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:
“One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)