Sequels

A sequel written twenty years later can:

acknowledge the passage of time in the real world by recounting events understood to be occurring exactly twenty years after those of the previous work;

continue the action from immediately after the closing scene of the previous work;

be set any other length of time after the previous work.

In other words, an author has complete freedom to intervene or re-intervene at any moment along his fictional timeline as I used to believe that the creator of this universe would be able to do, e.g., responding to a prayer for good weather on a particular day, He would direct environmental conditions on previous days in order to ensure good weather on the day in question. By revising a text, an author can even change the course of events as we sometimes imagine that time travelers might do. The characters in a revised text have no memory of their experiences as recounted in the original text - unless, of course, the author were to write in some kind of cross-textual connections but to do that would be to tell a different kind of story.

Let us consider sequels written by:

(i) Dornford Yates;
(ii) Poul Anderson;
(iii) a Doctor Who script writer.

(i) Yates wrote nine novels narrated by Richard Chandos. Volume VI begins:

"This tale is one which could have been told before now: in other words, the events which I shall relate took place before some others which I have already set down."
-Dornford Yates, An Eye For A Tooth (Beeching Park, Kelly Bray, Cornwall, 2001), 1, p. 1.

Near the end of Volume I, Mansel and his man, Carson, drove fast from Villach to Salzburg with Chandos and Hanbury asleep in the back of the Rolls. We did not know then that Mansel and Carson had found a corpse on the road and concealed it in the road-side ditch. Now, only ten days after that event, Mansel informs Chandos and Handbury and requests their help in the investigation of a murder. Thus, Volume VI becomes a retroactive sequel to Volume I which is fortunate for Hanbury because, as we later learned, he had died between Volumes IV and V.

(ii) Anderson's omnibus Time Patrol collection, Time Patrol, should end with "Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks" first because this story does come after the others in terms of Everard's experience and secondly because PART ONE of the Time Patrol novel, The Shield Of Time, is a direct sequel to this story. Everard has returned:

"...to New York on the day after he left it..."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART ONE, 1987 A. D., p. 3 -

- from the events of "Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks" in Hiram's Tyre even though other stories were written in between.

(iii) When the Doctor returns his first two traveling companions to the twentieth century, they find that they have returned to that century perhaps three years after they had left it. I do not remember the exact number of years but the point is that it exactly corresponded to the years during which those characters had appeared in the program, something like 1960-'63. Was the script writer consciously acknowledging the period of time that had elapsed for the TV viewers or did it just not occur to him that, with a time machine, the Doctor should have been able to return these twentieth-centurions to the moment from which he had taken them, thus saving them the trouble of explaining an absence of three years?