Canon Welding / Literature

Canon Welding in literature.

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• In general: a fix-up is the term for a novel created by welding multiple short stories together. The Other Wiki has a list of them.
• Fantasy author Michael Moorcock gradually connected almost every single character he'd created into a Myth Arc revolving around the concept of the Eternal Champion.
  • Moorcock's Doctor Who novel The Coming of the Terraphiles features a Captain Cornelius, who may or may not be another aspect of the Eternal Champion (much like Jerry Cornelius) which ties the Eternal Champion into the Whoniverse as well!^note Moorcock has said that Captain Cornelius was created because he was told he couldn't use Jack Harkness. Whether this makes Captain Jack the Eternal Champion is an open question, but it's fun to think it might. There's also a Second Aether, referencing Moorcock's Second Ether sequence which also takes place in the Eternal Champion continuity.
  • Moorcock also wrote some stories set in Alan Moore's America's Best Comics Universe, characters from which later appeared in Elric comics; Elric himself briefly met Conan the Barbarian in an early issue of Conan's Marvel Comics series.
• Isaac Asimov:
  • Foundation Series:
    • Ultimately, Dr. Asimov merged three (at least) different continuities; the Robot Series (specifically I, Robot and the The Caves of Steel sequels), The Empire Novels, and the Foundation series itself.
    • Foundation's Edge: Dom's story to Trevize and Pelorat about the "Eternals" in chapter 17 is a reference to The End of Eternity, which Dr Asimov wrote in the 1950s. The end of the novel revolves partly around allowing humanity to expand into an empty galaxy.
    • Foundation and Earth: This novel uses The Quest to have Trevize and company travel to several worlds established by The Caves of Steel and sequels, such as Aurora and Solaria. At the ultimate goal of their search, Earth, they discover R. Daneel Olivaw, the secondary main character from that series. One of them also describes the plot of Nemesis in a fictional context.
  • The early robot story "Robbie" was given an Orwellian Retcon to tie it into the Robot series, replacing the Finmark Robot Corporation with US Robotics and Mechanical Men, and adding a Susan Calvin cameo.
  • "...That Thou Art Mindful of Him": This story is set at a point between I, Robot and The Caves of Steel, while giving an explanation for how the Ban on A.I. during Susan Calvin's day is overcome and incorporated into daily life on Earth during Detective Baley's day. It also makes reference to a Multivac input, which puts the various Multivac stories in the same universe as the positronic brain robots.
• The final novels in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles tie Lestat's story into that of The Mayfair Witches.
  • Actually, they were tied together much before that, notably by the Talamasca (introduced in Queen of the Damned and later a key player in both the vampires and witches novels) and a few common supporting characters like Aaron Lightner. In other words, the Witches novels avowedly take place in the same world as the Vampire Chronicles from day one, though their interactions increase substantially over time. Hints in The Vampire Lestat also indicate that Rice's least-liked novel, The Mummy, also shares a continuity with these series.
  • The novel The Queen of the Damned establishes that witches and spirits are real. Memnoch the Devil claims that God, the angels, and The Devil are all real.
  • However, despite Lestat having actually met Christ, Rice insists that her biographical novels recounting the life of Jesus are not part of the same continuity.
• J. R. R. Tolkien:
  • The Hobbit was not, at the time of its writing, intended to be in the same continuity as The Silmarillion, which Tolkien regarded mainly as personal recreation and had as yet no intent of publishing. Despite this, he couldn't help throwing in a few names and locations that referenced The Silmarillion. When he began writing the sequel that would become The Lord of the Rings, he went whole-hog and moved The Hobbit to Middle-Earth, The Silmarillion becoming the Back Story of the novels. In fact, the ring that Bilbo found was originally just an ordinary, harmless magic ring and nothing more, and Gollum, having no motive to kill Bilbo, happily led him to safety at the conclusion of the riddle game. It wasn't until The Lord of the Rings was being written that Tolkien decided that it was the ring, and he revised the Bilbo-Gollum encounter in order to make it more sinister. The in-universe explanation for the altered narrative is that Bilbo wrote the first version while under the influence of the ring as he wanted to conceal the actual circumstances of his acquiring it. The revised, true version was written later, after he was no longer in the ring's grasp.
