As the title of this blog may give it away, today's thoughts might be on or related to L. Frank Baum's books on the Land of Oz. While I don't remember all the characters, this is a throwback to my days loving fantasy novels and Dorothy and the other character's adventures in Oz reminded me a great deal of the Narnia books (another childhood love) because their fantasy worlds became more of the focus than the characters who came and went. Just like Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie did not appear in all the Narnia stories, neither did our beloved Dorothy. The biggest difference between the two, I find, is that the idea of escaping to another world was much more metaphysical concept in the Narnia books than in the Oz books. Dorothy physically moves her aunt and uncle to Oz at one point in the stories, something that would not have been possible within the Narnian tales because it was truly an imaginary world (filled with Christian allusions).
Yes, the Oz stories held a special place in my heart - spending a great deal of time reading them in our newly constructed elementary school library. Fortunately they had all of Baum's book in stock, but when I wanted more, I was able to utilize the public library to read the slightly less canonical stories written by Baum's son and other writers. The stories themselves, were often quite simplistic, but some of the ideas used were and are quite fascinating and I still reference them from time to time. The most significant of these was Glinda's "Great Book of Records" which records every event in history exactly when it happens.
Glinda's "Great Book of Records" was a source of much internal struggle in my younger days because it was apparently quite a complex and paradoxical concept to process. My first issue was that there is a fine line between recording history as it happens and taking away autonomy, as the book could be consulted, directly tying events and acts to their supposed consequences. Then there was this eerie Big Brother-ish feeling that it gave off since the "good" witch Glinda was always watching. It's like CCTV in Britain ... it's everywhere and no one knows whether anyone will care to notice what they did. It was the ultimate breach of privacy, not that I was so offended by sacrificing liberties for safety, but that there was no control over it and if my memory serves correctly, it was a plot device on at least one occasion where it was used for less-than-noble purposes. Beyond the moral questions, there were also the temporal questions such as how does it record acts in progress and how does it decide the order of the infinite number of events taking place simultaneously? There were also basic logic questions like - how does one find anything when there are an infinite number of a events taking place at any instant and an infinite number of instances over the course of history (naturally, a magical search function might have come in handy ...)? Then there were the pesky paradoxical questions, such as whether the Great Book of Records recorded itself recording history, which was itself an event occurring! There were hundreds of questions that developed from this supposedly simple and usually insignificant plot device that led me to believe (possibly my own delusion of grandeur) that Baum's books were more intelligent and philosophical than they let on. While I wouldn't call all of his characters deep or his world perfect in any way, he did bring up a lot of interesting questions by the way he introduced unusual concepts.
I cannot, however, talk about Baum's books without touching on the one vision he is most praised for: the character Tik-Tok. Tik-Tok is widely considered to be the first literary example of a robot (though the term "robot" was non-existent in 1907 when he was conjured by Mr. Baum)! Like his contemporaries Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, he was intentionally or unintentionally introducing concepts that would later become extremely relevant and influence how the general populous envisioned robots, space ships, submarines and other staples of fantasy and science fiction to this day. It's interesting because in Baum's fantastical world where men made of straw and tin protected wayward Kansas girls and animals spoke and were educated, the concept of a talking machine (who looks like a combination of a boiler, a clock and a wind-up toy) seemed to fit right in.
It was probably just an artifact of a creative mind and one could leave it like that, except that Baum, for one reason or another, made Tik-Tok quite different than the other magically anthropomorphic, intelligent and conversational beings and creatures. Tik-Tok is repeatedly introduced as a non-living, emotionless machine who considers himself subservient to Dorothy. Part of this could be contributed to an industrial age attitude towards machines, but from my perspective as a child, and even to this day, it made Tik-Tok the most pitiable character in all the books. Having done nothing wrong except to be a machine instead of an animal, he was never truly able to develop, making him stagnant and timeless - a common theme in the world of Oz. In a world where lost girls could become heroes, monkeys could fly and magic was quite real, Tik-Tok was juxtaposed as a neglected, unchanging character.
This brings me back to the Great Book of Records because one of the questions I did not posit before was what qualified as an event that could go on the "record?" Were thoughts events? If one was to try and answer these questions, you could look at the most likely answers to figure out what was really at work. Given the somewhat paradoxical nature of the Book, maybe it only recorded the actions of sentient beings (since trees blowing in the wind might take too much space and time in a record aimed at helping the country's leadership to solve problems). However, one could argue that parameter was related to every character in the books, except Tik-Tok since he neither felt emotions, nor fear and he was "programmed" to follow certain cues.
Disregarding my liberal interpretation of the Book's capabilities, Mr. Baum seems to be introducing the robot as an outsider, a tool and puts on display man's mastery of machines (in the form of Tik-Tok's subservience). While this entry has gotten a little carried away, I did want to express the keen appreciation I had and still have for Mr. Baum's books. His creation of Tik-Tok and the Great Book of Records gave me a great deal to question and spurred my interest in his books and the fantastical as a kid.
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