Her father Tony Gabaldon was of Mexican-American ancestry, and her mother Jacqueline Sykes of English-American ancestry. Her father Tony Gabaldon (1931–1998) was an Arizona state senator from Flagstaff for sixteen years and later a supervisor of Coconino County.
She has received three degrees from two different institutions: a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Zoology from Northern Arizona University, 1970—1973; a Master of Science (M.S.) in Marine Biology from the University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1973—1975; and a Ph.D. in Ecology from Northern Arizona University, 1975-1978. Her M.S. research topic was "Agonistic Interactions of Hermit Crabs." Her Ph.D. dissertation title is "Nest Site Selection in Pinyon Jays, Gymnorhynchus cyanocephalus)." Dr. Gabaldon received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (DHL) degree from Northern Arizona University in 2007. Gabaldon Hall, a dormitory on the campus of Northern Arizona University, is named in honor of her father, Tony Gabaldon.
As a full-time assistant professor in the Center for Environmental Studies at Arizona State University in the 1980s, Dr. Gabaldon did research, was a scientific computing and database expert, and taught university classes for college credit in anatomy and other subjects. An expert in scientific computing, she was the founding editor of Science Software Quarterly, a journal for scientists that chronicled the rapid advances in hardware and software during the decade when processing power began to migrate from the mainframe to the desktop. The journal featured reviews of software for scientific word processing, laboratory data acquisition, statistics, databases, computer languages and compilers, computer utilities, and books, mostly for IBM-PC computers and clones running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 At its peak, the journal had a circulation of over 4,000.
During the mid-1980s, Gabaldon also designed and taught personal computer courses part-time as a faculty member of the ASU Computer Institute, located in the Tower Shopping Center in Phoenix. The ASU Computer Institute offered non-credit, one-day, evening, and Saturday classes for students, business professionals, and others who wished to learn PC computing. Students received a certificate and could obtain Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for classes they completed successfully. During this period, she wrote computer articles and software reviews for popular national computer publications such as Byte magazine, PC Magazine, and InfoWorld. During this time, her husband founded and ran a successful company which provided computer programming services and support to Phoenix-area businesses.
In March 1988, Gabaldon decided to "write a novel for practice, in order to learn how." She didn't intend to share it with anyone at the time, or to try and get it published. While "casting about for an appealing time and place" for the novel she happened to see an old Dr. Who rerun on PBS, titled "War Games." One of the Doctor's companions was a young Scot from around 1745, a young man about 17 years old named Jamie MacCrimmon, who provided the initial inspiration for her main male character, James Fraser, and the mid-18th century time period. She used the name “Jamie” from the Dr. Who character, though she stated, "I’m afraid Jamie Fraser has nothing else in common with Jamie MacCrimmon save the kilt."
The use of time travel came when Gabaldon decided it would be interesting to have "an Englishwoman to play off all these kilted Scotsmen," but her female character "refused to shut up and talk like an 18th century person." This idea gave rise to Claire, the beautiful and stubborn English nurse "who took over the story and began to tell it from her viewpoint."
Later in 1988, Gabaldon publicly posted a short excerpt of her novel on the CompuServe Literary Forum, also called the "Lit. Forum," a hangout for people who like books (the forum is still extant, but is now called The Compuserve Books and Writers Community). She was an active member of this book-discussion community, and had posted several pages of her unfinished novel to strengthen her points in an argument with a male forum member regarding what it feels like to be pregnant. Within days, a science fiction and fantasy agent read her short post and offered to represent Dr. Gabaldon. She decided, however, to procure an agent who would sell her works as general fiction. Another forum member, a published science fiction author, was impressed by her post, and introduced her to his agent. The agent, Perry Knowlton, represented her on the basis of an unfinished first novel, tentatively titled Cross Stitch. Knowlton sent large excerpts of the book to five editors, and within four days, three of them had made offers on it. Her first book deal was for a trilogy, the first novel plus two future sequels. The title of the first book was changed from Cross Stitch to Outlander in the United States before release, but it bears the original title in the U.K. About this name change, Gabaldon says, that Cross Stitch was " a play on "a stitch in time", and that the British publishers liked it. The American publisher, though, said that it "sounded too much like embroidery" and wanted a more "adventurous" title.
Dr. Gabaldon resigned her faculty position at ASU after the first book deal was finalized, and became a full-time fiction author.
There are presently seven novels in the main Outlander series, including the most recent, An Echo in the Bone, released on September 22, 2009 in the U.S. The novels center around the time-travelling, 20th-century English nurse (Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser) and her 18th-century Scottish husband (James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser), and are set in Scotland, France, the West Indies, England, and America. The Lord John Series is a spin-off from the Outlander books, and centers on a secondary character from the original series.
Gabaldon's works are expanding beyond the printed word to other media. A graphic novel titled The Exile (An Outlander Graphic Novel) will be released on September 21, 2010 at a launch party in Scottsdale, Arizona. A musical based on Outlander was introduced in Aberdeen, Scotland, on July 31, 2010, created by two fans of her books. Music from this production was also released on a CD in July, 2010.
Besides the Outlander series, Gabaldon is working on a contemporary mystery set in Phoenix titled Red Ant's Head, and has published short stories in numerous fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, and science fiction anthologies.
She is married. Has a husband and three children.
Tony Gabaldon (1931–1998) was an Arizona state senator from Flagstaff.
Sam Watkins(born 1988) is an American epic fantasy writer who publishes fiction as Sam Sykes.
His debut trilogy of novels, the Aeons' Gate series, was appreciated by critics for their characterization and dialogue, and for their deconstruction of standard fantasy tropes, but criticized for their meandering, derivative plot.
