Monday, December 17, 2018

This Week's Very Short Oz Stories

Yes, I still have a few stories to go in The Lost Tales of Oz, but I don't really have the time right now to read these long tales. Don't worry, with my winter break coming up, I'll try to catch up and bank a few entries for the coming weeks. But I still want to blog, so I've dipped back into Oziana with the 1997 issue, and found two very short stories:

  • "Junk Mail" by Dave Hardenbrook extols the virtues of a new computer and all the wonders it can do in an advertising e-mail sent to Ozma. Considering this was 1997 and the very dawn of the internet as we now know it (my website debuted just a few months earlier, for instance), it is surprisingly innocent yet prescient.
  • "A Generic Oz Story" by Tyler Jones is a brief encapsulation of the travails American children Timmy and Tammy go through when they find their way to Oz, which includes being captured and enslaved by the inhabitants of no less than three isolated Ozian communities, before making their way to the Emerald City for the obligatory party.
Okay, I promise the other Lost Tales novella next week; I just can't promise how early in the week it will be...

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