The Outlandish Companion

by Diana Gabaldon

  That came about rather by accident.3 A friend asked me whether I would be interested in writing a novella for a four-author anthology she was putting together. “I dunno,” I said. “I’ve never written anything under three hundred thousand words; it would be an interesting technical challenge. Let me check with the publisher, though, and make sure there’s no problem.”4

  When I described the invitation to my editor, she said that sounded interesting; what had I thought of doing? I replied that I thought I’d maybe tell the story of Brian and Ellen Fraser’s courtship—to which the editor’s response was, “Oh, you can’t do it for them, you have to do it for me—I lust for that story!”

  I pointed out that the publisher doesn’t do novellas, to which the editor’s response—she’s known me a long time—was, “Oh, I’m sure you could make it longer.”

  The final result was the suggestion of a book that consists of three interlinked novellas; the first tells the story of Colum and Dougal MacKenzie, and how the brothers claimed the leadership of the MacKenzies of Leoch; the second novella is the story of Brian and Ellen’s courtship and elopement; the third is Murtagh’s story—his friendship with Brian, his love for Ellen, and how it was that he came to stand as godfather to her son.

  So let’s see—that’s six Jamie and Claire novels, one prequel, one companion… and I suppose it’s possible that we’ll have to do a second companion, to catch up with the last two novels (if I do, that book will feature a comprehensive index to the whole series). So there will be either eight or nine books in this series, altogether.

  Q: Have you written anything else, besides the Outlander novels? Are you planning to write any different stories?

  A: I’ve written lots of other things—comic books, radio ads, scholarly articles, computer manuals, software reviews, technical articles on the proper way of cleaning a cow’s skull—but no other fiction. Outlander was my first novel, and I haven’t really had time to write anything else besides the Claire and Jamie stories yet.

  I do, however, have a contract for two contemporary mystery novels, and I expect (hope) to have the first of these finished soon.

  Beyond books, I did in fact produce three pieces of short (well, relatively short) fiction during the last year. I was asked to do a story for an anthology called Mothers and Daughters, whose “gimmick” was to have stories written by well-known authors collaborating with either a mother or a daughter.5 I asked my (then-fifteen-year-old) elder daughter if she’d like to do this, and since she said she would, we did. The story—a romantic fairy tale farce involving a white cat and a copy editor—is titled “Dream a Little Dream for Me.”

  That experience having proved to be fun for both of us, when another editor asked if I would write a fantasy short story for a German Arthurian anthology, I said I would, if they didn’t mind my doing it with my son (I having a son with a major taste for fantastic fiction). They thought that a good idea, so we produced “The Castellan”—the story of a lonely man of mixed blood, a white raven with a sarcastic sense of humor, and a real dragon lady, who thinks blood is blood, and it all tastes fine.6

  I don’t know why it should have been such a big year for anthologies, but it was. The editor of Past Poisons: An Ellis Peters Memorial Anthology of Historical Crime invited me to contribute a historical crime story. This seemed like an offer I couldn’t refuse, so I agreed.

  Now, the only historical period I happen to know much about is the eighteenth century, and I didn’t think I could take the time to do adequate research on another period for the sake of a short story.7 So, the eighteenth century it was, and the result was “Hellfire,” a story about Lord John Grey,8 the murder of a red-haired man, and Sir Francis Dashwood’s notorious Hell-fire Club at Medmenham Abbey.

  Q: When is the next book coming out?

  A: I have no idea. It takes me roughly two to three years to write one of the big historical novels, but this span is affected by things like book tours and other promotional activities (to say nothing of family life). Once a manuscript is delivered, the publisher does need time9 to do the production work, and then the actual publication date is determined by all sorts of factors that aren’t in my control and can’t be predicted.

  I write as fast as possible, consistent with producing a good book, and the publisher nobly tries to get books on the shelves as soon as it can—that’s about all I can tell you. When we do have solid pub dates for books, though, I always post this information on my Web page (www.cco.caltech.edu/~gatti/gabaldon/~gabaldon.html).10

  Q: Jamie is described as being unable to wink, but in several places in the books, he “opens one eye” to look at Claire. Isn’t this the same thing? If he can open one eye at a time, surely he can blink?

  A: Well, no, it’s not really the same thing. The movements are controlled by different sets of muscles. Try this: Close both eyes, then open one. You should feel a “pull” or movement, in the muscles of your upper eyelid/lower forehead.

  Okay. Now, with both eyes open, wink with one eye. Assuming you can do this, you should feel most of the muscle movement in the upper cheek and lower eyelid muscles. See?

  There was a long discussion on this point in one of the AOL groups, with people trying it both ways. Turns out there are quite a few people out there who can’t wink! Some people can wink, but only with one eye. Most were able to open one eye at a time, but some people (who could wink) couldn’t open one eye and leave the other closed. Likewise, many people could lift one eyebrow, but not the other. Evidently, there’s quite a lot of individual idiosyncrasy in eyelid-muscle coordination.

  Q: How do you pronounce your name? What kind of name is it?

  A: Gabaldon is a Hispanic name. This means it has two common pronunciations, one English, one Spanish. The most common (English) pronunciation is GAB-uhl-dohn (long “o” in the last syllable; it rhymes with “stone”).

