Ozma of Oz (a book review post)

Because The Woggle-Bug Book, is not included as one of the Oz books, Ozma of Oz is considered the third book in the series. Despite the fact that the book is not really about Ozma (introduced in The Marvelous Land of Oz), it gets her name. She doesn't even show up until more than 1/3 into it and hardly takes center-stage after that. The title, though, is probably the greatest weakness of the book. So far, I'm enjoying each of these more than the previous one. Being only three books in, though, that's not saying much.

In a broad, cultural sense, Ozma of Oz may be the most significant of the Oz books. It introduces the character Tiktok, who is considered by many to be the first use of a robot in literature. An actual mechanical person with a mechanical brain. He's a clockwork, as the name implies, and you have to wind him up, but, unlike the Tin Man, he is completely manufactured and his knowledge was "programmed." Of course, we don't really know what that means, but it doesn't really matter. Within the structure of the book, he is just another of Baum's interesting and entertaining characters, winding down at inopportune times.

My favorite of the new characters in this book is the Princess Langwidere. The princess owns only one dress, a white one, because it goes with all of her heads, all the 30 of them. Rather than change clothes to make herself attractive, she changes heads. The white dress is because it goes with whatever head she chooses to wear. This, of course, rather confuses her subjects, because they can't figure out why she looks different every time they see her. Each head also has its own personality so, although she retains her memories, some heads are more likable than others, and she can feel bad in one head about what she did while wearing another. This whole idea is a great concept, and I wish I'd thought of it.

I should mention that this book features the return, by popular demand, of both Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion.

Now, rather than talk anymore about the story, clever as it is, I want to discuss some social issues and commentary that are worth noting.

There are no men in these books. Not really. The only real example of a man that you get is that of the Wizard in the first book, and he's a fraud. Although the Tin Man used to be a man, he is no longer. All that's left is a rather vain and pompous facsimile. Fortunately, he's also genuinely caring, or he would be insufferable. The other male personas among the main characters are just that: personas. They don't represent actual people but ideas. Then there are the soldiers in Ozma of Oz, who are rather comedic as they are all but one officers. The lone private is only there so that the others have someone to give orders to. He's also the only one who doesn't run away from danger, although the officers were supposedly chosen for their bravery.

All of the important characters in the books are women, and most of them are positive examples of powerful women, Princess Langwidere being a prominent exception. She was more interested in admiring her various heads in the mirror rather than ruling the kingdom which she was responsible for. Considering that these were written before women had the right to vote, I think this is an important aspect of the Oz books to acknowledge.

That said, we do run across Jinjur, who had been a general in the previous Oz book, who is now married and settled down. Dorothy is amazed by the change but, as Jinjur says, "I've married a man who owns nine cows and now I am happy and contented and willing to lead a quiet life and mind my own business." So, despite the fact that Baum supports the independence and power of women, there does still seem to be the underlying belief that all a woman needs is to find the right man to marry and she will settle down and give up all that other stuff. It does seem, though, that Jinjur wears the pants in her marriage; her husband is indoors nursing the black eye that she gave him for not following directions. I think, though, all things considered, we can forgive Baum this one slip. At least in these first three books, Oz gives us a powerful representation of what independent women can do.

The Woggle-Bug Book (a book review post)

The Woggle-Bug Book is not precisely part of the Oz books as it doesn't take place in Oz or really have anything to do with Oz other than the Woggle Bug. Actually, the book is adapted from the musical adaptation of the second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz. Well, loosely adapted. The Woggle Bug is a supporting character in Marvelous Land, but it sounds like much of the plot of the musical is related specifically to the Woggle Bug and his love for a dress, which is what the book is about except set in New York. Maybe. Some American city, at any rate.

So, yes, the book is about how the Woggle Bug falls in love with a dress. He sees it on a department store mannequin and is taken in by its colors, but he can't distinguish it from the person who is wearing it, so the whole plot revolves around him chasing after the various possessors of the dress. And smashing hats. The premise is, in all actuality, entirely amusing.

However, the execution is lacking, especially by today's standards, considering that the book is filled with racial caricatures. I'm sure those things were amusing in their time, but it was a time when Blackface was considered a high form of entertainment. Needless to say, by today's standards, the stereotypes are, at the least, insulting.

