In 1978, Alan Dean Foster published Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the first sequel to Star Wars.

George Lucas, meanwhile, began working on his own sequel to Star Wars. In 1980, The Empire Strikes Back hit the theaters, and with it came the first retcons in the Star Wars universe. 27 years have passed, and the amount of Star Wars material has expanded dramatically, creating a need for more numerous and powerful retcons - both for fans who want to have a coherent vision of what Star Wars is, and for editors who want to fit future Star Wars products in with past Star Wars products*.

Retcons are explanations intended to tie together two sources that say rather different things. It might be personal to a fan, or official to an editor making an entry in a continuity database. For example, was the Rand Ecliptic a freighter or a frigate? Since the ANH novelization identifies it as a freighter, and I happen to really like the classic Star Wars novelization, I choose to identify the Rand Ecliptic as a freighter.

I then find myself mentally rewriting "freighter" in for "frigate" when I read about the Rand Ecliptic. That's a retcon - a retroactive continuity fix. You might suggest, however, that it was both a freighter and a frigate - even though those two terms might ordinarily be considered contradictory.

This is another sort of retcon, involving the construction of some additional background material instead of simply deciding one source was right and another wrong. Retcons of this last type are particularly powerful. If we are creative enough, we can contrive an explanation that allows for any apparently contradictory events - such as assuming that the Millenium Falcon has a "grow/shrink" control somewhere in the cockpit.

At this point, it might occur to us that if we stretch too far, we're going to have a very strange idea of what's going on in the moments the camera isn't looking - and we might want to know when to start discarding erroneous material rather than explaining it.

My personal standard for deciding it's time to start discarding material is simple:

When I have to assume that a character is acting out of character - a sane character insane, an expert character incompetent, or an honest character a pathological liar - it's time to start throwing things out rather than creatively explaining.

It's a very simple standard, and one that keeps my personal vision of Star Wars reasonable. Of course, then you've opened the question of which option makes for a better Star Wars, and that, my fellow Star Wars fans, is ultimately subjective.





*To see why this is commercially a good idea, we don't have to look further than the hostile reaction of many Star Trek fans to Voyager and Enterprise because of poor attention to continuity in those series.