Books like A Barnstormer in Oz

I guess it's tempting to reconcile and connect your disparate hobbies and interests. If you like heavy metal music and watching wrestling, then you're predisposed to enjoy a band like Fozzy (with Chris Jericho). And Philip Jose Farmer loved science fiction and Oz books, but they were only very tenuously linked, if at all. Hence this project: a revision of the Oz universe to make it more "science fictiony". Unfortunately it also sucked any life out of the narrative. This book is made uneven because it has far too many dull and tedious digressions about what Baum "got wrong". That's right, Baum was merely writing what was reported to him by Dorothy, and he got many things wrong. In fact, only the first book was based on Dorothy's experience, and the remaining sequels were invented by Baum's imagination. Besides being a lousy way to keep the reader enthralled (this book is dull, dull, dull), it also speaks volumes about the original concept of modernizing Oz to reconcile it with science fiction: Farmer only bothered with the first book. Why not limit himself to modernizing perhaps only the first chapter, toss out the rest, and make it easier to write a gripping adventure story? Farmer's project (I am reluctant to call it a novel) is jumpy and uneven, and unsatisfying on multiple levels. The best parts of this book occur when Farmer allows the action to speak for itself.