Fictions Within Fictions

If we regard "Sargasso of Lost Starships" as a fiction within the fiction of Poul Anderson's Technic History, then we can imagine sequels that would not need to be consistent with any events occurring later in the Technic History. There could be a Black Nebula series and collection which could then be filmed as "Technic History: Non-Canonical."

Fictions within fictions are a vast untapped source of potential creativity. Fictional characters have to read something. Often they refer to works that we have read, like Alice In Wonderland or Sherlock Holmes, but they must read something else as well. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series cannot be published or sold in the version of New York inhabited by Time Patrolman Manse Everard so what did Poul Anderson write instead of the Time Patrol series in the Time Patrol timeline? This is not a question that anyone usually even thinks of.

We do know, because we are told, that Wells' The Time Machine and Anderson's Maurai future history series and There Will Be Time are published in the There Will Be Time timeline. 

In Alan Moore's Watchmen, which is a comic strip, a character reads a comic strip. We see and read what he sees and reads and eventually want to know the outcome of this secondary or subsidiary story as well as that of the primary story. Both were filmed but separately, the inner story as an animation.

In Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, a very minor character is an actor who plays an irascible police inspector in a popular TV series. Thus, there could be two TV series, one of Millennium, the other about the inspector, with the same actor playing both the actor and the inspector.

But the truth is that authors and script writers are fully occupied with what they are already writing about.