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Worlds Without End Blog

WoGF Review: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon Posted at 8:00 AM by Alex Hammel

ahmmel

WWEnd Women of Genre Fiction Reading ChallengeAlex Hammel (ahmmel) is an MSc. student in botany at the University of British Columbia. He started reading Tolkien and Lewis as a young nerd, and became an avid reader of all kinds of speculative fiction as an undergraduate when he discovered that it was more fun than studying. He joined WWEnd to participate in the WoGF challenge, and can often be found in the vicinity of a good beer.


OutlanderMy (quite late) June WoGF review is of Diana Gabaldon‘s Outlander, a fantasy/historical fiction/romance novel about time travel, Scotland, sex, Scottish men, and sex with Scottish men in Scotland after traveling through time. (Yes, my wife recommended this to me. No, I am not Scottish.)

As I am sure the reader has gathered, there is quite a lot of sex in this book. Although romance novels are not my usual reading material, my feelings about the sex scenes are that they fulfill the same purpose as space battles in military SF, or regular battles in an adventure fantasy novel: it’s just for fun. Putting the focus on the ‘just for fun’ elements can result in either an entertaining light read or a dreary slog through yet another orbital skirmish/drawn-out siege/Scotsman. Gabaldon, mercifully, gives us the former.

It helps that the sex scenes are very well done, and surprisingly tasteful (to me, anyway). This is not, to borrow a phrase from Neil Gaiman, a ‘one-handed read’, although it’s hardly PG-rated either. Gabaldon has quite enough to say about 18th-century and 1940s attitudes towards marriage, abuse, consent, and rough sex to keep things interesting, and she is for the most part careful not to let the romance swamp the rest of the story. The sex is, I think, one of the smartest things about the book.

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