Gregory Maguire achieved incredible success with his novel Wicked, a sympathetic look at the evil witch from L. Frank Baum’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Wicked and its sequels have sold over seven million copies, and a stage adaptation of the first book has been the highest grossing Broadway show for the past nine years. There’s also a feature film in development, but so far it’s been slow going.

“Universal Studios is the main bankroller of the play, and they’re still making money on Broadway,” says Maguire in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “So they’re not in any hurry to turn this into a feature film yet.”

It’s been quite a ride, but now Maguire feels it’s time to try something new, and has announced that last year’s Out of Oz will be his final Wicked sequel. Instead he’s turning his attention to a new project called Egg and Spoon, set around 1900 in Tsarist Russia. The book is expected to hit stores late next year.

“It’s really a meditation on some things that we are facing right now in our dystopian 2013,” says Maguire. “The threat of climate change, floods and droughts, and weather that won’t sit in the month in which it belongs, and the implications for human suffering and the human need to begin to find new ways to share resources.”

Listen to our complete interview with Gregory Maguire in Episode 80 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), in which he recalls his time as a peace activist in Nicaragua, lists his favorite science fiction authors, and gives his impressions of the upcoming film Oz the Great and Powerful. Then stick around after the interview as guest geek Douglas Cohen joins hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley to discuss the various incarnations of Oz in fiction and film, including John and Doug’s new anthology Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond.

Gregory Maguire on Oz purists:

“At the very end, when I was signing books, a woman came up to me. She was very tall, she had on a trenchcoat and a brim-snapped hat, and she came to me and she peered down into my face, and she said, ‘I have a confession to make.’ I said, ‘Yes?’ She looked this way, she looked that. She said, ‘I’m from the official international Wizard of Oz club, and I’ve come to spy on you and report back to our minions. But … I’ve become a convert!’ And then she threw off her hat and bought three books and had them all signed for her mother and her husband and her children. I think that’s sort of what happened. It took the Oz people a little bit longer to realize, yes, I was playing around with sacred material, but not in any way to disgrace the original material, just actually to make it seem richer and to make its richness make more sense.”

Gregory Maguire on political allegory in Oz:

“The book Son of a Witch was intended as a response of mine to the second Gulf War and to the pictures of people coming out of Abu Ghraib, especially the photograph of the man in the hood who was on a box and wired up to — supposedly — electrodes. Those pictures came out and were all over the front page of The Boston Globe, and they were so horrendous that I felt physically sick, and I thought, ‘If I don’t write something about somebody making an attempt to break someone out of prison, then I’m just going to go bonkers’ … Now, when I came to read the book Son of a Witch for audiobook — books on tape — I found to my surprise that the character playing the new emperor of Oz had a distinctly Texan twang, which I don’t believe he had any right to have. So I suppose I was betraying my own political attitude in my performance of some of the characters once I came to do the book on tape.”

David Barr Kirtley on Oz as an American fantasy:

“Obviously America’s not the only country that has hucksters, but just the fact that the land of Oz is ruled over by this fraud, that just seems very American to me somehow. You have these characters and they set off on this quest basically for spiritual fulfillment — the scarecrow and the lion and the woodsman are each trying to improve themselves, reach a new level of enlightenment almost, and what they end up with is some guy who just gives them some worthless trinkets and they go away happy. And that seems very American to me. It’s a country where spirituality is very important to people — they sailed across oceans to be able to express their spiritual values — but then they just end up with consumer junk instead.”

Douglas Cohen on acting in school plays of The Wizard of Oz:

“In fourth grade we were staging The Wizard of Oz, and the teacher held try outs, and I wanted to be the scarecrow. I watched the movie, I rehearsed the song, I felt good. And I didn’t get the role — it went to Mandy Sherwood and I was really mad. I ended up getting stuck with the wizard of Oz, which all things considered was a pretty good role — I could have just been an Ozonian or a munchkin — but I was pretty bitter. And then years later I actually got into musical theater … and I tried out for another production of The Wizard of Oz — I think I was in ninth or tenth grade at the time. And I’m like, ‘All right, this is a chance to redress old wrongs. I’m going to try out for this and, dammit, I’m going to be the scarecrow.’ And just in a cruel twist of irony I ended up getting the wizard of Oz again. For a little while I was embittered toward the whole franchise, but that quickly went away.”