The Wizard of Oz has long been one of my favorite stories. My grandfather gave me a first edition copy of L. Frank Baum’s book, illustrated by W. W. Denslow. I remember reading it to my daughter when she was a young girl. Unfortunately, I had colored all over it when I was three, presumably in an attempt to embellish the engraved illustrations. What do they say about little redheaded boys? My daughter went on to cherish the story and later produced a play based on the novel after she became an elementary school teacher.
When the book first came off the press on May 17, 1900, Baum assembled it by hand and presented it to his sister, Mary Louise Baum Brewster. Most people are aware of the iconic movie, and like with most such adaptations, the movie differed from the book in several respects. Probably the movie’s most important difference from the book is the story’s premise. In the movie, Dorothy is simply dreaming and never really travels to the land of OZ. Friends and family in her life show up as characters in the dream. This is a clever twist on the story’s plot and provides a better hook than the first chapter of the novel which basically gives a description of the Kansas prairie.
Baum’s series of 14 books set in his fantasy Land of Oz was an early example of science fiction before the genre really took off. The stories included an eclectic collection of not-yet-realized technological inventions and devices, including perhaps the first literary appearance of handheld wireless communicators (Tik-Tok of Oz). Arthur C. Clarke best summarized the magical realism of science fiction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The book’s notion of traveling to a parallel world captured my fascination long ago. As so often happens in classic science fiction and fantasy, writers a century ago envisaged alternative worlds that were striking in their imagination and the rich feeling of thisness. Despite taking placing in a fantasy world, Dorothy’s yearning to return home and the friends she makes gives the story a certain verisimilitude. We can relate to her because we have all been lost at some point in our lives.
This story inspired my next book in the Lost in the Multiverse series, which came out this month. A loose adaptation of Baum’s classic, Elle: The Naked Singularity is science fiction spiked with magical realism, a story in which a college student finds herself lost in the multiverse. When Elle slips to a parallel Earth, she must evade capture and find a way to return to her home world. Echoing The Wizard of Oz, Elle has modern variants of Baum’s famous characters. The Dorothy in the book is Elle Akamu who time-travels through a wormhole from 21st century to an alternate world of a 1970s British Hawaiian Islands. In her quest to return home, she befriends the Iron Buddha, a transgender Tin Man who has lost his heart one too many times. The cowardly lion is played by a POW survivor plagued by PTSD. Rounding out the trio, Haylie is an adorable teen orphan who lost her mind to schizophrenia. There are many more literary allusions, but I’ll leave those for you to find.
Elle pulls us into a realm of ancient superstition and modern science with mystery and forbidden love. But anchoring this suspenseful, propulsive novel is an intimate young woman searching for her place in an upside-down twin world. Lost in the multiverse, she discovers life is about accepting her past, choosing a future, and finding love in her new world. A fusion of science and Buddhism, the narrative explores racism, gay rights, and gender inequality in the 1970s through the eyes of a 21st century time traveler. A stranger in a strange land, Elle wrestles with our oldest questions—what is the nature of the universe? And how do our relationships shape our world?