  • Tom Bombadil, Goldberry and Old Man Willow originally appeared in a poem published in 1933. They had no connection to Middle-Earth until the writing of The Lord of the Rings was in progress, and that didn't turn them into anything more significant than a Wacky Wayside Tribe.
• C. S. Lewis:
  • The Space Trilogy: That Hideous Strength contains not only Merlin as a real, historical character, along with the rest of Arthurian Legend, but one of the main characters interrogates him regarding "Numinor", a misspelling (or obsolete spelling) of "Numénor", from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion and surrounding legendarium, which was unpublished at the time. This is surprising on the one hand for its implications for the worlds in question, as well as unsurprising because of the authors' close friendship and the fact that both canons are set on Earth but at different times (the inestimable past and the present). It's all the more incredible to realize that it took 32 years for The Silmarillion to be published (in 1977) after That Hideous Strength (in 1945), making it surely among the longest complete payoffs for an Easter Egg.
• Robert A. Heinlein did this towards the end of his career, incorporating all his previous stories (often with radically different universes) into one meta-universe, thanks to a handy trans-dimensional device invented by one of his characters. Then he brought the John Carter of Mars series in, and the Oz books, and eventually all fiction ever created.
  • Though he did give preference to the ones he liked, and especially those written by authors with whom he was personally acquainted; one of the transdimensional 'jumps' involved taking the characters into the Lensman universe created by his friend, E. E. "Doc" Smith. He even threw in some real people: the characters of The Number of the Beast run into Charles Dodgson while in Wonderland, and near the end of the novel, it's mentioned that Bob, Arthur, and Isaac should be showing up for a big meeting soon.
  • Nearly all main characters he ever wrote are in one scene at the end of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.They try to recover Mycroft Holmes, whose death was perhaps the biggest Tear Jerker Heinlein ever wrote. Towards the end the characters are aware they are in a story, and find the Author to be a bastard...
• Larry Niven originally had two continuities: the first was the "slowboat" stories of early colonization of space by humanity (featuring the novels World of Ptavvs, the Gil Hamilton stories, and A Gift from Earth), while the second featured faster-than-light travel and aliens (featuring the stories of Beowulf Shaeffer, Louis Wu, and the Ringworld. Then he wrote his short story "A Relic of the Empire", which combined the two continuities and created the Known Space universe.
  • Niven needed to introduce a Retcon into the Ringworld series to make this work: in the first Ringworld novel, everybody knows that humans evolved on Earth, but in its sequel, The Ringworld Engineers, it's common knowledge that humans are descended from the Pak.
• Truckers, the first novel in Terry Pratchett's Nomes Trilogy, takes place in the (real) town of Grimethorpe, but in the later books the Store is relocated to Blackbury, which is also the setting of the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy. (However, the later republishing of Terry's early short stories has revealed that "Blackbury" was always his go-to town name, including in an antecedent to the Nomes Trilogy called "Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor".)
• Edgar Rice Burroughs had Tarzan travel to the underground world of Pellucidar in order to rescue the hero of the series. ERB weaved together the continuity of his books in other ways.
  • The character Jason Gridley is introduced in Tanar of Pellucidar, meets Tarzan in Tarzan at the Earth's Core, and appears as part of the frame story in A Fighting Man of Mars and Pirates of Venus, linking together Burroughs' four main series.
  • The technology for the Moon mission from The Moon Maid was Barsoomian in origin.
  • Tarzan is a supporting character in The Eternal Lover, whose central character is the sister of the hero of The Mad King; thereby bringing those otherwise non-series novels into the fold.
