Canon Discontinuity/Literature

A good book series can be a treat to read, but even long-running franchises aren't immune to the dreaded Canon Discontinuity demon, as these cases show.


 * Zorro: at the end of The Curse of Capistrano, the main villain was dead, and Zorro publicly unmasked, revealing his identity to everyone. By the third book, neither of those events had ever happened.
 * The issue of Lord Soth from the Dragonlance novels, represents perhaps the unholy lovechild of Canon Discontinuity and Executive Meddling. In the novel Knight of the Black Rose, TSR took the famous Dragonlance character into Ravenloft, where he became a Dark Lord. This did not sit well with one of the original authors of the Dragonlance series, Mr. Tracy Hickman who, according to rumor, demanded that TSR/Wizards of the Coast Retcon Soth's trip to Ravenloft, and killed off the character for good measure.
 * It's better than that. Before dying, he repents of his crimes, regains his honor, and swears an oath to pursue redemption in his afterlife. This is a giant flaming Take That against ever putting him in Ravenloft, as one of its conceits is that some people are simply so evil that they're beyond redemption - and its Dark Lords are those people.
 * The rules for thought-speak in Animorphs are as follows: only Andalites (and Mercora, in Megamorphs #2) can use it in their natural form, it can be used in any morph including human, and anyone, of any species, morphed or not, can "hear" it. Events contradicting the first two before KAA settled on the rules are Canon Discontinuity.
 * The Posleen War Series novel The Hero, by Michael Z. Williamson and John Ringo, was declared non-canon, after the publishing of Tom Kratman and John Ringo's Watch on the Rhine. (John Ringo is mentioned only because his name's on the cover. Other than okaying the story outlines from the other authors, he was uninvolved in any Posleen novels not written by him solo.)
 * The Red Dwarf book series starts with two novels, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life, written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor (working collaboratively under the pen name "Grant Naylor"). After that, Naylor wrote the novel Last Human and Grant wrote the novel Backwards—both of these act as the third novel in the series, in Canon Discontinuity with each other.
 * This could equally fall under Continuity Snarl, as Last Human very briefly hand waves the events of Backwards and then goes off into its own Alternate Continuity. Parallel universes being a well-established plot element, it's probably best not to think about it too hard.
 * This is even more interesting since Last Human was actually published BEFORE Backwards.
 * Reading both books, it can be established that the universes of both diverge sometime during Lister's stay on Backwards Earth. The most likely event being that in Backwards, Kochanski was unintroduced to Lister before the events of the book.
 * The Worthing Saga has multiple levels of Canon Discontinuity. The actual "canon" consists primarily of the full-length novel. The stories included in the back of a recent edition came first, but Card didn't have them on hand when writing the novel, so a lot of the details differ, and he essentially made them an Alternate Universe. The stories not included are all so awful that he wouldn't even discuss them.
 * For a while, it was common for Clive Cussler's NUMA Series novels to end in sweeping global changes... that were promptly ignored by later novels in the series. These endings have included such things as the creation of a perfect "Star Wars" weapon system that would make nuclear war impossible, and—a particularly egregious example—the President using a forgotten treaty recovered from a buried train wreck to merge the United States and Canada into "The United States of Canada".
 * Actually, if you check the maps in the books (and one or two of the later odd references here or there) the Canada thing stays canon. It's just really almost never explicitly mentioned. If you've got the right hardcovers though it can occasionally be found on some of the maps. No idea whether it's still really canon, but it was referenced in at least one other book. Of course, aside from keeping track of Dirk's car collection the series as a whole isn't really that big on continuity. What with the Deus Ex Machina of the Author Avatar it's almost Magical Realism.
 * The Known Space short story "A Darker Geometry" was declared non-canon shortly after it was published. Also, the canonical description of being inside a stasis field when it is activated is a single-word paragraph reading Discontinuity.
 * Plato in The Republic, when discussing censoring stories, starts with the necessity of censoring out all myths that attribute evil behavior to the gods.
 * When finishing The Dark Tower series, Stephen King himself stated right before the very end that fans could just stop reading here if they so wished, and simply be happy with the fact that What follows is rather cruel, after all.
 * The various cast members of Saturday Night Live (including John's brother Jim) agree that Wired was no John Belushi's life and that it was all lies.
 * Le Cinquieme Livre of Gargantua's adventures, allegedly written by Rabelais, may be the most impressive example. People began doubting his paternity starting from its very apparition during the Renaissance. The conflict only really came to a conclusion in 1994 with the help of Mireille Huchon's annotations and arguments. However this does not resolve all issues since this part of Gargantua's adventures seems to have been written through a totally different perspective which does not always fit too well with the saga's previous books.