  The common Spanish pronunciation is gah-vahl-DOHN (still a long “o”). If I meet anyone who pronounces the name correctly in Spanish, I know that they are a) from New Mexico, and b) very likely from the area around Belen, which is where my father came from.11 (Yes, Gabaldon is my own name, not my husband’s).12

  Q: What happened to Claire’s pearls? She pawned them, in Dragonfly in Amber, but later on she gives them to Brianna.

  A: Well, when I finished the draft of the manuscript, I realized upon reading it through that I had forgotten to get the pearls back. I therefore made a quick note in the margin—“Get pearls!”—but didn’t do anything about it until we had reached the galley proof stage.

  Since changes in the text are highly undesirable at this stage, whatever I did had to be brief—and it was. On page 672 (U.S. hardcover edition): “I am a fool,” Jamie grumbled, climbing the steep, cobbled streets to the wynd where Alex Randall had his lodgings. “We should have left yesterday, at once, as soon as we got back your pearls from the pawnbroker! D’ye no ken how far it is to Inverness? And we wi’ little more than nags to get us there?”

  Q:In Drums of Autumn, what happened to Willie, after he and Jamie went to the Indian village?

  A: I reckon he and Jamie returned to Fraser’s Ridge, whereupon he was joyfully reunited with the recovered John Grey, and the two of them went on their merry way to Virginia.

  These are long books, but there’s only so much room in them, even so; I can’t take extra space to explain events that can reasonably be taken for granted, or there wouldn’t be room to deal with the Truly Interesting Stuff. And while I could certainly have thought of some Interesting Stuff to happen after Willie’s return with Jamie, explicating it and tying it in with the overall structure of the story would have made the book substantially longer.13

  Q: Are you Scottish, or English?

  A: American. Raised in Flagstaff, Arizona.14 However, my ancestry is both English (with one German branch) and Mexican-American (Latina, Hispanic, Chicana, whatever you want to call it); one of my maternal great-grandfathers emigrated from England (Yorkshire) to Arizona in
the late 1800s, and two other branches of my maternal family arrived in New York during the American Revolution,15 while my father’s family is from New Mexico.16

  Q: Have you ever been to Scotland?

  A: I had never been there when I wrote Outlander, and did that book entirely from library research (since at the time, I thought the book was purely for practice, I hardly thought I could tell my husband I had to go to Scotland to do research). I did take part of the advance money from the sale of Outlander and go to Scotland for two weeks, though, while working on Dragonfly. It was (luckily!) just as I’d been imagining it. I’ve been back several times since, for book tours and the like, and would go back like a shot, at the slightest opportunity.

  Q: What is your academic background? What did you do professionally before Outlander was published?

  A: I have an M.S. in marine biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and a B.S. in zoology and Ph.D. in quantitative behavioral ecology (animal behavior with statistics involved) from Northern Arizona University. My thesis was on Nest Site Selection in Pinyon Jays.17 After getting my last degree, I did two postdoctoral appointments, at the University of Pennsylvania18 and at UCLA.19

  I also wrote comic books (freelance) for Walt Disney for a year or two in the late seventies.20 Then I was a professor at Arizona State for twelve years or so, in the Center for Environmental Studies.

  What I actually did there, weirdly enough, was to develop an expertise in the brand-new field of scientific computation (the use of computers to do scientific research—in botany, ecology, physiology, meteorology, etc. This is a completely different field from computer science, which is the study of computers and how they work).

  As part of this endeavor, I started and ran a scholarly journal called Science Software for several years. See, I started using computers for scientific analysis in the early eighties, just when microcomputers were getting started. It occurred to me that there should be a venue for other scientists who did what I did (not many, back then) to share their work. The journal took off, and took over—within a year, I was doing virtually nothing else; I ran the journal, did training seminars for scientists wanting to get into computers and lab automation, wrote texts and manuals, and so on.

  Essentially, I invented my own specialty. I then called up magazine editors and offered to write about it. That is, I started sending copies of Science Software around to the editors of the mainstream computer press (along with one of my Walt Disney comic books, just to be sure they noticed my query), asking for assignments—which I got instantly, because at that time, I was one of maybe a dozen people in the world who knew anything about scientific and technical software and could write coherently about it.

  In other words, I became established as an “expert” in scientific computation the same way I started writing fiction; I just did it.

  I kept doing it, in fact, until I had finished the draft of Dragonfly in Amber. At this point, my university contract came up for renewal, and I decided that it would be nice to see what it was like to sleep for more than four hours at a stretch, so I resigned.

  Q: Where did you get the idea for a time travel novel?

  A: I had meant Outlander to be a straight historical novel, but when I introduced Claire Beauchamp Randall (around the third day of writing—it was the scene where she meets Dougal and the others in the cottage), she wouldn’t cooperate. Dougal asked her who she was, and without my stopping to think who she should be, she drew herself up, stared belligerently at him, and said “Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp. And who the hell are you?” She promptly took over the story and began telling it herself, making smart-ass modern remarks about everything.

