Last year when I was reading The Time Traveler’s Wife for Book Club and Knit the Classics, I read a rather agitated post by someone who felt we should all read Gabaldon’s Outlander first, because she had “done it first.”
I took this to mean that The Time Traveler’s Wife was a takeoff on Outlander in some way. Having read a few chapters, I can assure you that this is not the case. There is no more reason to be agitated on behalf of Gabaldon than on behalf of Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Michael Crichton, Connie Willis, or anyone else who has ever incorporated time travel into his or her books.
Maybe the agitated one meant that Gabaldon had kicked off the fashion for time travel romances. There was a spell when half the romance novels in the Advance notices were time travel stories. Then vampire romances came into fashion. It looks as thought the next big thing will be stories including mythological figures. Aphrodite taking a hand in the romance. That sort of thing. Will we all get agitated on behalf of Thornton Wilder or Peter David? I think not.
One of the great mysteries is why publishers insist that a single book has two different titles, one for America, and one for the rest of the world. Here I was thinking that Gabaldon must have written a new book called ‘Outlander’ but it appears to be the same book that I read years ago called ‘CrossStitch’. Over here the ‘Outlander’ series, is called the ‘CrossStitch’ series. I have read 4 out of the 6 books and half of the 5th book (I started getting a little bored by book 5 and haven’t picked it up again) so the characters are in limbo just before the War of Independence.
Cross stitch is a form of embroidery here as well. I admit to have always been a little puzzled about the title but my guess would be something to the effect of stitiching across time. Or maybe tied up with cross stitch tapestries that trap scenes from different times. Given that the second book is ‘Dragonfly in Amber’ the latter abstraction of cross stitch might be the correct one.
Perhaps that’s the reason for the change in title – a little too obscure for the American reading public – a bit like changing ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’ to the ‘Sorceror’s Stone’. 🙂 – although Gabaldon is actually American so she must have had a higher opinion of her readers’ intelligence than did the publishers..
My edition of Cross Stitch is a UK edition I think. It’s been out since 1991.
Look what I found….:-)
“Cross Stitch was my original title (it was a play on “a stitch in time”), and the Brits liked it. The Americans said “It sounds too much like embroidery, can you think of something more….adventurous?” so I did–Outlander. Also, when I wrote it, I had in mind that it was one book–and knew only enough about it to be pretty sure that Claire would “cross” not once, but twice– future to past, past to future–which would make an X, which is the basic embroidery cross stitch. It also had to do with Claire’s occupation–that of a healer. Lots of meanings, but overall, not really a good title, I don’t think.”
http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~gatti/gabaldon/faq/faq_index.html