Was

Was by Geoff Ryman (Penguin, 1992) In 1989, Jonathan boards a plane to Manhattan, Kansas, where he rents a car, explaining to the man at the Hertz desk that he’s dying. In 1875, in the same place, a young girl named Dorothy gets off a train with her dog Toto, expecting her Aunt Emma to meet her, but Emma isn’t there. Years later, Dorothy will have a breakdown while in school, as the substitute teacher—a man named Frank Baum—watches in horror. In 1939, in Culver City, California, a young Judy Garland tells her makeup artist a story which might be confession or might be fabrication or might be both. Was is a story about The Wizard of Oz and it’s a story about fantasy and reality, two ways of seeing that seem forever intertwined. Maybe, in the end, they are the same thing: each a kind of choice that creates a world that is never quite what it was, never at all what it seems. View this post on the web, reply via email, or become a supporter.