Over on Mastodon, I participate in an ongoing hashtag/prompt called #WritersCoffeeClub. It's great fun, and I enjoy interacting with other authors. The prompt for today, November 26 in your timeline, was as follows:

26. Have you ever retconned a story after publishing? Is it okay to retcon?

According to many sources, the term “retcon,” short for “retroactive continuity,” is defined as:

A piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events, typically used to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for an inconsistency.

However, many respondents on the hashtag seem to have a different idea on what this term means. A typical example is this one (nametag redacted):

This and many other respondents, and indeed the phrasing of the original prompt, seems to suggest that people are using this term to mean something like “release an updated version of a work that has a plot point fixed so that it works with a sequel story line.” To me, this seems to be very different from the generally accepted use of “retcon.” This is actually rewriting narratives rather than just suggesting that the original interpretation or presentation is not the real story.

Now, I hesitate to claim that any word usage is “incorrect” or “correct,” since language is fluid and words mean what people use them to mean if the readers and listeners also understand them that way. But this level of semantic drift, particularly with such a new word (it was added to some dictionaries only in 2021) is bound to engender some confusion, since the original meaning and usage is still quite alive. It would be better, in my opinion, to coin some new word for this very real phenomenon so that people can talk about it unambiguously. My friend Cordela suggests “postcon,” which I quite like.

Semantic arguments aside, the practice definitely exists, and is bound to become more widespread, particularly with regard to ebook versions of works, which can be updated more or less at will by the authors or content owners. Thus, the version of a work you are reading may depend upon when you happened to download it. Or, if you are reading it within an app that automatically updates your library, the version you currently have access to may be different from the one you originally read. You could question whether your memory of a scene from that book is an example of the Mandela Effect or if the author actually changed it. You could be reading book four of a series and a character enters the scene, and you say, “Wait, didn’t he die in the first book?” and you pull up the first book in your app and find out that the character in question had a narrow brush with death but survived. Are you suffering from memory loss, or did the author rewrite that scene? How can you tell? Imagine if the Berenstain Bears books only existed in ebook form. Would you even know for sure that the name of the family of bears isn’t Berenstein? (I know some percentage of you are now saying, “Wait – it isn’t “Berenstein”? Follow the link.)

And the phenomenon isn't limited to “print” either. A correspondent tells me that pop icon and small songbird Taylor Swift is taking liberties with her rerecording and reissuing of her old material, changing lyrics occasionally to suit her current mood. And of course Lucas has effectively buried the original versions of his Star Wars films.

It isn't hard to notice that we've unwittingly drifted into the world of Orwell’s 1984, only with the new digital media all the laborious work that Winston Smith had to do with surgically replacing captions or portions of photographs is now all too easy. 

In that light, perhaps complaining that a few people on Mastodon are using the term ‘retcon’ incorrectly is not worth worrying about. But I'm just an old wizard living inside a fantasy, and wishing the world were different doesn't make it so. Well, perhaps a Wish spell might, but I'm not sure it would work outside of my fantasy universe, and in any case it will cost me a point of Constitution to cast it, so I need to keep my powder dry, so to speak. I'll save it in case I need to retcon something in my life.