The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [204]
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