The Shocking Secret of Oz

Since the days of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, fantasy worlds have been designed with an eye toward continuity and consistency.  Each one operates according to its own internal logic and its own set of natural (or unnatural) laws, which, ideally, remain the same from the beginning of a series right through to the end.

Oz is not that kind of fantasy world.

As I’ve said before, L. Frank Baum didn’t set out to create a series at all.  Rather than writing variations on the original Oz book, he preferred to add fresh new books featuring fresh new worlds, each one distinctly different from the last.  Why bother to remember what you did before when you can do something completely different?  Ix, Mo, and Noland are just three of the many worlds he created.  None of them caught on the way Oz did, however, and eventually Baum’s fandom made it clear that Oz was what they liked best.  Baum met their wishes – but he did not give up his ways altogether.  The result was that Oz became something of a continuous creation, its rules and details subtly (or not so subtly) improvised from book to book.  The Oz of Wizard is a very different place from the Oz of his own later books such as Glinda Of Oz.  Rules change.  Origin stories are adjusted or replaced – perhaps ignored, perhaps even forgotten.  If consistency is truly the hobgoblin of small minds, Baum’s mind must have been vast indeed.

The upshot of all this is a confusing legacy for later Oz writers.  Which rules do you obey?  Can you patch together a unified framework?  Is it even worth trying, when the author himself seems not to have bothered himself over it?

Each Oz author comes up with his or her own answers, and each answer inevitably complicates the situation for the next author to come along (which raises a whole new tangle of questions regarding canon, for goodness sake).  Some of us tie ourselves in knots trying to make it all fit, or we engage in endless, often heated, discussions in Internet chat rooms.  Me, I like to see the matter as a gift rather than a curse.  If Baum didn’t feel tied down, then neither do I.  Give me some wiggle room and I’m there!  In fact, it’s fair to say that my first two stories pop right out of interesting gaps that Baum left behind.  Got a mystery you can’t solve?  Pull out your laptops, folks, there’s a story in it!

On the other hand, I do try to stick to my Baum, for better or worse, and Thompson fans will not find any of her characters in my stories (though I have found it necessary to throw in a reference or two here and there).  I also prefer to elaborate on ideas he underused or gave up on, rather than inventing totally new worlds within his worlds.  And finally, I’m ridiculously proud to have a place in my friend Joe Bongiorno’s Royal Timeline of Oz http://www.timelineuniverse.net/Oz/Mainlinetimeline.htm  So perhaps I’m not quite as laissez-faire as I pretend.

Next time:  The Illustrious Illustrators of Oz, a brief introduction to Oz artists.