• Terry Brooks' Shannara series was always established as being set a fantasy world that formed After the End of modern civilisation. His The Genesis of Shannara series is set during the collapse of civilisation, and establishes the Four Lands as the future of his The Word and the Void novels.
• What August Derleth called the "Cthulhu Mythos" (a term never used by H. P. Lovecraft and only by Derleth after Lovecraft's death) originated from cross-references by Lovecraft between his own stories and that by other writers. Lovecraft, not Derleth, referenced passages from the Necronomicon, other forbidden books, or placing offhand comments during the expository monologues, about various Eldritch Abominations having no bearing on the current story. Specifically, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath ties most of his early standalone short stories into the Dreamlands Cycle, and also brings in "Pickman's Model" and the Randolph Carter stories. The Dreamlands Cycle is ultimately linked to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, though a few stories, such as the early "Dagon", may be outside the grand continuity. Several other authors have tied them together, notably August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith. Even the demonic race beneath the Earth from "The Rats in the Walls" appears to be referenced in "The Whisperer in Darkness".
  • Clark Ashton Smith's Xiccarph and Zothique series were not originally connected to the "mythos" in Smith's own writings.
  • Lovecraft and others tied works by earlier writers he did not personally know. For example, RW Chambers' The King in Yellow (referenced in "The Whisperer in Darkness"), to the work of Arthur Machen (the Aklo language) and Lord Dunsany (Bethmoora).
  • Though they never met in person, Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were pen pals and some of their letters discuss plans to combine their respective universes, but their untimely deaths prevented this from being made a reality beyond a few vague hints in various stories.
• Stephen King:
  • Beginning with It, King began tying many of his novels into The Dark Tower series, to the point that every single novel he wrote during the early 2000s was somehow related to the epic. The process included bringing back a character he Put on a Bus (literally) in 'Salem's Lot and retconning the Big Bad from The Stand into the Crimson King's Dragon. (Indeed, the Crimson King himself made his first appearance outside The Dark Tower series.)
    
    From Desperation (1996) to From a Buick 8 and Everything's Eventual (2002), 100% of King's fiction output (six novels and two story collections) tied into The Dark Tower (at least retroactively). These were bookended by Wizard and Glass in 1997 and the conclusion of The Dark Tower series in 2003-04. There's also the aforementioned incorporation of everything back to Salem's Lot and The Stand, written before The Gunslinger.
    
    And lest we forget, Salem's Lot takes place in the same city as Jerusalem's Lot, an earlier short story, confirmed to be in the Cthulhu Mythos. Therefore, The Dark Tower series is part of the Mythos by extension. Oh and as mentioned above Transformers, Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes, and everything else on this page has crossed over with the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • It's also been established that if there's anyone in a King story with the initials R.F., they're probably a very particular person: Randall Flagg, the Big Bad of The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon (as Flagg, no first name), and the Crimson King's Dragon. Except for (presumably) Rudy Foggia of The Jaunt, who is quite dead at the beginning of the story.
    • In 2022, King threw a further wrinkle into this one with a tweet suggesting that Pennywise might actually be Flagg as well. Although this one was probably a case of Trolling Creator.
  • It also contains an appearance by Charles Pickman, from the H. P. Lovecraft story Pickman's Model — which ties it to all the Lovecraft stories mentioned below. King's next novel, The Tommyknockers, not only crossed over with It, but also tied in several of King's other novels, including Firestarter and The Talisman.
  • The books Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game were originally two halves of one book, In The Path of the Eclipse, and the published versions still refer to each other, as the female protagonists of the books have a psychic link, having times when they suddenly get the feeling that this other person, whom they don't know, is somehow in danger. Both books also feature the same eclipse as a plot point: Jessie Burlingham is molested by her father during the event, while miles away, Dolores uses the eclipse as an opportunity to murder her abusive husband.
  • Misery refers to The Shining at one point, when Annie mentions the ruin of the Overlook Hotel.
• Tony Hillerman once had two series, one featuring Navajo cop Jim Chee and one featuring Navajo cop Joe Leaphorn. There is now only the Leaphorn & Chee Mysteries.
