Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (2 page)

I will utter a word of caution, though. Perhaps my souvenirs of Oz are darker than yours. I can’t help that; life gives what it will. As a young reader, I learned about Oz the way I would later learn about Life on the Mississippi or life sailing to the lighthouse of the Hebrides or life lived on the verges of The Waste Land. And I found the insularity and even parochialism of Oz’s separate populations puzzling and, maybe, worrying. Racist even, though I hadn’t a word for it yet. Troublingly myopic, exceptionalist. Certainly lacking in intellectual curiosity. When Dorothy first arrived in the land of Munchkins, the kindly Munchkin farmers told her what
they’d been told about the Emerald City and about the Wizard. But none of them had had the gumption of Dorothy to pick themselves up and go see for themselves. No firsthand experience. Few of them could predict what kind of population lived over the horizon. None of them cared.

Or maybe I’m being unkind. Maybe those Munchkins all just had to stay on the farm to bring in the crops. But they didn’t signal lust for adventure in their remarks about the Emerald City; you’ll grant me that.

Well, they had not read any chronicles of Oz to whet their appetites for the adventure, I suppose. Kindly, good, solid working people, they were lacking in vision. They’d never gone far enough away from the villages of their own childhoods to be able to look back down the slope and see childhood for what it is: a paradise from which, if we are to survive, we must escape.

I write this in a small walled garden in what used to be called the Languedoc region of France, where for the past decade I have spent part of every summer. My French is close to execrable; even the birds chirp with a better accent than I do. The plane trees with their coats of mottling bark, and the stiff, brushlike sound of their leaves in the dawn wind—it’s all ineffably foreign to me a decade on, and if I can be forgiven an Anglicism, it’s ineffably dear to me, too. I like spending time every year in a place I only barely comprehend. It reminds me of childhood, when I was most alive because the world was so new. Being abroad, struggling to understand, reminds me of Oz.

There is more to say, but here comes the bus. It says
OZ
above the front window. Welcome aboard. Welcome home.

Gregory Maguire
Cavillargues
Bastille Day, 2012

BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS & DOUGLAS COHEN

T
here’s no place like home.

The phrase has become one of the most famous in the English language, if not all of Western culture. Although first popularized by John Howard Payne (as a lyric in the song “Home! Sweet Home!” for his opera
Clari, Maid of Milan
), it’s safe to say that when most people hear it, they think not of the opera or the song but of L. Frank Baum’s most magical creation: Oz. It is to Dorothy Gale that most of us unconsciously attribute these words—perhaps because her innocent longing for her farm while being surrounded by such wondrous magic makes the words all the more poignant. Whatever the reason, there is no denying the resonance of the message. Yet while the words may indeed evoke thoughts of home for some, it is somewhat ironic that those words now transport most of us to that magical Land of Oz.

But if this unassuming phrase should take our thoughts someplace vastly different than Baum intended, it’s hardly surprising, because while there’s no place like home, it’s
equally true that there’s no place like Oz. It has not only transcended the ranks of fantasy readers; thanks to the beloved MGM film classic
The Wizard of Oz
, it has also transcended the ranks of readers, period. Indeed, Oz has woven itself into the very fabric of our culture.

While the Land of Oz has achieved a level of fame that few fantasies ever manage, and while various political allegorical meanings have been attributed to these works, at its heart Oz remains a series of fairy tales—tales written by a man who continued writing them long after he expected to because he received so many letters from children imploring him to write more Oz adventures. For many of those children—and for many of us even now—Oz became another home.

Of course, sometimes the home you remember can change. You’ll find that is the case with these stories. For this project we asked our authors to not only
revisit
Oz—we asked them to
reimagine
it.

And the results were everything we could have hoped for. Some authors chose to fill in the cracks of the existing mythology with their own unique vision. Others revised the original story, making it branch out in wildly unexpected directions. Still others took the bones of Oz and rebuilt it from the ground up, one magical limb at a time.

Characters you know and love might look different. They might
act
different. Their choices might shock you. They may make you laugh. They may make you cry. They may guide you down a gaily colored road to see a great and powerful wizard, but then again you might not even find yourself in Oz. (Though in spirit, all these stories take place in Oz, regardless of their actual location.)

If it seems like we’re being vague regarding how our authors have reimagined Oz…guilty as charged. We want
you to experience that same delight we did the first time we read these stories, discovering what is familiar versus what is different, seeing how it all fits together. We want you to wander into old, warm dreams only to find they’ve taken a delightful right turn.

Even so, we do want to mention one important bit of information before you begin your trip to Oz. If you’re only familiar with the classic movie, you might notice that certain details in some of the stories are different from what you remember. The reason for this is simple: our authors were tasked with reimagining L. Frank Baum’s books rather than the famous film based on them. (Though quite faithful, the movie version does take some liberties with the source material.) As a result, some of the little details you remember may be slightly different here—and not just because the stories have been reimagined. For example, in the movie version, Dorothy famously comes to possess a pair of magical ruby slippers; in the book, the shoes are silver instead. Another difference: thanks to the film, the Wicked Witch’s soldiers have come to be known as Flying Monkeys rather than Winged Monkeys, as they were originally. And in the book Glinda is the Witch of the South rather than the North, and so on. So when you encounter these details in the anthology—things that may seem to be changed for no particular reason—rest assured there is a method to our madness. But if the movie is all you know, have no fear: the movie and the book are similar enough that you’ll have no trouble following the stories and falling into these new versions of Oz.

