyssey (whose down-and-out hero shelters from a storm in what he takes to be a grain silo, only to find he has stowed away on a spacecraft). Laumer did humour too, satire on bureaucracy being a strong theme, as in In the Queue, Placement Test and the stories of the galactic diplomat Retief.

I was reminded of Laumer from running into the website of his brother, the late March Laumer (Wikipedia link - I won't link direct to his site, as it throws up popup ads). March Laumer wrote largely self-published reinterpretations of the Wizard of Oz mythos, some recycling characters and scenarios from Volkov's Russified versions. His novels were controversial for introducing adult themes such as the sexuality of Oz characters, thus taking them out of the genre of children's fiction.
      Neverthless, other authors have done similarly: Philip José Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz introduces Hank Stover, Dorothy's son, who flies his Jenny biplane into a green cloud and arrives in Oz to find some surprises. One is that it exists; another is that Baum bowdlerized its culture, not merely for sexuality but also for its social and political complexity. The book is discussed at the Reviews Page at the official Philip José Farmer site.

Different in tone, but equally mature in its themes, Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, takes a revisionist slant on the Oz mythos, telling of Elphaba, a green-skinned political activist who is ultimately murdered by the alien girl, Dorothy. Maguire goes into detail on the moral and political themes: for instance, the rights problems raised by the co-existence in Oz of animals (the ordinary kind) and Animals (ones with human intelligence). I read it a while back and thought it took itself a little too seriously, coming with its own Study Guide to the moral issues, but it's still an intriguing take on the mythos.

The Royal Timeline of Oz has an extensive collection relating to the literary history of Oz and its various spinoffs, both faithful and revisionist: see, for instance, The Dark Side of Oz and Beyond the Deadly Desert.

- Ray