Ret-Gone/Literature

Examples of Ret-Gone in Literature include:

In the Thursday Next series, starting in Lost In A Good Book, Thursday's husband Landen Parke-Laine gets erased from history through time travel, despite attempts to stop this. The Chronoguard then hold his existence hostage unless Thursday does a task for them.
- This has already happened to Thursday's father, although because he's an experienced Chronoguard himself, this doesn't prevent him popping up on occasion to give Thursday advice. They've wiped him from history, but they haven't actually stopped him existing yet (although he now has no first name). Don't think about this too hard, and especially don't wonder how Thursday can exist.
  - Of course, it helps that time travel will never have been going to be invented.
Balefire, in the Wheel of Time series. When it hits you, it kills you in the (recent) past, with the amount of "backburn" being based on the power of the spell. Everything you did in the past few seconds or minutes never actually happened. This affects physical reality but not the memory of those still around to witness the events, leading to much confusion as people remember dying but are clearly not dead.
In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space books, this is a risk of messing around with Faster-Than-Light Travel. One alien hints that entire civilizations have been erased this way, and that's only the ones who left evidence behind.
- Redemption Arc shows a variation of this. In both cases, the only person who remembers the missing person being there at the time of the event was there in the room with them. However, these people didn't vanish from time. A look in the records showed that they did exist, but died years earlier and if they hadn't died, they very likely would have ended up working on the project that they are claimed to have vanished during. This implies that the witness, or at least their memories of the person, was transplanted into an alternate universe where that person was already dead.
In the Dragonlance novel Dragons of Summer Flame, those who die while fighting the forces of All-Father Chaos are eliminated completely from existence, including the memories of the entire world. The only evidence they were ever there at all is the empty clothing and suits of armor left behind. Their method of doing so? All they need is for you to see them, and listen to them for a few seconds, so their words can steal your will to exist away. Or touching them will do that too. Chaos The All-Father was not a nice person, and his creations express this very well.
- In a later book, a group of shadow-wights survive by feeding off the memories of a small village, rather then wiping the villager from existence, allowing the wights to survive indefinitely with their victims none the wiser.
  - A short story titled, appropriately, "Gone", describes the fate of a group of treasure hunters who go to an island populated only by shadow wights hoping to find loot. The story is told by way of a diary, with the author repeatedly getting confused (at one point in the middle of writing an entry, as the person he was writing about gets erased at that very moment) because his past entries mention people who were never there. The final entry is made by the last survivor, who thinks that the entire diary is actually a work of fiction someone wrote as a present for him.
All Travelers in The Pendragon Adventure are Ret-Gone from their specific worlds after they take their first trip to another territory. They have no histories, no traces of evidence, no sign they ever existed. The people they knew still remember them, but there are no physical records of them and their journals serve as the only other proof of existence. Bobby Pendragon gets this in full, including having his house and family vanishing. Though the fact that Travelers are Ret-Gone has helped the Travelers a few times in discovering that someone is Saint Dane.
This happens in the anthology book connected to The Black Jewels trilogy. The character Saetan wipes out an entire people in response to his son's death. However, an incredibly minor character, an inn owner, remembers that a merchant from that island was there, but him and everything the man had brought with simply weren't there anymore. Also, his wife, Heketeah, the one actually responsible for the death, remembers them and is utterly terrified at the power it takes to simply erase a whole people. Saetan's friend goes to find the island only to find it's completely gone.
At the end of Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet Charles has succeeded in changing the past so that Madoc "El Rabioso" Branzillo, the mad tyrant on the verge of ending the world is replaced with Madoc "El Zarco" Branzillo, a good man.
One of Adam's powers in Good Omens.
Happens to the protagonists in the book Superstition. They and their circle of associates test the power of belief by willing a spirit into existence; that spirit then proceeds to wipe that entire circle out of existence, and succeeds at it.
In the Discworld novel Mort, after the title character refuses to collect the soul of a princess who should have died, the universe attempts to carry on as if she had died, causing much confusion as the citizen begin mourning the loss of someone though they don't know who or why. Said princess has to constantly remind people in the same room that she's present.
- Later, an 'interface' forms, a bubble on the world (which only the magically gifted or DEATH can see) centred on the princess, where the inside is the changed timeline and the outside is 'correct' history in which the princess is dead. The pressure of history causes the bubble to shrink and shrink until the changed timeline would never have existed.
This is the main power possessed by the shadow-men in John Dies at the End, though the erasure isn't perfect:

"But one night, me and John got really drunk and we sat around telling Todd Brinkmeyer stories, real stories, stories that happened but didn't happen. I think of his face and sometimes I can see it, and it's like a dream you can't quite remember the next morning. And I go back and go over the chain of events and there's places, holes where I know Todd should be."

Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast has this happen to the heroes. Fortunately, the reason it happens is also the means of their escape—a Time Travel device that allows access to The Multiverse and establishes that they live in a Mutually Fictional Massively Multiplayer Crossover. Within the work's Recursive Canon, a rival "Author" deleted them from their home universe in an act of revenge.
The protagonists try this on Hitler in Stephen Fry's Making History. It backfires.
The Goosebumps book The Cuckoo Clock of Doom involves the protagonist being forcibly transported back through his own life by the clock. He manages to find it again and return to the present before ceasing to exist, but realises that his Annoying Younger Sibling was now never born due to a flaw in the clock. He considers going back and attempting to fix things, but it's left ambiguous.
In the short story "The Edge of the World" by Michael Swannick, three high school kids, one girl, two boys, full of hormones and teenage angst, blow off school one day and decide to go look at the edge of the world, which is not far from the American military base where they live. While there they look at caverns carved into the cliffs by ancient monks. They each make a wish - and one boy wishes he had never been born. They get their wishes. They only trace left by the boy is a quickly fading dream-like memory in the mind of the girl.
A variant in the Young Wizards series: If a wizard breaks the Wizards' Oath, he loses his wizardry and everyone in the world forgets he was ever a wizard.
In "The Time Of Yore" by Michail Uspensky the main hero, a slapdash bloke named Jihar, runs up to his neck in debts and finally pawns his very fame to a greedy merchant. Due to interference of dark magic, the due-bill has this power: nobody in the whole world recognises him anymore, all his heroic achievments are attributed to the merchant, and even the books written about Jihar are changed.
Sweet wee Cassie from Animorphs considers preventing a person from being born to be more humane than killing them. It wouldn't normally have been a problem for the poor host who would have been infested against his will, but she happened to have a time machine at the time she came to this revelation. Sorry John.
In Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, it is eventually revealed that our timeline is NOT the original one, there was a whole other history where-in Europe never sailed west to the Americas but the successors the Aztecs sailed East and lay waste to most of the "Old World" with a religion based on conquest and human sacrifice. The people of this timeline eventually Ret-Gone'd themselves out existence to try to create a better world (where-in Columbus sailed west first). By the end of the book, the people of our timeline have little choice but to make a similar sacrifice, this time with a more detailed plan that provides a chance for a peaceful and mutually beneficial meeting of Europe and the Americas.
This happens to Kahlan in the last three novels in the Sword of Truth series. Richard is the only one who remembers her, including herself; Kahlan, in an interesting twist, is rendered amnesiac and is kept as a scullery maid by those who Ret-Goned her.
The end of Dream Called Time: Cherijo and Duncan end up in an alternate timeline where they never existed, due to their setting right what once went wrong with the Jxin. They're fine—although, obviously, there's no record of them aside from a few people's ripple-effect-proof memories and the fact that they're, well, there...and so, as it turns out, is their daughter Marel. Somehow.

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