Reimagining a creation as enduring and seminal as Oz is no small feat—we all have our memories of it, and for many these memories are dearly cherished. Perhaps this explains why our authors embraced this project with so much enthusiasm. Oz is as special to them as it is to you; it
is a land of deep imagination, part of that dreaming landscape they delve into each time they create a new work of fantasy. Most of them discovered Oz in one form or another before they even realized they wanted to write fantasy stories of their own, and so it could be said that L. Frank Baum planted some of the earliest seeds that brought them to where they find themselves today. For those of whom this is true, perhaps this anthology is their chance to say thank you…a chance to celebrate one of the great fantasies of our time…a chance to go back to Oz.

We all change as we pass out of childhood and become adults. Our perceptions of Oz may change as well. So follow the road of yellow brick when you’re ready, but prepare for a detour or two along the way. And remember: whatever version of Oz you find yourself in, there’s no place like it.

BY RAE CARSON & C.C. FINLAY

S
TRANGE IN A
S
TRANGER
L
AND

S
craps, the Patchwork Girl, witnessed the Wizard’s arrival.

She sat beneath a tree watching the most spectacular show ever performed by a summer sky. White clouds swirled above an emerald-colored sky, like whipped marshmallow topping on a glass bowl full of lime jello, spinning round and round and round on a potter’s wheel.

She didn’t think it could get any more amazing when the clouds cracked open and sunlight burst through, so blinding that she lifted one patchwork arm to shade her button eyes.

That’s when she saw the balloon.

It was a big bubble made of brightly colored fabric, with a basket hanging underneath and a man inside the basket, clinging to its rim. And it was coming toward her tree.

She jumped up and shouted. “Turn away!”

“I am rudderless in the maelstrom!” yelled the man in the basket. His small voice was getting louder and closer. “Reinless in my carriage!”

The man was making no sense. Scraps waved her hands to shoo the odd vessel aside. “All right, but steer your picnic basket that way!”

“I can’t steer it because—”

The balloon crashed into the branches of the venerable tree, which shook and shook and shook, like a dog shaking off a bath. The balloon deflated, becoming hopelessly entangled, but all the tree’s effort did manage one thing, which was to spill the passenger out of the basket.

He hit the ground with a loud thump, and Scraps ran toward him. She reached down to help, but he jumped to his feet like a cat—not all lithe and athletic like a cat making a spectacular leap but rather all arrogant and full of himself like a cat too embarrassed to admit that he’d taken a bad tumble.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He stared at her uncomprehendingly, so she spoke in a way that he might understand.

“ARE. YOU. ALL. RIGHT?”

“I must have knocked my noggin,” he said, feeling his head for lumps. “I’ve shaken the coin purse, rattled the old dice cup.”

“I don’t know about that,” Scraps said. “But I think you bumped your head—you’re not making a lick of sense.”

He startled when she spoke again, as if hearing her for the first time. “Merciful blessings,” he said. “You’re a talking ragdoll! And a filthy one at that.”

Scraps, who was very proud of her shiny button eyes, orange yarn hair, and striped knickers, opened her mouth to say something likely to land her in a tussle with the strange man, even though she stood no higher than his knee. But the tree spoke first.

“And you’re a blithering idiot,” boomed the good-natured old oak.

He was bending over as he said it, and the man from the balloon jumped so high that he hit his head on a branch and accomplished what falling from the sky could not: he knocked himself out cold.

“What a strange man,” the tree said, his knotholes frowning. “What do we do with him now?”

“I’ll run to the Emerald City and get the Guardian of the Gates,” Scraps replied. “He’ll know what to do.”

P
ROGRESS!

The Guardian of the Gates had no idea what to do.

The strange man had not stopped talking once since he’d been carried to the guardhouse. He called himself Oz, which was short for Oscar, because he had so many other things to say; there was no time to use a two-syllable name when one syllable was available. His talk was equal parts questions and opinions, although the latter seldom seemed related to the answers he received to the former, until he said, quite out of the blue:

“I’ll tell you what’s not right about this country.”

The statement startled Gigi, which is what the Guardian of the Gates was called by his friends, even though his proper name—George—was only one syllable long. But who in the world used one syllable when two perfectly good syllables were at hand?

“What’s wrong with this country?” asked Gigi, who already knew what was wrong with the guardhouse—half his bread and all his butter had been eaten by the stranger.

“Now don’t go putting words into my mouth,” Oz said. “
Not right
is not the same as
wrong
. There’s
right
and
not
right
, and there’s
right
and
wrong
, and there’s
wrong
and
not wrong
. But to insist that
not right
is the same as
wrong
is to infer a transitive property of equivalence that is not supported by the evidence, for we do not yet know the qualities that individually compose
not right
and
wrong
. Am I not right?”