The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [2]
With this sort of nudging going on at home, it’s no wonder that I didn’t announce that I was moving to London to become a novelist right after high school. Instead, I got a B.S. in zoology, an M.S. in marine biology, a Ph.D. in ecology, and a nice job as a research professor at a large university, complete with fringe benefits, pension plans, etc. The only trouble was that I still wanted to write novels.
Now, I have had rather a varied scientific career, featuring such highlights as the postdoctoral appointment where I was paid to butcher seabirds (I can reduce a full-grown gannet to its component parts in only three hours. Oddly enough, I have yet to find another job requiring this skill), or the job where I tortured box-fish and got interrogated by the FBI (they didn’t care about the civil rights of the box-fish; it was the Russian exchange scientist grinding up clams in my laboratory they were after). At the time when my desire to write novels resurfaced, though, I was working at Arizona State University, writing Fortran programs to analyze the contents of bird gizzards.
This was really an accident; I was supposed to be developing a research program dealing with nesting behavior in colonially breeding birds. However, I was the only person in my research center who had (and I quote the director) “a background in computers.” At the time, said “background” amounted to one Fortran class, which I had taken in the College of Business in order to keep my husband company. However, as the director logically pointed out, this was 100 percent more computer knowledge than anyone else in the place had. I was therefore drafted to help with the analysis of ten years’ worth of avian dietary data, using punch cards, coding sheets, and the university’s mainframe computer. (In other words, this was long before the term “Internet” became a household word.)
At the conclusion of eighteen months of labor—which resulted in a gigantic eight-hundred-page coauthored monograph on the dietary habits of the birds of the Colorado River Valley—I said to myself, You know, there are probably only five other people in the entire world who care about bird gizzards. Still, if they knew about these programs I’ve written, it would save each one of those five people eighteen months of effort. That’s about seven and a half years of wasted work. Why is there no way for me to find those five people and share these programs with them?
The net result of this rhetorical question was a scholarly journal called Science Software, which I founded, edited, and wrote most of for several years.1 A secondary result was that when my husband quit his job to start his own business and we needed more money, I was in a position to seek freelance writing work with the computer press.
I sent a query letter to the editors of Byte, Info World, PC, and several other large computer magazines, enclosing both a recent copy of Science Software and a copy of a Walt Disney comic book I had written.2 The query said roughly, “As you can see from the enclosed, you’ll never find anyone better qualified to review scientific and technical software—and at the same time, capable of appealing to a wide popular audience.”
By good fortune, the microcomputer revolution had just bloomed, to the point where there actually was a fair amount of scientific and technical software on the market. And as one of perhaps a dozen “experts” in the newly invented field of scientific computation (it’s really pretty easy to be an expert, when there are only twelve people in the world who do what you do), I got immediate assignments. It was in the course of one of these that a software vendor sent me a trial membership to CompuServe, for the purpose of mentioning a support forum that the vendor maintained