The Outlandish Companion Read online

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author would, as usual, like to acknowledge

  … Her husband, who keeps saying, “Yes, but when are you going to finish the next real book?” (I’m working on it. Them. Whatever. Soon. Well, as soon as I can, anyway. Time is relative, isn’t it?)

  … Her children, who still make witty remarks from time to time, but who are now old enough to register objections to having these quoted in public (what they said [collectively] was “You’ve been putting us in your books? MOTHER! Our friends read these books!” To which I replied in some consternation, “Well, tell your friends I think they’re all much too young to be reading these books!”)

  … the Usual Suspects: the longtime and ever-changing array of electronic friends (and many passing acquaintances of kindly intent) who provide me with interesting factoids, entertaining questions, vital information, scintillating conversation, and fascinating raw material.

  … the Readers, who both instigated this book and supplied me with a great deal of its content by asking questions, suggesting Things They Would Like to Know, and providing all sorts of interesting miscellanea, like the Celtic discography (music to be listened to while reading the novels). To say nothing of those who argued with me about the actions of characters in the books—as though I had anything to do with it!

  This book has been somewhat different from the novels that I write, not only in its content, but in its form and substance. Normally, the only really important thing in a book is the story, and while the mechanical details such as design and copyediting are certainly not unimportant, they aren’t vital. This particular volume is much more than the sum of its words, though, and much more the product of dedication on the part of a great many talented (and long-suffering) people besides myself, including:

  … Barbara Schnell, my delightful (and faithfully accurate) German translator, who provided many of the photographs of the Highlands near Lallybroch.

  … Carlos and Deborah Gonzales, who used their artistic magic to transform visions into reality.

  … Dr. James Brickell, who emigrated from Scotland to North Carolina in 1733, and went to the trouble of drawing pictures of the flora and fauna encountered en route.

  … Kathy Pigou, the Australian astrologer who cast the horoscopes for Claire and Jamie.

  … Iain MacKinnon Taylor (and his brother Hamish and his aunt Margaret), who has done his bit to prevent the extinction of the Gaidhlig tongue, by providing me with Gaelic translations, pronunciations, definitions, and grammar notes.

  … Michelle LaFrance, another devoted to the perpetuation of Gaidhlig/Gaelic/whateveryouwanttocallthebeastlylanguage, who provided me with reams of useful resource material.

  … the staff and habitu$$s of the CompuServe ROOTS Forums, who helpfully provided all kinds of reference material on genealogy.

  … The Scottish Trustees of the Carmina Gadelica, for permission to quote assorted Celtic blessings and invocations in their entirety.

  … the anonymous editor of The Baronage Press, for his erudite and authoritative assistance in preparing the heraldry and genealogical notes that accompany the Family Trees.

  … Judie Rousselle, Diane Schlichting, Fay Zachary, Tabbak, BCMaxy, Sassenak, and the others who have so kindly given Jamie and company a continuing online presence through their Web sites—and in particular, Rosana Madrid Gatti, who designed and maintains the Official Diana Gabaldon Home Page, to the delight of all who see it.

  … Virginia Norey (whose name ought really to be presented here with illuminated capitals, at least), for the stunning design of this book, to say nothing of the subsidiary illustrations.

  … Mark Pensavalle, the production manager, whose blood and sweat stain the pages of this volume (I would say tears, but I don’t think it’s been bad enough to make him actually cry yet).

  … Johanna Tani, chief copyeditor, who has provided the ever-necessary vigilance against those hordes of errors that breed in the gutters of books, hatching out into the light of day when the covers are opened.

  … Susan Schwartz, without whose herculean efforts this book would simply not exist.

  … Jennifer Prior, copyeditor, one of the normally unsung heroes of book production, and

  … the many other people who have contributed so much to this book: Ann Fraser, for details of the Fraser of Lovat family tree; Elaine Smith, for the ring patterns; Stephen and Anne McKenzie, and Karen Jackson, for the photographs of Castle Leod, and all the other helpful souls whose many contributions have made this book what it is (i.e., large).

