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
Buy this book
Bookshop

Selected essays

Writing essays & notes

  1. The open universe

    On The Language of the Night and The Real World of Technology

  2. Umyazu

    Reading is the art of attention.

Reading books

  1. Was

    by Geoff Ryman

  2. Kraken

    by China Miéville

A creative space to practice the future →