I don't really understand the need to set the book in the real world for any other reason than to include those characters. Baum still felt the need to have the Woggle Bug encounter a bunch of talking animals, so it seems to me the book would have worked just fine in Oz. Except that it was done as a child's picture book, not a novel, so, maybe, they thought the book would work better in a familiar setting. It was more than a century ago, so it's hard to say. It doesn't translate well to modern day, though, because of the racial issues.

However, that probably makes the book ripe for a modern interpretation because, as I said, the premise is really very funny and put the Woggle Bug's life in jeopardy on more than one occasion. I wouldn't suggest the original for more than die-hard Oz fans.

And, now, for something I've never done before: a review of the specific edition I purchased.
I picked up a free edition of The Woggle-Bug Book for my Kindle, and it was definitely an example of getting what you paid for. The person responsible for the adaptation did a piss poor job of it. For one thing, the original book had illustrations; evidently, those illustrations had captions. The captions were included in the narrative text of the book wherever they happened to fall, which was quite jarring. The book is in past tense, but the captions are in present, so you'd suddenly get this present tense summary of the current action of the book. Also, the book, especially toward the end, is full of typos. It was very apparent that not much time or attention was given to making the book presentable. I would certainly not recommend this edition of the book to anyone, even for the low, low price of FREE.

The Marvelous Land of Oz (a book review post)

As I mentioned in my review of The Wizard of Oz, I didn't know the Oz books existed when I was  a kid, so I completely missed out on these until I was too old to be interested. Well, as a high-schooler, I wasn't interested. After finishing the second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, I'm really starting to be disappointed that I missed these books when I was a kid. So far, they are pretty marvelous.

As a writer, one of the things I find most interesting about the series is that there was never supposed to be more than just the one book, the one everyone knows because of the movie. But there was a musical, stage version of Wizard done -- co-produced by Baum -- and the actors portraying the Tin Man and the Scarecrow were so good that people (kids, mostly) began requesting more stories about those two characters. Not about Dorothy, just about the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. The resulting book doesn't even mention the Cowardly Lion.

We also get a book that is much more blatantly about the politics of the day, specifically, the suffrage movement. Virtually every character other than the Tin Man and Scarecrow, which includes all of the "human" characters, are female. Which may be a statement to cause some confusion, considering the main character is a boy named Tip, but you'd have to read the book to understand.

I think I like this one more than Wizard. Well, actually, I do. The one big flaw of Wizard -- that Dorothy wanted to go home, a place she didn't like -- is hard for me to get over. This one has no flaw like that and is even more whimsical. Not to mention that the characters are much more real in this one.

In Wizard, the characters are all "happy happy joy joy" all the time, but that's not the case in Marvelous Land. They bicker. They bicker a lot. Some of them even seem not to like each other much, and the Saw Horse doesn't get along with anyone. Tip constantly threatens the Woggle Bug because of his punning, and Jack Pumpkinhead is... well, I like Jack, but he's a whiner. Most interesting, though, is the Tin Man. He's developed a serious case of vanity and has had himself nickel plated. He's still a nice guy, but he spends more time worrying about his shine than he spends worrying about his friends. Also, I like the contrast between the Woggle Bug, who has lots of knowledge, and the Scarecrow, who has Brains but not lots of facts. It's a bit of intelligence versus wisdom and, mostly, it shows us that we need both.

At the moment, two books in, I'm really enjoying the Oz books and will definitely continue to read them. If you know your history at all -- well, early 20th century history -- there is the added enjoyment of all the social commentary that's been thrown in. Hmm... That sounds haphazard. Weaved in is more like it. In all of the best ways, these books are like the classic Looney Tunes cartoons: Kids find them hilarious, but you can't really appreciate them until you're an adult.

The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz was never that big a deal to me when I was a kid. Not that I didn't watch the movie every year when it came on TV, but it was never my "thing." No, that was Star Wars. Still, I probably would have read it if I had known it was a book, but no one ever bothered to tell me that. I suppose that's what comes of having non-reading parents. By the time I found out it was a book (probably during high school, certainly not before), I just wasn't interested in it.