  • Though to be fair, from the beginning the Chee stories (which came second) would reference Leaphorn and characters and events from his stories—they just weren't featured in the same books for a while.
• Before he's done, F. Paul Wilson's Adversary Cycle bids fair to weave in practically every book and short story the man has ever written.
• Mercedes Lackey's assorted Urban Fantasy stories seem to be set in different continuities, until mention is made of the west coast elfhames (from the Bedlam's Bard series) in the SERRAted Edge novels, and of Tannim, the mulleted protagonist of the SERRAted Edge novels appearing as a bit character in his teens in Jinx High, a Diana Tregarde investigation.
  • Since Jinx High was Tannim's first appearance, and the Bedlam's Bard events were namechecked in the first SERRAted Edge novel, this one was evidently intended from the start, or nearly so.
• Kate Elliott has confirmed that her new Crossroads trilogy of fantasy novels is actually a fictional story within the context of her earlier Jaran series of SF novels.
• Peter F. Hamilton retconned several of his earlier SF short stories to be set in the same universe as his immense, later The Night's Dawn Trilogy and published them in a collection called A Second Chance at Eden. However, he has avoided this phenomenon elsewhere and has created no less than three distinct SF universes existed at similar points in history, making it impossible for them to coexist in the same continuity.
• Alastair Reynolds did something similar with several of his early SF short stories, retrofitting them into his Revelation Space series of books and publishing the results as a collection called Galactic North.
• Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry presents the world of Fionavar as so significant that echoes of it appear in the mythologies of every other world in The Multiverse. His subsequent stand-alone novels Tigana and The Lions of Al-Rassan, although each set in a different world, each has a moment showing that to be true. Ysabel is more overt, actually featuring several characters from the Fionavar Tapestry later on.
• The Peter David novel Howling Mad mentions Mayor Penn, who is the returned King Arthur from Knight Life.
• A particularly confusing example is The Well of Lost Plots, which ties the world of Thursday Next into a book (now a series) that Jasper Fforde wrote first, but which was published afterwards (The Big Over Easy, originally Nursery Crimes), and does so by establishing it as fictional within the Nextiverse, although, like all works of fiction, Thursday can enter it, and spends most of the book inside it, being ultimately responsible for its odd mix of genres. Everyone follow that?
  • To further confuse things, the Thursday Next stories are themselves fictional within the Nursery Crimes series.
• Agatha Christie's Author Avatar Ariadne Oliver seems to tie several of her series together. She originally appeared in the Parker Pyne stories (as did Miss Lemon). Then she became established as a Hercule Poirot character, starting with Cards On the Table (which also featured Superintendent Battle, who'd previously appeared in the two novels starring Bundle Brent). Then she was the main character in the 1961 novel The Pale Horse, which also featured the vicar's wife from the Miss Marple novel The Moving Finger. And in Murder in Three Acts, Poirot meets Mr Satterthwaite, who previously appeared in The Mysterious Mr. Quin collection of short stories. Tommy and Tuppence are also linked, since the same slightly unhinged old lady appears in The Pale Horse, the Miss Marple novel The Sleeping Murder, and the Tommy and Tuppence novel By the Pricking of My Thumbs, despite Partners in Crime having them refer to Poirot as a fictional character. Then again, Partners in Crime mentions Poirot, but not Agatha Christie, and the novel that Tommy references is The Big Four, one of the ones narrated by Hastings, so maybe it was, in-universe, written by Hastings, Watson-style.
  • Tommy and Tuppence can also be linked to the others through a mysterious character who is only referred to as Mr. Robinson. This character appears with Poirot in Cat Among the Pigeons, Marple in At Bertram's Hotel, and Tommy and Tuppence in Postern of Fate. He also appears in Passenger to Frankfurt, which does not feature any of Christie's series detectives.
