Retroactive Continuity - Literature Involving Retconning

Literature Involving Retconning

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his most-beloved character Sherlock Holmes by plunging him to his death over the Reichenbach Falls with his arch nemesis Professor Moriarty, the public's demand for Holmes was so great that Doyle was compelled to bring him back to life in a subsequent story, where he details that Holmes had merely faked his death.

In Stephen King's novel Misery the protagonist, Paul Sheldon, is forced to write a sequel to his book Misery's Child, in which the main character, Misery Chastain, dies. He at first attempts to retcon the events in that book, but his captor, Annie Wilkes, regards this as cheating and makes him create a sequel that doesn't actively deny what the reader already knows. The second attempt to bring Misery Chastain back to life (which Annie Wilkes likes) is almost an example of a comic book death.

In the Well World series by Jack L. Chalker, the computer Obie had the ability to adjust the equations of the universe and any changes made could be retconned so that all records would adjust so that even very odd things could be made logical. Early in the second book, a woman is changed into a centaur, and the records of her birth as a genetic experiment were automatically created by the Well World to explain the change and keep things balanced.

Though the term "retcon" did not yet exist when George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime depicted in that book is involved in a constant, large-scale retconning of past records. For example, when it is suddenly announced that "Oceania was not after all in war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia and Eurasia was an ally" (Part Two, Ch. 9), there is an immediate intensive effort to change "all reports and records, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks and photographs" and make them all record a war with Eastasia rather than one with Eurasia. "Often it was enough to merely substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable." See historical revisionism (negationism).

In Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, the action in the final part of the book occurs at Japetus (or Iapetus, a moon of Saturn). For the following novels, the action was changed to Jupiter and Jupiter's moon, Europa in order to resemble the movies 2001 and 2010.