This was all sort of like my experience with Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which was a movie that I loved as a child and still do to this day. But I didn't know it was a book and had never really even heard of Roald Dahl until I was in college, and I had no interest in reading it at that point. That came later after the second movie was made, which I didn't like but the Dahl family did, so I decided that I should probably read the book. And I didn't like it. It just wasn't magical like the movie had been. And I didn't like Charlie and the Glass Elevator, either, despite the high hopes I'd had for it since there was no movie to hold it up against.

Despite all of that, I decided I should give L. Frank Baum a try. If nothing else, I wanted to see what it was like before passing it on to my daughter, especially since she loved the Charlie books despite my dislike for them (which is great; maybe, I would have liked them when I was a kid).

In a certain sense, both Baum and Dahl borrow their style of story-telling from Carroll. As in the Alice stories, crazy things happen to the main character, and that character just goes along with those things as if they are normal. There's no plot as such. For Carroll, this is certainly true. Both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass just end. It's as if Carroll decided, "I'm though with this now," or, maybe, he just couldn't figure out how to end the story, so Alice wakes up and everything is over. I had that same sense from Glass Elevator. Dahl just got tired of writing or didn't know what to have happen next, so he just had it end. Chocolate Factory did have a bit more plot, but it was still kind of all over the place.

The stuff coming up about The Wizard of Oz will have spoilers. Now, you know. Also, it's kind of impossible to talk about the book and not talk about the movie. Okay, it's not, but I'm going to compare some things in the two mediums.

First:
The book starts out describing how gray Dorothy's life is. Everything is Kansas is gray. The land, the sky, her aunt and uncle. Everything but her little, black dog, and, by extension, Dorothy herself (because there is a heavy implication that Toto is the only reason Dorothy has not become a gray person herself). On the other hand, Oz is full of color and life that Dorothy has never experienced and is amazed by (I'll come back to this).

The movie starts off in black and white, mirroring the tone of the book, and bursts into full technicolor after Dorothy arrives in Oz. I think this is the most amazing thing about the movie and possibly the one thing that has made the movie so beloved for so long. I can't imagine the effect on an audience who had almost exclusively only seen black and white movies.

Second:
The Ruby Slippers. The issue of the shoes is one of  the things I've most heard complained about from people that love the book, wherein the shoes are silver. But, well, I get the desire to make them red for the movie since they were doing the big color shift in Oz, and I think going with the red was the better choice. Visually, it just stands out more. So, no, there was "no good reason" to change the color of the shoes... except that there was, and there is no significance to the shoes being silver in the book except that that was the arbitrary color that Baum chose. Or not really color, because I think he was just going with "silver shoes" to contrast against the "golden cap."

Third:
And speaking of the "golden cap," it's completely missing from the movie, so why not change the slippers to red since there is no golden cap to go with the silver shoes. I get dropping the whole "golden cap" thing from the movie, because that was a plot thread that the movie didn't need. That's just what frequently has to happen when you adapt a book to a movie: you have uncomplicate the book, so leaving the golden cap out of the story makes sense.

Beyond all of that, I liked the book. It has a more careful attention to plot than either Dahl or Carroll put into their stories while keeping the whimsical "you have no idea what might pop up next" quality. Bad things happen to the characters, and, if I hadn't seen the movie, I might have wondered what was going to become of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman during Dorothy's captivity. I also like that Dorothy is actually gone from Kansas in the book rather than seemingly just waking up like in the movie.

The book does, however, have one great flaw which keeps me from liking it more: Dorothy has no real motivation to go home to Kansas other than that she ought to want to go home to Kansas. It's clear at the beginning of the book that she doesn't like Kansas. She has no joy there other than her dog, and the dog goes to Oz with her, so, really, there's nothing that ought to make her want to go back, especially since she loves Oz. But she does want to go back, and it is her unwavering desire to go "home," for going home's sake, that drives the story. I found that, along with the lack of growth on Dorothy's part that accompanied that, to be rather inexplicable. Other than to make the story happen, why did Dorothy want to go back to a place she didn't like to people that, as far as we can tell, she had no true emotion for.

And, speaking of the lack of growth on Dorothy's part: Dorothy doesn't grow as a character during the story. She's the same girl going back to Kansas as she was when she got to Oz. However, she does serve as the catalyst for all the other character growth in the novel, which was interesting to watch and not often done, so, whereas I would normally dislike a story where the protagonist is static (see my review of Brave), I found that I didn't mind that so much in Wizard. Well, except that I really did wish she would have realized, "Hey, I don't have to go back to Kansas."