• While Kim Newman has seeded connections between his books since the beginning, the short story "Cold Snap" seems to be a concentrated effort to tie them all together. A "Diogenes Club" story (and therefore featuring characters whose Alternate Universe selves appear in the Anno Dracula novels) it adds characters from his early work such as Jago, and even features the villain from his Doctor Who novella Time and Relative. The connection seems to be a case of The Multiverse, rather than a single world, since some of the characters are more or less explicitly indicated to be alternate versions of the ones from the novels; this may have been the only way to tie the fairly light-hearted action-adventure of the Diogenes Club series to a set of works that shade into outright horror. The events of Time and Relative are explicitly described by a character with knowledge of the multiverse as having happened in "a continuum several path-forks away from our own", and the ending hints that the events of Jago will go differently in the Diogenes timeline because of the Club's involvement.
  • Under the pseudonym Jack Yeovil, Newman wrote a number of books based on Games Workshop properties. Krokodil Tears, one of the Dark Future books, had its Big Bad have a vision of an alternate version of himself as the Big Bad from his Vampire Genevieve series of Warhammer books.
• Paul Magrs is a matter of this trope; by his own admission, everything he writes, whether original or franchise-based or plain fanfic, takes place in "a single set of mashed-up universes", though The Multiverse with a dash of Broad Strokes is sometimes at play.
  • Iris Wildthyme appeared in his first-ever short story (Patient Iris) and in his Magic Realism Phoenix Court novels, before he revealed she was an extremely eccentric Time Lady when he started writing for the Doctor Who EU and couldn't resist putting her in (since she was a Dr Who pastiche to start with).
  • Iris Wildthyme, in her appearances in novels and audios, occasionally interacts with an organisation called MIAOW, the Ministry for Incursions And Other Wonders (simultaneously a parody of Torchwood and Doctor Who's UNIT). This organisation has also turned up in his Brenda and Effie series of novels set around Whitby. Characters from his Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Mad Dogs and Englishmen, his Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama The Boy That Time Forgot, and the Pheonix Court series that featured the original version of Iris have also appeared in this series. A character from one of Magrs' Tenth Doctor novels also reappeared in an Iris Wildthyme short story, along with a character from the Brenda and Effie series.
  • Additionally, a couple of Magrs's stories (some Who, some not) strongly imply that "the Ministry for Incursions And Other Wonders" is the full name of the Ministry from The Avengers. One of his Eighth Doctor short stories goes as far as to suggest that the Ministry/MIAOW is also the organisation running the Village.
• H. Rider Haggard's novel She and Allan brought together Ayesha from She and Allan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines.
• E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series of novels was originally 4 books long (initially published in serial form in an SF magazine). In the late 1940s or early 1950s, he took an early work of his named Triplanetary and retrofit it in with the rest of the Lensman universe. He wrote an additional novel, First Lensman, to bridge the gap between the two storylines.
• Jules Verne did this quite a bit:
  • Most famously, he welded The Mysterious Island with his earlier books 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and In Search of the Castaways by adding Captain Nemo from the former and Tom Ayrton from the latter to the cast of characters. However, doing so opened a few plot holes, and the time period doesn't quite match.
  • Robur the Conqueror mentions the cannon from The Begum's Millions. (Insert inevitable joke about "Cannon Welding" here.)
• David Gemmell has stated that all his books take place in the same world, despite covering vastly different territory, such as a low-magic fairly standard fantasy world (Drenai saga), a post-apocalyptic world (The Jerusalem Man) and our own world (an Arthurian duology and a duology set in ancient Greece). (Those last three are explicitly connected by the plot device of the Sipstrassi stones.)
• L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, also wrote Oz sequels and non-Oz works of fantasy. Through several Crossovers, he established that all of them take place in the same magical continent, called Nonestica.
• Leslie Charteris introduced Inspector Teal in the novel Daredevil featuring Storm Arden before Teal appeared in The Saint.
• Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn stories and Dominic Flandry stories weren't, originally, part of the same universe. But a bit of prodding by fans, and he wrote some bridging so that now they are both part of the Technic History.
