F&SF "Kansas, She Says, Is the Name of the Star" review

[This Review is by request of F&SF Magazine and is cross posted to the F&SF message board http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/ and to a number of LJ blogs!]

Kansas, She Says, Is the Name of the Star by R. Garcia y Robertson is an inventive, active, romp of a story that invites the reader to get up close and personal within the limited territory of a space-born habitat. I enjoyed the story and kept turning the pages but then I noticed that I was ticking off the bits and pieces from the Wizard of Oz and I realized that part of my motivation or interest in the story lay in this treasure-hunt rather than in the story.

This is a dependency story that leans on the probability that the reader will know and remember the Wizard of Oz while it deliberately distorts and traffics upon L. Frank Baum's masterpiece.

This is fan-fiction in search of perverting the wonder of the original work. In the end I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth that Robertson's Oz is reduced to a trite, grimy world of sex slavers and pedophiles and that little girls caught against this tapestry are dependent on mysterious outside forces to save them.

As the Marquis De Sade would say, "...the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost - the most legitimate - passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one."

Poetic irony?