"The Fall of Oz"
by Jordan S. Bassior
(c) 2006
I warned you all. Oh, no, you said. The Gnome King just wants peaceful atomic power. Oh no, you said. Surely he must realize that Oz is an American ally, and what would happen to him if he used his arsenal.
So you didn't want to hit their reactors.
And now the Emerald City is a smoking ruin and Ozma's missing, possibly dead; American boys are dying on the Other Side of the Rainbow trying to winkle his troops out of their tunnels; and nobody knows when this war will end or how many will die before it's through.
And the images -- the pitifully half-melted Glass Cat; the few burnt rags that used to be the Patchwork Girl, still talking because the Potion of Life can work even if there is only a few bits left ...
The horror. The horror ...
END.
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Practically everything referenced in this short-short is the creation and property of L. Frank Baum and his heirs, save where copyrights may have lapsed. Atomic power, nuclear weapons, US military intervention, and foot-dragging on foreign policy are all too real, as is "the horror," though Joseph Conrad referenced it in The Heart of Darkness. :)
That was probably the most unsubtle thing I've ever read.
ReplyDeleteWasn't particularly meant to be subtle -- I was aiming more for "darkly funny" (as in the "Oz" chapters of Tad Williams' Otherland). I could have been making one of two opposite points by it, though. Which one do you think I was making?
ReplyDeleteIran, of course.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't come off as darkly funny either, and to compare... this... to the Oz section of Otherland. I think Tad would resent that comparison as much as I do.
I didn't have a particular real-world country in mind when I wrote this, more the general concept "Terrorist State about to acquire nuclear weapons," but that doesn't really answer the question. Which of the two possible points do you think I was making: that this is a universal situation, which would arise even if we could travel to a fantasy world, or mocking the whole concept of pre-emptive strikes by presenting it in a fantasy world?
ReplyDeleteTad Williams wrote a rich and interesting science fiction novel with numerous well-realized settings: I wrote a quickie knock-off short-short story, and I don't pretend to be as good a writer as Mr. Williams. Obviously, Tad Williams did it better.
Having said that, did you realize at what point Tad was getting with his Oz segment? Especially given the way in which computer games based on stories tend to be hyperviolent versions of the worlds they portray?
I don't see why Tad would resent being referenced as someone who has added to the Oz mythos. The Oz section of Otherland was an indirect addition (because it's fictional even within the fictional world, a "third-order" creation, to borrow Tolkien's terminology), but no one who didn't like Oz would have written that.
If you're who I think you are, you've almost certainly read the Wicked series by Maguire. Have you ever read A Barnstormer in Oz, by Philip Jose Farmer? Happier ending than either Williams or Maguire, but in its own way almost as cynical. And an interesting alternate take on that universe.
Since you seem to advocate the Tamil Solution, I would imagine that you've made the first one.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't want to be associated with this mere propaganda in any way if I was Tad.
I am completely confused by your association of the Sri Lankan civil war with the problem of aggressive minor Powers acquiring nuclear arsenals. The Sri Lankan civil war had absolutely nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Free assocation of (BadThing1) with (Badthing2) is neither an effective way of discussing nor of understanding either of the two items on the list.
ReplyDeleteI'm also not very interested with discussing complex real-world political situations on this blog. I have another blog for that, which you could have discussed it on if you weren't more interested in insulting and threatening a certain Filipina friend of mine than being polite and reasonable, Mr. Marston.
My point in the story was that, if fantasy worlds existed, and Powers from our world had access to them, we might see the creation of familiar problems such as nuclear proliferation, Terrorist States, and the dilemna of whether to pre-emptively strike (and thus behave aggressively) or to await developments (which might be horrific when they came). This is part of my general theory that political and diplomatic problems tend to be universals (note similar problems of proliferation of other militarily powerful technologies in other centuries, such as gun-running to natives in the 19th century colonial wars).
Oz was an amusing world in which to set the problem because it's so light-hearted in the original books. This was of course one of the reasons why Tad Williams picked it for his devastated-Kansas segments. I will admit that Williams' work was my primary inspiration here, especially the rant that he included.
Do you have anything useful or relevant to contribute?
But you and the Sri Lankan government have similar solutions to terrorism, bombing them all until they give up or they're all dead, either way works.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you're not interested real world political solution, why write such a transparent parallel to Iran and their nuclear program?
I didn't make up the term Tamil Solution in response to the war on terror, someone on Metafilter did in a remark about the mass protests in hopes that this will cause US neocons who've been promoting the Tamil Solution to stop promoting massacre as the path to stability.
But you and the Sri Lankan government have similar solutions to terrorism, bombing them all until they give up or they're all dead, either way works.
ReplyDeleteThis statement is not only literally untrue (check what you wrote, carefully, but also irrelevant to both the story and the problem of whether to make pre-emptive strikes versus allowing nuclear proliferation to dangerous Powers -- unless you imagine that pre-emptive strikes come at only two intensities: "ineffective" and "genocidally annihilatory."
And if you're not interested real world political solution ...
Never claimed that I wasn't. However, this isn't my political blog. Why do you find that so difficult to grasp?
... why write such a transparent parallel to Iran and their nuclear program?
It is only your limited knowledge of current events and history that makes you assume that that the only obvious parallel would be with Iran. In the modern world, one might also be drawing a parallel with Pakistan or North Korea, just to name two of the most OBVIOUS analogies (I could think of several others). Historically, there are obvious parallels with various colonial wars, where previously-ineffective hostile natives got their hands on exported European arms and became more dangerous. Heck, if I wanted to go way back, I could point to the spread of Roman military technology to the Germanic barbarians, or of Mesopotamian military technology all over the High Ancient world!
My analogy only seems so "transparent" to you because you can only see one tiny, recent facet of a much larger historical universe. It's an artifact of your blindness and ignorance, not of my supposed obsession with Iran.
I didn't make up the term Tamil Solution in response to the war on terror, someone on Metafilter did in a remark about the mass protests in hopes that this will cause US neocons who've been promoting the Tamil Solution to stop promoting massacre as the path to stability.
This statement is totally irrelevant to my story, as this is not a story about, say, the US government deciding that the Nomes are too evil to live, that "Nomish will only be spoken in Hel," and exterminating them with nerve gas.
"Nomes, Mr. Rico! Zillions of `em!"
Anyway, you know that America would be too soft-hearted to kill all the Nomes. We'd force them to surrender, make them declare that the Nome King was no longer their divine emperor, and within a generation or two they'd be exporting electronics, cars, Nome anime and cute Nomish schoolgirls all over the Dreaming ;-)