• Dale Brown has done this. Rebecca Furness and Daren Mace, characters originally in the non-Patrick McLanahan book Chains of Command, joined the main continuity in Battle Born and Warrior Class respectively. The eponymous space station of Silver Tower, thought a victim of Canon Discontinuity because of its long absence from his books, joins the main continuity in Strike Force. The Dragon of non-Patrick McLanahan book Storming Heaven, Gregory Townsend, is Dragon Ascendant Big Bad of main continuity title The Tin Man.
• Iain Banks, in his mainstream (non-SF) literature has said he doesn't do sequels/prequels; though he did include one subtle crossover in Complicity: Cameron's friend Al, an engineer he met on a paintballing weekend, is Alexander Lennox, recovered from his car-crash in The Bridge.
• All of Christopher Moore's varied books appear to take place in the same verse, whether the setting is modern suburban California or Israel in Jesus's time. Various characters make appearances outside of their respective novels, like angels and vampires and fruit bats. Of course, whether this is actual canon welding or just his Verse depends on whether Moore had the broad strokes sketched out from the start or just made it up as he went (and tied it together afterwards)!
• Philip José Farmer took this to the extreme in his creation of the Wold Newton Universe. His novels Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life link the two heroes' respective families to the same event, the meteor strike in Wold Newton, Yorkshire, England, on December 13, 1795. Other stories, both by Farmer and other writers, have expanded the Wold Newton universe to demonstrate links to The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sherlock Holmes, The Spider, James Bond, Nero Wolfe, Sam Spade, The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet, and even Star Trek.
  • In a way, his series of books beginning with To Your Scattered Bodies Go could be considered the logical conclusion of this trope, as he intentionally designed a world in which he could bring in any character from any story written by anyone.
• Madeleine L'Engle first connected her "Kairos" and "Chronos" series when Canon Tallis from Kairos novel The Arm of the Starfish appears in Cronos novel The Young Unicorns; several characters from each series would cross over later.
• In The Art of Detection, Laurie R. King welds her wildly successful series about Sherlock Holmes' female apprentice to her lesser-known series about a modern San Francisco cop. The novel is a serious Mind Screw, as Sherlock Holmes appears to be simultaneously real and fictional in it.
• Simon R. Green's series The Nightside, Secret Histories, and Ghostfinders take place in the same world. And constantly reference each other. There are also very strong connections to his Deathstalker, Forest Kingdom, and Hawk and Fisher series. And all his other writings.
  • In the latest Nightside novel there's even a perspective-flipped recreation of a scene from a Hawk and Fisher novel, of the duo waiting at a tavern to meet Razor Eddie.
• An unreleased series of novels (Alien Exodus and The Human Exodus) in the Star Wars Expanded Universe would have done this between Star Wars, THX 1138, and American Graffiti. The novel would have had descendants of the characters from the latter two works warp across time and space to A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away... and become the first humans in that place.
• Narita Ryohgo wrote links establishing that his three series of light novels — Baccano!, Durarara!! and Vamp! — all take place in one universe. For example, Shizuo from Durarara mentions getting into a fight with person strongly implied to be one of the Baccano! characters.
• It's not clear if this was intended from the start, but a minor character in the Starbuck series (set in the American Civil War) by Bernard Cornwall was revealed in the second book to be the son of Richard Sharpe, the hero of the Sharpe series, Cornwall's earlier and more famous series set in the Napoleonic Wars.
• Neil Munro wrote two series of short stories for the Glasgow Evening News: Erchie, My Droll Friend about a Glaswegian waiter, and Para Handy, Master Mariner about a steamboat going up the West Coast of Scotland. When Erchie needs to take a ship to his daughter's wedding, naturally it's Para Handy's Vital Spark.