  At this point I shrugged and said, “Fine. Nobody’s ever going to see this book, so it doesn’t matter what bizarre thing I do—go ahead and be modern, and I’ll figure out how you got there later.” So the time travel was entirely Claire’s fault.

  Q: Why did you have Outlander start in the 1940s, rather than the present day?

  A: Well, three main reasons.

  1) I wanted Claire’s transition to the past to be as plausible as possible. Thus, coming from both the hardships of postwar Europe and the anthropological travels with her uncle Lamb, her adaptation to Jacobite Scotland would not be as difficult as it might be for a more modern person. It’s difficult for many present-day Americans to realize, but pre-war Britain was really fairly primitive, in terms of the kinds of conveniences—food, travel, refrigeration, plumbing—we take for granted.

  2) As I went on working, it was clear to me that at some point Claire would come back to the future, and I had decided that time moves linearly, no matter where you are in it—that is, if you leave from point A, and spend X amount of time living in the past before returning, you will return to A + X. I didn’t want to have to go into my future in order to write Claire’s future—that is, I didn’t want to be dealing with the problems both of historical and futuristic novels simultaneously.

  3) The third reason turned out not to be of any particular importance, but in the beginning, when I was still playing with the time travel notion, I hypothesized that the time-passage in the stones might be “open” only in or near periods of social violence—warfare, particularly. That would mean time travelers would be likely to “fall in” during times of upheaval, and to travel between periods of violence, when their appearances and disappearances were less likely to be noticed.21

  I later decided that it made more sense for the time-passages to be geomagnetic in nature, and thus they were affected by the ancient sun feasts (which are related to the gravitational field of the earth and its changing orientation to sun and moon). I therefore abandoned the connection with violence—but setting one end of Claires story near World War II did have something to do with that notion.

  Q: Why does Roger not “hear” the stones in North Carolina, when he’s fleeing from the Indians and stumbles into the circle?

  A: Wrong time of year. If the passage through the stones stands widest open on sun feasts and fire feasts, it is presumably more or less “closed” in the periods between. As Geillis/Gillian’s notes indicate, an attempted passage at the wrong time can be fatal.

  Q: Why is there a date discrepancy between Outlander and Cross Stitch with regard to the disappearance of Geillis Duncan into the past?

  A: The discrepancy in dates is a mistake—it’s a copy-editing error caused by differences between the British edition of the book, which begins in 1946, and the American one, which begins in 1945. The American book was already in galleys when we sold Outlander in the UK, and the publisher’s feeling was that since changing the initial date would have required sending the whole manuscript back to the copy editor, it was better to leave it. See “Errata” for a fuller explanation of the error.

  Q: Why did you choose Scotland during the Jacobite period as the setting for your books?

  A: Well, like almost everything else about these books, it was an accident. I was looking for a time in which to set a historical novel, because I thought that would be the easiest kind of book to write for practice. While pondering, I happened to see a rerun of an ancient Doctor Who episode on PBS—one in which the Doctor had a young Scottish sidekick, picked up in 1745. The sidekick was a cute little guy, about seventeen, named Jamie MacCrimmon, and he looked rather nice in his kilt.

  I was sitting in church the next day thinking about it, and thought, Well, you’ve got to start somewhere, and it doesn’t really matter where, since no one’s ever going to see this—so why not? Scotland, eighteenth century. And that’s where I started—no outline, no characters, no plot—just a place and time.

  Q: Is there any significance to the title Dragonfly in Amber?

  A: The dragonfly in amber is something of a symbol of Jamie and Claire’s marriage—not only via the token Hugh Munro gives Claire—but as a metaphor; a means of preserving something of great beauty that exists out of its proper time. Also, amber is a rather mystical substance that’s been used for mag
ic and protection for thousands of years. (See “Where Titles Come From” for a fuller explanation.)

  Q: Which cover(s) do you like best?

  A: I like the American hardcover art very much. As for the others… well, there are quite a number of different ones, counting all the foreign editions, and some are remarkably beautiful (I particularly like the first edition of the British Dragonfly paperback—no longer available, alas). Some are just remarkable.

  Let me just state for the record that I really, really, REALLY hate any art that attempts to show the actual features of any of the characters. Since an artist can’t possibly imagine what Jamie, Claire, et al really look like, the result is bound to be unsatisfactory to someone who does know what they look like. I much prefer such details to be left to the reader’s imagination.

  Q: Are the books available in audio format?

  A: Yes, in various versions. Bantam Audio-books owns the right to produce abridged commercial versions of all the books, and all four published books have been recorded and are available. The tapes are beautifully produced and beautifully read (the reader for all four books is Geraldine James; a very fine British actress, who does a wonderful job), but they’re very much abridged; only about one-fifth of each story is on the tapes (each book is a six-hour, four-tape set). These tapes are a good companion to the books, but certainly no substitute.

  The unabridged versions of Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber have been produced commercially by Recorded Books, Inc. (Voyager and Drums will follow, sometime in 1999).22 The unabridged version doesn’t have music or sound effects, but is beautifully read (by Davina Porter, a terrific Scottish/English actress who sounds a lot like Claire), and does include the complete text of the book—on thirty-two-plus hours of tape per book.