Was

by Geoff Ryman

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.

Publisher
Penguin
Year
1992
Collection
Fiction
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Selected essays

Writing essays & notes

  1. Petered

    On Making a Career in Dictatorship and Bullshit Jobs

  2. An addiction

    On To Write Like a Woman and Why We Fear AI

  3. In the world

    In memory of Nevan Scott, 1985–2026

Reading books

  1. Lavinia

    by Ursula K. Le Guin

A creative space to practice the future →