• Andrzej Pilipiuk has connected his Jakub Wędrowycz stories with his more serious trilogy called Kuzynki (Cousins) — Jakub is mentioned by name in second volume and makes a cameo in third, combined with the illustration to leave no doubt that this is indeed him. This is odd, because in first book of the trilogy Jakub is clearly fictional as one of the characters reads his books and considers them the evidence that modern Polish literature is terrible.
• E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia series only came together with the novel of that title, which brought the characters of Miss Mapp together with those of two previous Lucia novels. Although not regarded part of the series per se, another earlier novel Secret lives was also subsequently tied into the same continuity.
• Anne McCaffrey:
  • Pegasus In Flight and Pegasus In Space were written as Interquels to officially merge the original To Ride Pegasus with the later The Rowan and the rest of the Tower and the Hive series into a single continuity.
  • In one of the Crystal Singer novels, the protagonist travels in a BB Ship, the unique form of space travel featured in her earlier The Ship Who Sang.
• Just about every book by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child take place in the same fictional universe. They're probably best known for the Agent Pendergast series, but even their non-Pendergast books share characters that tie in with one another. For example, one of their earlier books, Thunderhead, introduced anthropologist Nora Kelly and featured William Smithback from their first Pendergast-related novels; Kelly was later made a recurring character in the Pendergast novels. Two Pendergast novels feature a wheelchair-bound profiler named Eli Glinn, he was introduced in an earlier novel entitled The Ice Limit and has later appeared in their new Gideon Crews series of novels. Mime, a hacker from the duo's second book Mount Dragon, has appeared in their later Pendergast novels.
• Several of Piers Anthony's works. The last book of the Mode series featured a brief trip to Xanth. The 27th Xanth book included a visit to Phaze, a world from the Apprentice Adept series.
• At the end of Christopher Anvil's "War With The Outs" series, humanity learns that beyond the Outs' territory, space is controlled by two new alien races, the Stath and the Ursoids. Both of these had previously made appearances in his "Colonization" series, suggesting that the "War With The Outs" stories take place earlier in the same universe.
• Susanna Clarke published a short story where one of characters from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell visits village from Neil Gaiman's Stardust, making both stories take place in one world. As far as we know, this is still canonical.
• Older Than Radio: French writer Honoré de Balzac wrote a few independant novels and short stories before making recurring characters. He next made the project of making a study of human society and called his work The Human Comedy (in reference to The Divine Comedy).
• Older Than Print:
  • As the original versions of the stories have been lost and had to be speculatively reconstructed by scholars from the evidence of the various German and Scandinavian versions it is hard to tell, but it is quite clear that the Nibelungenlied is an amalgam of some quite different stories, and it is a matter of conjecture to decide when the welding of the elements occurred and which ones are to be attributed to the author of the Nibelungenlied. The story of the dragonslayer called Siegfried or Sigurd accounts for the first half of the main plot and the originally unrelated story of the death of the Burgundian kings at the hands of the Huns and their king Atli (Attila) for the second. The welding necessitated some changes, thus in the Scandinavian epics that contain just the Atli saga, the sister of Gunther, who is married to Atli, kills her husband to avenge her brothers. In the Nibelungenlied Kriemhild kills her brother using the army of her second husband Etzel (Attila) to avenge the murder of her first husband Siegfried.
  • A canon-welding that does seem to be the idea of the writer of the Nibelungenlied is the inclusion of Dietrich and his knights in the finale, which fuses the Nibelungen story to the cycle of epics about Dietrich of Bern (Theoderic the Great). In that cycle Attila was presented essentially as a sympathetic character and generous host, not the kind of treacherous and cold-blooded killer as in the Atli sagas.
• George Mann's timeline of the Newbury & Hobbes universe, at the back of The Casebook of Newbury & Hobbes, includes his Sherlock Holmes novel, his Doctor Who Expanded Universe work and The Ghost (2010).