  Thank you all!

  Diana Gabaldon

  http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~gatti/gabaldon/gabaldon.html

  For Jackie Cantor,

  My companion on this long Outlandish journey

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  PART ONE: Synopses

  Outlander

  Dragonfly in Amber

  Voyager

  Drums of Autumn

  PART TWO: Characters

  Where Characters Come From: Mushrooms, Onions, and Hard Nuts

  Cast of Characters

  I Get Letters …

  Horoscope Reading for James Fraser, Horoscope Chart

  Horoscope Reading for Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser, Horoscope Chart

  Magic, Medicine, and White Ladies

  PART THREE: Family Trees

  A Genealogical Note

  PART FOUR: Comprehensive Glossary and Pronunciation Guide

  A Very Brief Guide to Gaelic Grammar

  Comprehensive Glossary of Foreign Terms (including British slang)

  PART FIVE: Outlandish Web Sites and Online Venues

  The Web Sites

  The Diana Gabaldon Home Page

  LOL—The Ladies (and Lads) of Lallybroch

  Through the Stones

  The Outlandish Time Line

  Clan Outlandish on AOL

  The Free Gallery of Authors’ Voices

  CompuServe Readers and Writers Ink Group

  PART SIX: Research

  Researching Historical Fiction: Hot Dogs and Beans

  Botanical Medicine: Don’t Try This at Home

  Penicillin Online: A Writer’s Thread

  PART SEVEN: Where Titles Come From (and Other Matters of General Interest)

  Outlander vs. Cross Stitch

  The Gabaldon Theory of Time Travel

  PART EIGHT: The View from Lallybroch: Objects of Vertue, Objects of Use

  Lallybroch

  “Arma virumque cano”

  PART NINE: Frequently Asked Questions

  Answers

  PART TEN: Controversy

  Communication

  PART ELEVEN: Work in Progress: Excerpts of Future Books

  The Fiery Cross

  King, Farewell:

  “Surgeon’s Steel”

  The Cannibal’s Art

  Writing and Real Life

  Annotated Bibliography

  Eighteenth Century

  Scotland

  Medicine (Including all Herbals)

  African Cultures

  Ghosts and Ghost Stories

  Literature

  Language Resources

  Magic

  Natural History Guides and Resources

  North Carolina

  Food and Cookery

  Native American Cultures and History, Etc.

  Rather Odd Books

  Miscellaneous

  Appendixes

  I: Errata

  II: Gaelic (Gaidhlig) Resources

  III: Poems and Quotations

  IV: Roots: A Brief Primer on Genealogical Research

  V: A Brief Discography of Celtic Music

&nb
sp; VI: Foreign Editions, Audiotapes, and Strange, Strange Covers

  VII: The Methadone List

  PROLOGUE

  Well, it was all an accident, is what it was. I wasn’t trying to be published; I wasn’t even going to show it to anyone. I just wanted to write a book—any kind of book.

  Not actually any kind of book. Fiction. See, I’m a storyteller. I can’t take any particular credit for this—I was born that way. When my sister and I were very young and shared a bedroom, we stayed up far into the night, nearly every night, telling enormous, convoluted, continuing stories, with casts of thousands (like I said, I was born with this).

  Still, even though I knew I was a storyteller from an early age, I didn’t know quite what to do about it. Writing fiction is not a clearly marked career path, after all. It’s not like law, where you do go to school for X years, pass an exam, and bing! you can charge people two hundred dollars an hour to listen to your expert opinions (my sister’s a lawyer). Writers mostly make it up as they go along, and there is no guarantee that if you do certain things, you will get published. Still less is there any guarantee that you’ll make a living at it.

  Now, I come from a very conservative background (morally and financially, not politically). My parents would take my sister and me out for dinner now and then, and while waiting for the food to be served, would point out the oldest, most harried looking waitress in the place, saying sternly, “Be sure you get a good education, so you don’t have to do that when you’re fifty!”

