Technology
Dr. Edwin P. Ryland, a Methodist minister and a personal friend of Baum, maintained that if Baum had not pursued his vocation of writing for children "he might have been one of the country's best known technical writers for he had a strong leaning toward technical matters." Many critics who have written about Baum and Oz have noted that Baum's is a technology-friendly fantasy realm, which sets it apart from the more traditional fantasies that preceded it. Baum's Oz books and other works reveal commonalities with science fiction (The Master Key) and utopian fiction; they contain mechanical men (the Tin Woodman and Tik-Tok), a planned metropolis (the Emerald City), a domed submersible city and miniature submarines (in Glinda of Oz), and similar features.
Baum's Flying Girl books provide a dramatic and blatant display of this technological bent. The first book opens with a Foreword in which Baum thanks Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss "for curtesies extended during the preparation of this manuscript." Curtiss and the Wright Brothers appear briefly in the book, along with other early "aeronauts" like Walter Brookins and Arch Hoxsey. Baum's treatment of heavier-than-air powered flight through both books is strongly affirmative.
Read more about this topic: The Flying Girl
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body—we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power ... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)