OUTLANDER Season Finale Sends Books Rising
Season two of the popular STARZ Outlander adaptation wrapped on Saturday. The final episode revealed new characters and story lines and also how much the screen version has increased book sales for the entire series, with all eight titles showing impressive leaps on Amazon’s sales rankings.
Some people must feel the need to catch up, sending the first two books in Diana Gabaldon’s series, Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber soaring. However, readers will find differences between the books and the series, particularly for season 2.
But the real interest lies in what comes next. Book 3 in the series, Voyager (PRH/Delta; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample) rose the highest on Amazon’s rankings, to #25. All the rest of the titles in the series also received significant bumps (the full list is here).
Two new seasons have been ordered, according to Variety. There is no air-date yet for season 3, but if the gap is anything like the time between seasons 1 and 2, fans will have to wait nearly a year, a period of time they mournfully call #Droughtlander.
It could take even longer than that, as casting for the new faces of season three has not even begun, co-executive producer Maril Davis told New York Magazine, “We haven’t actually started looking at anyone, but we’ll be starting fairly soon.” On top of this, new locations have to be spotted and new sets built as the action moves from Scotland to Jamaica.
When season 3 does air, fans can expect even more differences between page and screen reports Bustle, quoting executive producer, Ronald D. Moore, “Our goal is still to try and be as faithful as we can to the books [but] the longer that you go, the more the TV series inevitably veers from the book and certain plot lines then take on a life of their own … Those changes add up and the further in you go, the bigger those separations become.”
On the same topic Davis also told New York Magazine “In some ways, it should be like the books, but telling the TV version should be fresh. Even for book fans, you want to give them what they want, but in a different way sometimes. We want try to do that for season three as well.”
Gabaldon recently announced that the ninth book in her very slowly unfolding series (the first book was published over two decades ago) will be titled Tell The Bees That I Am Gone. A pub date is not yet known but Entertainment Weekly posted a brief excerpt.
Gabaldon has also said that a tenth book will be forthcoming, which she believes will finally wrap the series, and that she has plans for a prequel, focusing on her main character Jamie’s parents.