The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [120]
The second reason for the choice of World War II is a corollary of the first and a result of the time-travel premise—technology.
Were I to have used a professional healer from contemporary times (the 1980s or 1990s, say), she would have been accustomed to the use of sophisticated equipment and procedures, and—if written with psychological plausibility—would have been missing the use of these acutely, at least in the early stages of exposure to the past.
While Claire is appalled at the lack of hygiene, the ignorance of nutrition, the crudity of surgical procedures, and so on—these are all matters of general medical knowledge that the modern reader also shares. Therefore, a person reading of Claire’s perceptions and adventures— bone-setting, wound-stitching, curing fevers—would feel herself (or himself) very much in her shoes. This sympathetic identification would be less if she were constantly thinking how much she’d like to put an epileptic child through an MRI scanner or what a pity it was that she couldn’t manage peritoneal dialysis or genetic engineering to correct inborn errors of metabolism.
A third factor in my choice of Claire’s time period was the “forward factor.” That is, when dealing with time travel, any writer must make decisions as to exactly how the process will be defined; does a traveler age? If a traveler returns to his own time, will he arrive at the same temporal point of departure (i.e., the same hour, day, etc., as when he left), or will some time (spent in the past) have elapsed?
Now, the evolution of the Gabaldon Theory of Time Travel was quite gradual, and in fact is still not yet completely explicated.6 However, it seemed to me, while writing Cross Stitch/Outlander, that time is linear and progressive for an individual; a person is living his or her life in a normal manner, and thus does age normally, no matter which time period he or she occupies while doing so.
That being so, if I ever meant Claire to return from the past (and I didn’t know whether I did or not, but it struck me as a distinct possibility), she would return to a time farther in the future than the point at which she left it. This in turn meant that if I made her contemporary with myself— set the story in the 1980s or 1990s, that is—her return to the future could well put her in my future—she could start in 1990, spend twenty years in the past, and return to 2010—all this in a book that might be published in 1995! (Had I realized at the time how slowly I write, I might have worried less about this.)
I didn’t want the books to become dated or seem overtly “wrong” in 2010—as might easily be the case if I tried to project Claire’s medical career and daily life in a time later than my own. Looking backward, then, I hit upon World War II as a suitable time period. For one thing, this particular war was the time in which antibiotics were first introduced on a wide scale—the third of the great advances that form the foundation of modern medicine (the first being the notion of asepsis; the second, anesthesia).7 This was a very important modern medical advance, and one with which most modern readers could identify, but without the need for any technological explanation. Also, if Claire had been a combat nurse, she would naturally be accustomed to hardship—and thus would not find the eighteenth century nearly so much a shock as might the average debutante—and would likewise be independent, self-reliant, and resourceful. Since these were qualities I had already discerned in her, my job was only to supply a reasonable explanation as to why she had them. Further, wartime conditions in Britain and France were difficult, austere, and often dangerous. A woman who had lived through nearly a decade of such conditions would not be fazed by the lack of modern amenities—and might be less daunted by the prospect of giving up such things permanently.
And finally, the eighteenth century was rather a violent time. For Claire