Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond Read online

  Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

  Armored

  Brave New Worlds

  By Blood We Live

  Epic: Legends of Fantasy

  Federations

  The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  Lightspeed Magazine

  Lightspeed: Year One

  The Living Dead

  The Living Dead 2

  The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

  Nightmare Magazine

  Other Worlds Than These

  Seeds of Change

  Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom

  Wastelands

  The Way of the Wizard

  Forthcoming Anthologies Edited by John Joseph Adams

  Dead Man’s Hand

  Robot Uprisings (co-edited with Daniel H. Wilson)

  Wastelands 2

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 by John Joseph Adams & Douglas Cohen

  “Foreword: Oz and Ourselves” by Gregory Maguire. © 2013 by Gregory Maguire.

  “Introduction: There’s No Place Like Oz” by John Joseph Adams & Douglas Cohen. © 2013 by John Joseph Adams & Douglas Cohen.

  “The Great Zeppelin Heist of Oz” by Rae Carson & C.C. Finlay. © 2013 by Rae Carson & C.C. Finlay.

  “Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust” by Seanan McGuire. © 2013 by Seanan McGuire.

  “Lost Girls of Oz” by Theodora Goss. © 2013 by Theodora Goss.

  “The Boy Detective of Oz: An Otherland Story” by Tad Williams. © 2013 by Tad Williams.

  “Dorothy Dreams” by Simon R. Green. © 2013 by Simon R. Green.

  “Dead Blue” by David Farland. © 2013 by David Farland.

  “One Flew Over the Rainbow” by Robin Wasserman. © 2013 by Robin Wasserman.

  “The Veiled Shanghai” by Ken Liu. © 2013 by Ken Liu.

  “Beyond the Naked Eye” by Rachel Swirsky. © 2013 by Rachel Swirsky.

  “A Tornado of Dorothys” by Kat Howard. © 2013 by Kat Howard.

  “Blown Away” by Jane Yolen. © 2013 by Jane Yolen.

  “City So Bright” by Dale Bailey. © 2013 by Dale Bailey.

  “Off to See the Emperor” by Orson Scott Card. © 2013 by Orson Scott Card.

  “A Meeting in Oz” by Jeffrey Ford. © 2013 by Jeffrey Ford.

  “The Cobbler of Oz” by Jonathan Maberry. © 2013 by Jonathan Maberry Productions, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611099041

  ISBN-10: 1611099048

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012953172

  Dedication

  For that wonderful wizard,

  L. Frank Baum

  A NOTE ON THE CONTENT

  L. Frank Baum’s original Oz books were works of children’s fiction—albeit ones that have been known and loved by “children of all ages” throughout their existence. Though many of the stories contained in this anthology are also suitable for the aforementioned children of all ages, Oz Reimagined is intended for ages thirteen and up, and as such, some of the stories deal with mature themes, so parental guidance is suggested.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword: Oz and Ourselves by Gregory Maguire

  Introduction: There’s No Place Like Oz by John Joseph Adams & Douglas Cohen

  The Great Zeppelin Heist of Oz by Rae Carson & C.C. Finlay

  Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust by Seanan McGuire

  Lost Girls of Oz by Theodora Goss

  The Boy Detective of Oz: An Otherland Story by Tad Williams

  Dorothy Dreams by Simon R. Green

  Dead Blue by David Farland

  One Flew Over the Rainbow by Robin Wasserman

  The Veiled Shanghai by Ken Liu

  Beyond the Naked Eye by Rachel Swirsky

  A Tornado of Dorothys by Kat Howard

  Blown Away by Jane Yolen

  City So Bright by Dale Bailey

  Off to See the Emperor by Orson Scott Card

  A Meeting in Oz by Jeffrey Ford

  The Cobbler of Oz by Jonathan Maberry

  Acknowledgments

  About the Contributors

  About the Illustrator

  About the Editors

  FOREWORD: OZ AND OURSELVES

  BY GREGORY MAGUIRE

  When I try to settle upon some approach to the notion of Oz that might suit many different readers, and not just myself, I stumble upon a problem. The unit of measure that works for me might not work for you. Standards and definitions vary from person to person. Oz is nonsense; Oz is musical; Oz is satire; Oz is fantasy; Oz is brilliant; Oz is vaudeville; Oz is obvious. Oz is secret.

  Look: imagine waiting at a bus stop with a friend. We’re both trying to convey something to each other about childhood. When you say childhood, do you mean “childhood as the species lives it”? Do I mean “my childhood upstate in the mid-twentieth century, my house on the north edge of town, my grouchy father, my lost duckie with the red wheels”?