Mostly, though, I found the book most interesting in how it and the movie deviate from one another. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it so much just all on its own. At least not, now, as an adult. I wish I'd read it when I was a kid, though. However, I found it enjoyable enough (and Baum himself interesting enough) that I want to read more of the Oz books, so, I guess, you can't really ask more from it than that. Making me want to read the next one is its job, right? And it accomplished that. I'll have to wait and see how the rest of the books are.

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Artificial Intelligence

"Artificial Intelligence," as a term, was not invented until 1956, but, as a concept, it goes back much further. As a term, it means the science and engineering of making intelligent machines; as a concept, it means man, through science, creating intelligence where there was none.

Generally speaking, when we think of artificial intelligence, which I will just call AI, we think of computers. Past that, we think of robots. Computers, games in particular, have gotten sophisticated enough that the term AI is already being applied to them even if it's not precisely correct. The thing is is that computers are capable of learning. Adapting. The only real issue is that we're not quite sure, yet, how to determine at what point something becomes capable of thought. Independent thought. Pondering. And how does something become self-aware, which is a component we seem to believe is necessary for intelligence.

At any rate, the idea that computers will achieve the ability to think and become self-aware has been a huge focus of science fiction since before computers were actually a thing. Let's just pretend that that part where humans are trying to build machines that have legitimate intelligence isn't really happening. Or has happened?

Anyway...

Although, Isaac Asimov was not the first person to write about robots, he was the first person to write about them extensively, and his robot stories and novels laid the foundation for all future robot literature. His work is so fundamental, in fact, that people sometimes refer to his Three Laws of Robotics as if they were an actual, real thing, not something from a short story.

I remember the first time I heard of the three laws. It was an episode of Buck Rogers. I was 10 or so. The robot Twiki had had some sort of problem and was being re-booted. He quoted the laws, and the doctor/scientist guy got all excited and commented in awe about how they were hearing (for what sounded like the first time ever) Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

All of that to say, that Asimov has been instrumental in our cultural understanding of what artificial intelligence is even though he was first writing his robots stories at least 70 years before artificial intelligence would exist. His ability to see the possibilities of what could be were extraordinary.

Why has Asimov become such a central figure in the foundation of literature involving artificial intelligence? Well, I think I have an explanation for this. Robots, machine men, were commonly being used as the symbol for how technology and the pursuit of knowledge would destroy mankind. Yes, this is in the 1930s. But, then, if you look at what was going on in Germany and what would happen in World War II, this is somewhat understandable. Basically, robots were only used as an example of the Frankenstein complex: the creation rising up and destroying the creator. Asimov wanted to change this. He felt it was a tired cliche and supported the view that knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge is bad or wrong. First and foremost a scientist, Asimov believed in  the pursuit of knowledge, so he sought to make robots into something more realistic in his writing, not just a symbol of technology leading to our downfall. Not that that is not still a common symbol and fear, but he broadened our horizons on the subject and set the foundation for modern artificial intelligence in fiction.

Just as an aside, the character Tik-Tok from Ozma of Oz is probably the first significant use of a robot with its own intelligence in fiction. The term "robot" hadn't even been invented yet. There are a couple of other earlier mechanical men in fiction, but those works have mostly faded with time, while Baum's Oz books are still read and enjoyed today. That makes Tik-Tok the first (significant) artificially intelligent machine in literature.

But speaking of the Frankenstein complex...

I'm going to make a leap here and say that Frankenstein is really the first source of artificial intelligence in literature and fiction. There are often earlier sources cited, but they involve the use of magic, and I want to confine this to intelligence created through scientific means. Of course, the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein was a human machine, but the intelligence created, the mind created, was new and unique. Shelley's novel may be the first example of technology, of man's creation, rising up against him. As mentioned, it is the name that has come to be applied to those types of stories.

I'm not going to say that we, as a race, are striving toward the creation of artificial intelligence because of fiction, but fiction writers certainly saw it coming long before science did. Because our cultural awareness is so influenced by what has gone before, I would find it difficult to believe that whatever is coming in the realms of artificial intelligence will not have fantasy and science fiction at its roots. It will not surprise me at all to find one day that Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics have, indeed, become reality.