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The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale (Classics of Science Fiction)

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Baum posits in his preface, "When my readers shall have become men and women my story may not seem to their children like a fairy tale at all." And so it has come to pass.

The world of The Master Key is oddly anachronistic while trying to be future-looking. It must have been in its time. Young children may not be able to access a world that runs counter to direct experience. The story comes from Baum, however, and so the promise of fancy precedes its telling. Older kids will more easily imagine an alternate future-past where Baum's imagination could have taken hold in reality.

For the young reader who is engaged, the wonder of Baum's writing has always been the characters, despite the fame of Oz, the place. Here Baum does not disappoint. Rob, the boy who has his father's support to be a tinkerer, becomes a prototype hacker--and in that many young children (girls and boys) may recognize themselves. He is a typical Baum loner, who escapes into his experiements--just as we escape into Baum's books. His mother and sisters think him odd--playing with mechanics and electricity were not activities for girls in the US in the early 20th century, but Rob is held up to us as a model of sorts.

Baum writes, "Familiarity with any great thing removes our awe of it." And so he sets out to demystify electricity. He uses a mythic Demon of Electricity quite ironically to move from fantasy to the practical realities of the 20th century, which Baum must certainly have known his fans would need tools to face head-on.

Rob may very well have been modeled on the young Thomas Edison, who in Baum's day was the Wizard of Menlo Park and brought the reality of electrical life to the country. Edison's boyhood tinkerings became the genius offerings of the man changing the world. This industrial-age archetype holds up very well in our technology-oriented culture. I can easily imagine a young Steve Wozniak or Sergey Brin loving this story of a young man enabled with great gifts of technology.

There is a bit of scientific elitism in the story--the gifts the Demon bestows on Rob should be restricted, "to exhibit...only among people of intelligence". Baum clearly had an agenda, the story is punctuated by narrative that breaks the dramatic contract with the reader, calling out Rob by name and describing his character rather than showing it to us in the story.

There is also quite a bit of American political elitism as Rob goes about the world imposing upon kings and presidents and using special knowledge to change the outcome of world events. And wherever he goes, he is immediately recognized as an American. There is something of Baron Munchausen in his bravura, but with Munchausen it was ego, with Rob it comes from naivete. Nonetheless, it makes for a broad adventure.

Lastly, it is a more violent story than any from Oz, where creatures expressly did not die. Rob's world is one of the Boer war and one of the amazing electrical devices is a weapon, which Rob uses in offense as well as defense.

The book is full of classic Baum devices. For example, just as several of Dorothy's trips to Oz began with situations where she would have perished (the cyclone, being cast adrift in a south Pacific storm), Rob's journey begins when he might have electrocuted himself--foreshadowed by his mother's lament at the sure disastrous results of his experimentations.

In any case, fans of Baum's particularly flowery prose and his gentle respect for the minds and hearts of children are intact here and make The Master Key a fun escape. Baum knows that the world is full of wonder to children, and urges them to engage it, even when in fearsome circumstances. Brave children are a constant presence is Baum's books and this one is no different.

This book is part of project Gutenberg, so you can easily preview the text before buying a bound copy. Google also offers long portions of book online, in an easier to read format than the plain .txt of project Gutenberg.
http://books.google.com/books?id=lds_CUVN1AYC&dq=The+Master+Key+An+Electrical+Fairy+Tale&pg=PP1