  Oz comes to us early in our lives, I think—maybe even in our dreams. It has no name way back then, just “the other place.” It’s the unspecified site of adventures of the fledgling hero, the battleground for the working out of early dilemmas, and the garden of future delights yet unnamed.

  Foreign and familiar at the same time.

  Dream space.

  Lewis Carroll called it Wonderland, Shakespeare called it the Forest of Arden, the Breton troubadours called it Broceliande, and the Freudians called it Traum. The Greeks called it Theater, except for Plato, who called it Reality. Before we study history, though, before we learn ideas, we know childhood through our living of it. And for a century or so, we Americans have called that zone of mystery by the name of Oz.

  Your little clutch of postcards from the beyond is a different set than mine, of course. Nobody collects the same souvenirs from any trip, from any life. Yours might be the set derived from those hardcovers in your grandmother’s attic, the ones with the John R. Neill line drawings someone colored over in oily Crayola markings. (Crayons were invented at just about the same time as Oz, early in the twentieth century.) Or your souvenir cards might be the popular MGM set starring Margaret Hamilton and Bert Lahr and some child star—I forget her name. Or your souvenirs might be more like mine: memories of being a kid and reenacting (and expanding upon) the adventures of Dorothy using the terrain at hand, which in my case was a filthy alleyway between close-set houses in the early 1960s. Dorothy in her blue-checked gingham and her pigtails is my baby sister in her brother’s T-shirt, hair all unbrushed and eyes bright with play.

  What, I wonder, did we Americans do to conjure up a universal land of childhood before L. Frank Baum introduced us to Oz? Did the Bavarian forests of Grimm or the English fairylands (sprites and elves beckoning from stands of foxgloves, deep hedgerows) ever quite work for American kids? Or maybe that’s a silly question. Perhaps before 1900—when The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published and the United States was still essentially rural and therefore by definition hardscrabble—there was no time to identify the signposts of childhood. Children’s rooms in public libraries hadn’t yet been established. Reading for pleas
ure wasn’t for everyone, just for those who could afford their own private books. Few nineteenth-century Americans could relish childhood as a space of play and freedom; instead, childhood was merely the first decade in a life of hard toil on the farm or the factory.

  Maybe Oz arose and took hold because urban life began to win out over rural life. Maybe as our horizons became more built up and our childhoods—for some middle-class American kids anyway—a little more free, the Oz that came to us first on the page and later on the screen had a better chance of standing in for childhood. That merry old Land of Oz certainly did, and does, signify childhood for me; I mean this not as the author of Wicked and a few other books in that series, but as a man nearing sixty who recognized in Oz, more than half a century ago, a picture of home.

  I don’t mean to be sentimental. There’s a lot to mistrust about home. It’s one of the best reasons for growing up: to get away, to make your own bargain with life, and then to look back upon what terms you accepted because you knew no better, and to assess their value. Travel is broadening precisely because it is away from as well as toward.

  As a young man, on my first trip abroad, I went to visit relatives in northern Greece, where my mother’s family originates. In the great Balkan upheavals of the last century, the boundaries of political borders had shifted a dozen times, and the family village that had once been part of Greece, in the early twentieth century, lay now in Yugoslavia—still a Communist country in the late 1970s when I first saw it. Stony, poor, oppressed. My ancient, distant relatives, all peasant widows in black coats and neat headscarves, told me how their mother had spent her married life imprisoned in Thessaloniki, Greece, on the top edge of the Aegean; but, of a fine Sunday afternoon, she would direct her husband to drive her north, to a hillside just this side of the border of Yugoslavia. There she would sit by the side of the road and weep. The village of her childhood was on the other side of the border crossing. From this height she could see it, like Moses examining the Promised Land, but she was not allowed back. She could never go back. She never did, or not in this life, anyway. She never sent us postcards once she finally crossed over.

  Oz lives contiguously with us. The Yellow Brick Road, the Emerald City, and the great Witch’s castle to the west—these haunts are more than tourist traps and hamburger stands. They are this century’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Via Dolorosa and Valhalla. Oz is myriad as the Mediterranean with its spotted Homeric islands; Oz is vast as Middle-earth and moral as Camelot. This is to say, of course, that Oz is a mirror. Turn it about and, in the mirror, OZ nearly says ZOE, the Greek word for life.

  Of course we recognize Oz when we see it. Of course we find ourselves there. If we can’t find ourselves there, well, we don’t have much chance of recognizing ourselves here. As some farmhand or other might have said to Dorothy, or she to the Wizard.

  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

  INTRODUCTION: THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE OZ

  BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS & DOUGLAS COHEN

  There’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.