This Week's Oz Short Story

The 1986 issue of Oziana opens with the first story of the computer wizard, "A Computer Wizard in Oz" by Phyllis Ann Karr, with illustrations by Melody Grandy. This is actually a shared story (think something like a game of Dungeons and Dragons) among a group of friends about one hundred years in the future. One player decides that he is going to conquer Oz by, essentially, hacking the Magic Picture and using it as a conduit to the Emerald City. The other players throw obstacles in his path, like things other Oz characters would do or how they would react. I was particularly amused by Jellia Jamb's nonchalance/seen-it-all-before attitude that culminated with her pouring hot chocolate on him as a wake up call. I was also amused at Karr's attempt to look into the future of computing (remember, this is 1986, and the Macintosh was only two years old at the time), and how spectacularly wrong and/or off-track it is, even though we're now only thirty years into the future and not one hundred. But anyway, in the end the Computer Wizard turns out to not have a lot of teeth, Oz is easily taken back, and our protagonist is hauled off to jail, where he is scheduled to meet Tollydiggle and start serving his punishment.