Incorporating Short Stories Into Canon

I had one day this week when I was running on very little sleep, but I can happily say that the nights since have been better. Unsure if I’m behind on my Book Diary–I’m on the fence if I should review one book, because I don’t know if I have anything to say about it.

Reading Argylle by “Elly Conway”. Need a new Netflix show, in the meantime I’m trying out David Letterman’s interview show. Almost done (I hope) with Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.

This is more of a, “I’m thinking about this thing,” sort of Note, so I apologize if this is more boring than usual. Here, if it’s too boring, check out this awesome song from a video game soundtrack.

Incorporating Short Stories into Canon

In The Lost Hero, the first book in Rick Riordan’s The Heroes of Olympus, one of the main protagonists, Lego, comes across a bronze dragon automaton and fixes it up. It becomes the main mode of transportation (more or less) for him through the next five or six books. The reappearance of the bronze dragon always struck me as a bit odd because that wasn’t the first story he appeared in–that’s a short story published before the last book of the original series, “Percy Jackson and the Bronze Dragon”. 

I have a pretty strict rule about how, “Tie-ins shouldn’t be required reading for a piece of fiction,” at least when it comes to things like TV and movies. If I’m confused about an element of a story, and you tell me, “Well, if you read this tie-in comic/story/short film set in the same universe, it’ll all make sense!” I will have to resist the urge to slap you with a fish. Because I shouldn’t have to do homework!

Now I don’t think Festus, the bronze dragon, is an egregious example of this–I believe that he’s more or less adequately explained in The Lost Hero (I’ll let you know for sure when I get to that part of the re-read). It still feels a bit weird, though, that for the last few years, there’s apparently been a malfunctioning bronze dragon wandering the grounds of Camp Half-Blood, and if you haven’t read the short story, you’re wondering why no one bothered to mention it until now.

Dresden Files has, in its later books, done something a bit similar. It has a LOT of short stories in canon, and for the most part they exist outside of the main canon. Some of them have to exist out there; the story about the Oblivion War, by its very nature (the less people know about it, the better things are going) probably can’t be part of the main stories in an active way, and that works fine. Jim Butcher started dropping references to them in the main books, and as time went on these became more and more relevant to things. The Fomor are first introduced in a short story; Harry’s private investigator friend from before the stories pops up in another book in a minor role. Gwyn ap Nudd is name-dropped by Harry in another book.

And then in Peace Talks, the villain announces her arrival to the proceedings by dropping the head of a character who was pivotal to one of the short stories.

Oof.

I guess part of the reason this isn’t as big of an issue as, say, trying to explain the ending of an Assassin’s Creed game through a tie-in novel is that A), we’re in the same medium, for starters, and B), maybe I’m just more forgiving of books than other mediums? It’s not a big-budget production in the same way, it’s an author’s story that rarely feels like the extra stuff is a cash-grab. In most cases the story still works if you haven’t read that other material, but it still is much more helpful to have read it.

And I suppose it’s a good reason to get people reading more of the other materials. People tend to be drawn more towards novels than short stories, and so getting people to read those short stories, which are often put in collections with other authors (Butcher’s short stories are usually published this way first before being put in Dresden Files-only volumes years later). 

Riordan doesn’t have that excuse with “Bronze Dragon”, but at the same time it’s also not as if he does this sort of thing that often, and again, I think that it’s explained easily enough in the main book so that you don’t feel completely lost if you don’t have that story. And in settings like Riordan’s, or even Butcher’s, you can plausibly say to yourself, “Well, a bunch of weird stuff is out there, it’s not so unbelievable that this kind of thing exists and that our heroes ran into them when we weren’t looking.”

Also, unlike some of the horrible examples of tie-ins, it’s more about separate elements, rather than characterization or Plot issues. It’s not that the author is introducing some completely new personality for an established character, or someone making a choice that doesn’t quite make sense unless you read the other thing. The story still makes logical sense, even if you don’t have the other material.

Which I think makes a big difference.

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