I’ve talked before on this blog about the art of the retcon, or retroactive continuity. This is where a sequel to a story rewrites or disregards a detail in a previous instalment to drive the plot of the sequel. It commonly happens in film franchises, but can also be done in literature.
There are a number of bad ways to introduce a retcon, such as ignoring a previously-established character or writing off an entire story as non-canon.
One writer who did it well was Gregory Maguire, in his novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Here, he takes a character from the L. Frank Baum original, renames her Elphaba Thropp and gives her a fleshed-out backstory.
I’m reminded of retconning this week after hearing that Richard Osman will be changing a detail in his novel We Chase Shadows. The original scene in the hardback edition depicts a swift eating a worm, but it has been pointed out that these are not part of the bird’s diet. The paperback edition is expected to have a character now being unsure what species it is.
I guarantee this change is not a solo decision. There will have been many discussions behind the scenes to make even this small change happen. From a cataloguing point of view, the paperback edition needs to have a different ISBN from the hardback anyway, so it shouldn’t cause too much trouble in that regard.
At least it’s only a short passage at fault there. Once he found out how they behave, Peter Benchley regretted his portrayal of sharks in his most famous novel Jaws. After the success of the book and then the film, however, no amount of retconning could fix that.
Instead, he spent the last decades of his life campaigning for shark conservation.
