A Barnstormer in Oz
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, just as 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 elements 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."Farmer's earlier "biographies" Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life had made similarly revisionist examinations of older works of fiction, which Farmer put in the context of his Wold Newton family setting.