A Barnstormer in Oz: A Rationalization and Extrapolation of the Split-Level Continuum is a 1982 novel by Philip José Farmer. It is a sequel to L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, set some thirty years after, which disregards Baum's own sequels and those of others. The protagonist is Hank Stover, a pilot and the son of Dorothy Gale, who finds himself in Oz when his plane gets lost in a green cloud over Kansas in 1923. The novel was written for adults rather than children, and includes elements of sex and violence.
Plot
After his plane flies through a mysterious green cloud, Hank finds himself in an Oz on the brink of a civil war. He encounters Erakna, the new Wicked Witch. In the world of the Farmer novel, the events of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz were based on real events. Baum had been a newspaper reporter in Nebraska around the time Dorothy was transported to Oz; he interviewed her and later used his notes as the basis for the first novel. All subsequent novels by Baum were products of Baum's imagination. In Barnstormer, Dorothy has made only one visit to Oz; when Hank Stover arrives, the Scarecrow still rules the Emerald City, jas he did at the end of Baum's first Oz book.
Farmer treats Oz as a parallel universe, and attempts explanations of some of the fantastic element including magic and talking animals.
Significance
Literary scholars Kent Drummond, Susan Aronstein, and Terri L. Rittenburg have called the novel "the first instance of Dark Oz" and "the beginning of stand-alone, full-blown literary re-consumptions of Oz", specifying that it introduced the concept of "revisionist Oz, an Oz that purports to offer consumers the 'real Oz', the truth behind the myth."[1]
Opinions of Farmer's contribution to the literature of Oz span the entire critical spectrum; Jack Zipes called the novel "splendid",[2] while Baum biographer Katharine Rogers considered it "revision to the point of debasement."[3]Publishers Weekly considered it to be "done with almost no whimsy or humor" and "though ambitious, (...) not one of [Farmer's] better books;"[4] In Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Thomas Easton opined that the novel "will surely appeal best to those who remember Oz fondly. Others may well find it a touch too cute."[5]
References
^OZ GROWS UP, in The Road to Wicked: The Marketing and Consumption of Oz from L. Frank Baum to Broadway, by Kent Drummond, Susan Aronstein, and Terri L. Rittenburg; p. 143; published June 24, 2018, by Springer Publishing
^Jack David Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale, Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1994; p. 128.
^Katharine M. Rogers, L. Frank Baum, Creator of Oz: A Biography, New York, Macmillan, 2002; p. 252.
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