fuck yeah! wonderland!

who has written an elegant introduction to a recent re-issue of Carroll. Zelazny was a major science fiction writer, whose novel Sign of Chaos includes chapters set in a simulacrum of Wonderland. The influence of Alice on science fiction is vast and profound—it includes an episode of Star Trek entitled “Shore Leave”—and many, many novels and short stories; just one of the reasons why, as W.H. Auden once said, the Fourth of July is an important a day for literature as it is for the United States.

The manga artist who created Alice 19th, which includes a rather frightening version of Wonderland into which Alice’s older sister is banished, and begins with the appearance of a White Rabbit called Nyozeka. This is one of many manga Alices, since the little English girl has been big in Japan ever since the first Japanese translation was published in 1908.

Alan Moore’s erotic fantasia on themes by Carroll is far from being the first attempt to sex up Carroll’s superficially sexless tales. There have been countless pornographic versions, of which Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Porno (1976) is probably the most notorious.

As they have freely admitted (or boasted) in interviews, the Wachowski brothers scattered references to Alice throughout their Matrix film trilogy, beginning with the injunction to “follow the White Rabbit.”

Tom Waits wrote the songs for a 2002 stage version of Alice.

The English singer has composed and performed a number of songs that allude to the Alice books; her CD From Gardens Where We Feel Secure includes sound recordings made close to the sites where Dodgson imagined his alternative reality.

The Korean composer of the opera Alice (premiered in Germany in 2007), with a English language libretto by the Asian-Anerican playwright David Henry Hwang who is best known for his play M Butterfly.

Talbot’s recent (2007) graphic novel Alice in Sunderland has been acclaimed as one of the outstanding works of its kind. Impossible to summarize in a few words, it begins with a slobbish everyman character following a White Rabbit into a deserted theatre, and includes a number of fascinating speculations on the links between Dodgson and the North-East of England.

“At an epoch when, in the definitively United Kingdom, all thought was considered so shocking that it might well have hesitated to form itself, what had become of human liberty? It rested in its entirety within the frail hands of Alice.”—Louis Aragon.

The Surrealists adored Alice; Andre Breton cited her in various manifestoes, and all manner of Surreal works allude to her. One latter-day Surrealist, Jan Svankmeyer, made a well-received animated film of Alice.

Dodgson became a good friend of the great Victorian art critic, who taught Alice Liddell how to draw; the figure of Ruskin can be made out in the “old conger eel,” who taught the Mock Turtle “Drawling, Stretching and Fainting in Coils.” There are a number of curious parallels between their lives: for example, Ruskin also composed a fable, The King of the Golden River, at the request of a young girl; Ruskins tale was moderately successful, and has never been out of print, but it has never had such a vast and devoted audience as Alice.

A surprisingly cheeky note: Victorian adults who read Wonderland with their children would have seen at once that Tenniel’s portrait of the Queen—described by Carroll as a “Fury”—was based on Queen Victoria. Later dramatizations and adaptations of the tales often conflate the Queen of Hearts with the Red Queen of Looking-Glass, though they are very different characters.

Somewhat upstaged by the playwright’s more successful (Singing Detective) or scandalous pieces (Brimstone and Treacle), Dreamchild is still well worth seeking out. Directed by Gavin Millar, the screenplay drew both on the real-life Alice, seen here as an 80 year old lady on a visit to New York, and on Carroll’s creation.

L Frank Baum was happy to admit that Carroll’s work was a major influence on his stories about the land of Oz (beginning with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900), particularly in his invention of Dorothy, a young female protagonist who can play the role of surrogate for the reader. He complained, though, that Carroll’s stories were “incoherent.”

The Mad Hatter suffers from mercury poisoning, a common and unfortunate condition of many hatters of the time who used the chemical regularly for their craft. Depp and Burton elevated this Hatter’s madness by literally showcasing the character’s many mad mood swings in his makeup and wardrobe, creating a virtual human mood ring.

Vladimir Nabokov translated Carroll’s work into Russian, changing “Alice” into “Anya.” Though references to the Alice stories are scattered throughout his fiction, he firmly denied that Carroll was an influence on Lolita. Sure, Vladimir, we believe you.