Visitors from Oz

by Martin Gardner, L. Frank Baum

s/t: The Wild Adventures of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman
Dorothy and friends return in this Oz sequel, this time to New York City, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of "The Wizard of Oz". Combining mathematical riddles with technological pyrotechnics and vivid suspense, Martin Gardner has created a new fable celebrating the power of imagination and the lure of an ageless heroine named Dorothy from the turn of the century.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction

189 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Martin Gardner was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and published over 70 books.

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can tell the writer is a fan of the original books. It's very clear he has a lot of passion for them. Unfortunately, that passion does not translate into an enjoyable book--at least, not the same kind of book that the Oz series is. This reads more like a basic AU fanfic--the characters are all namedropped, but their personalities have been reduced to whatever the story needs to happen. It also dates itself pretty quickly, with the Oprah appearances and so on.

Imagine Dorothy and the rest of the cast in New York City, getting into early 2000's film comedy escapades. That's the book.

And seriously, why would you have Button-Bright's only line be "nope"? His response to almost literally everything in every single Oz book is "don't know."

[Nathan Dehoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was published back in 1998, and had much better distribution than most recent Oz books, but the reviews made me loath to read it. For some reason, it was only last month that I got the idea to look for it at the library. I’ve admired Gardner since reading The Annotated Alice back in my childhood, and I know he was a lifelong fan of Oz. Unfortunately, while there was some potential to this story, I don’t think it really lived up to it. The plot involves a movie producer named Samuel Gold who manages to get into e-mail contact with Glinda, and she agrees to see if Dorothy and her friends will visit the United States to promote a film Gold is making. Why they’d show up for him and not any of the other people who have tried to promote Oz over the years, I couldn’t say. Since Oz has been separated from our own Earth since the time of The Emerald City of Oz, and magical transportation between the two is impossible…wait, since when is this the case? Glinda did make Oz invisible at the end of Emerald City, but this pertained only to the land surrounded by the Deadly Desert, not all of fairyland. Also, there are plenty of examples of magical transportation between the mundane and fairy worlds in books later than Emerald City. Gardner seems to have wanted to use a non-orientable object called a Klein Bottle to get Dorothy to America, and disregarded prior continuity in order to utilize this device. A lot of this book appears to have been stuff Gardner wanted to address, but couldn’t convincingly fit into the plot. Dorothy and her companions visit Wonderland and meet its citizens, but pretty much all they do is explain how Lewis Carroll made them out to be a lot crazier than they really are. There’s a pointless diversion involving an ursine detective named Sheerluck Brown and a giant called Big Jim Foote, which actually might be the most amusing part of the story. When the visitors reach the States, they meet with celebrities like Oprah and Rudy Giuliani (the Mayor of New York at the time). In order to add some conflict, there’s a rival producer named Buffalo Boggs who has mob ties and severe body odor in place of any actual characterization. He sends some stereotypical Italian mobsters to kill the Ozites, apparently just so he can ruin the promotion for his competitor’s film. There’s also a bit where Dorothy takes down a stereotypical Muslim hijacker with help from the Pearls of Pingaree. The introduction of the Pearls is another thing that doesn’t really make sense, as the story explains that the King of Pingaree gave them to Glinda. So a small, vulnerable island nation gives up its only magical protection to someone in a country full of magic? Maybe it’s a comment on superpower politics, but I’m inclined to think Gardner just wanted to show the Pearls working in America and didn’t bother to come up with a convincing way to put them in. So, yeah, this could have been a lot better.