  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 for the software I was reviewing.

  I spent half an hour checking out the software support forum, and then—finding myself with several hours of free connect time in hand—set out to see what else might be available in this fascinating new online world. This being the mid-1980s, there was not nearly so much online as there is today (there was no World Wide Web; only the subscription services, such as CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy. America Online didn’t even exist yet). Still, among the resources available then (on CompuServe) was a group called the Literary Forum.

  This was a fascinating group of individuals who all liked books. That was the only common denominator; the group included people of every conceivable background and profession—among them, a few published writers, a good many aspiring writers, and a great many nonwriters who simply liked to discuss books and writing. Finding this congenial gathering to be the ideal social life for a busy person with small children—something like a twenty-four-hour electronic cocktail party—I promptly signed up with CompuServe, and began logging on to the Literary Forum several times a day, to read and exchange posted messages with the kindred spirits there.

  At this point in my life, I had a full-time job with the university, I was writing part-time for the computer press, and I had three children, ages six, four, and two. I’m not sure quite why I thought this was the ideal time to begin writing my long-intended novel—mania induced by sleep deprivation, perhaps—but I did.

  I didn’t intend to show this putative novel to anyone. It wasn’t for publication; it was for practice. I had come to the conclusion—based on experience—that the only real way of learning to write a novel was probably to write a novel. That’s how I learned to write scientific articles, comic books, and software reviews, after all. Why should a novel be different?

  If I didn’t mean to show it to anyone, it wouldn’t matter whether what I wrote was bad or not, so I needn’t feel self-conscious in the process of writing it; I could just concentrate on the writing. And, if it was just for practice, I needn’t worry too much about what kind of novel it was. I made only two rules for myself: One, I would not give up, no matter how bad I thought it was, until I had finished the complete book, and two, I would do my level best in the writing, at all times.

  So … what kind of novel should this be? Well, I read everything, and lots of it, but perhaps more mysteries than anything else. Fine, I thought, I’d write a mystery.

  But then I began to think. Mysteries have plots. I wasn’t sure I knew how to do plots. Perhaps I should try something easier for my practice book, then write a mystery when I felt ready for a real book.

  Fine. What was the easiest possible kind of book for me to write, for practice? (I didn’t see any point in making things difficult for myself.)

  After considerable thought, it seemed to me that perhaps a historical novel would be the easiest thing to try. I was a research professor, after all; I had a huge university library available, and I knew how to use it. I thought it
seemed a little easier to look things up than to make them up—and if I turned out to have no imagination, I could steal things from the historical record.3

  Okay. Fine. Where to set this historical novel? I have no formal background in history; one time or place would do as well as another.

  Enter another accident. I rarely watch TV, but at the time I was in the habit of viewing weekly PBS reruns of Doctor Who (a British science-fiction serial), because it gave me just enough time to do my nails.4 So, while pondering the setting for my hypothetical historical novel, I happened to see one very old episode of Doctor Who featuring a “companion” of the Doctor’s—a young Scottish lad named Jamie MacCrimmon, whom the Doctor had picked up in 1745. This character wore a kilt, which I thought rather fetching, and demonstrated—in this particular episode5—a form of pigheaded male gallantry that I’ve always found endearing: the strong urge on the part of a man to protect a woman, even though he may realize that she’s plainly capable of looking after herself.

  I was sitting in church the next day, thinking idly about this particular show (no, oddly enough, I don’t remember what the sermon was about that day), when I said suddenly to myself, Well, heck. You want to write a book, you need a historical period, and it doesn’t matter where or when. The important thing is just to start, somewhere. Okay. Fine. Scotland, eighteenth century.

  So I went out to my car after Mass, dug a scrap of paper out from under the front seat, and that’s where I began to write Outlander; no outline, no plot, no characters—just a time and a place.