• Robert E. Howard did this a lot with his historical, horror and fantasy stories. Just to name a few examples: Kull was explicitly tied with Conan the Barbarian in the essay "The Hyborian Age". Both was tied with the historical-fantasy character Bran Mak Morn through the Kull-Bran crossover "Kings of the Night". The ring of Thoth-Amon, from the Conan stories, and worshipers of Bran are featured in Howard's modern horror stories, while both Bran and Kull are mentioned in one of his Turlogh Dubh O'Brien stories set in 1200's. It wouldn't be unreasonable to consider all of Howard's speculative fiction to be part of the same verse, even if Howard never lived to point it out himself. And of course Howard and H. P. Lovecraft making references to each-others in their works was the foundation of the Cthulhu Mythos mention above.
• Members of a family named "Hempstock" have appeared in quite a few seemingly unconnected works by Neil Gaiman, including Stardust, The Graveyard Book and, most predominately, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Death from The Sandman (1989) also gets a mention in Stardust.
• Neil Gaiman's The Sleeper and the Spindle posits that the fairy tales Snow White and Sleeping Beauty take place in neighboring kingdoms, with Snow White's prior experience of evil enchantresses and enchanted sleep becoming vital to resolving the latter princess's curse.
• Indie author Royce Day's Space Opera The Red Vixen Adventures series and Diesel Punk novella Prisoner of War both involve characters of a species that resemble humanoid foxes, feature characters who express similar religious and political views, and have a protagonist named Lord Rolas Darktail. But it wasn't confirmed as the same 'verse until Shadow of her Sins in the former series, which featured a minor character from Gerwart, an expy of Germany from "POW".
• There's a Flashman book where the title character (himself originally from Tom Brown's Schooldays) encounters Sherlock Holmes, Watson, and their nemesis Tiger Moran.
• Steve Alten's flagship Meg series and his seventh novel, The Loch, became part of the same continuity with the latter book's sequel Vostok.
• An unusual example of an author allowing someone else to Canon Weld their work: the Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime series by Paul Preuss have as their premise that many of Clarke's stories are set in a single Verse.
• Roland Smith linked his Jacob Lansa series with the standalone book Sasquatch by having Buckley Johnson, a character from the latter, appear in the third Jacob Lansa book. Lansa later appeared in Tentacles, the second of the Cryptid Hunters series, and returned in the sequels alongside Dylan Hickock, the protagonist of Sasquatch.
• The Marla Mason series' ninth book, Lady of Misrule, reveals the author's previously stand-alone novel The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl to be set in the same universe.
• This, alongside Executive Meddling, is the very origin of the Sandokan series: the author Emilio Salgari had originally written The Tigers of Mompracem as a stand-alone novel (and made clear in the ending that Sandokan was retiring from piracy) and planned a Tremal Naik series starting with The Mistery of the Black Jungle (that ended with a Cliffhanger), but when reprints of the former outsold the latter by a fair margin the publisher asked Salgari to bring back Sandokan, and The Pirates of Malaysia starts with Kammamuri from The Mistery of the Black Jungle learning that Sandokan has unretired... And the ship he's on has wrecked on his island.
• The Kate Shugak novel Restless in the Grave features an appearance from Liam Campbell, the Alaska State Trooper protagonist of Dana Stabenow's other crime series, and other characters from his books. It may be a Fully Absorbed Finale as there have been no Campbell novels since, and in Restless in the Grave Liam has finally married his long-term love interest, and his mentor Moses is killed off at the climax.
• "The Dancing Floor", one of Cherry Wilder's last published works, combines elements from her Torin novels and her Rhomary Land novels, establishing them as part of the same future history.
• Keith Roberts' short story "Unlikely Meeting", published in Interzone #88, has the eponymous teenage witch from Anita meet Kaeti from Kaeti and Company. Since Kaeti and company are a Universal-Adaptor Cast anyway, he doesn't need to worry much about how it all fits together. (They've both read each others' books but it's not even particularly clear whether that's Mutually Fictional or A True Story in My Universe.)
• Matthew Reilly: After years of hints - the Supernova from Temple (Matthew Reilly) mentioned in Area 7 and Hell Island, Astro appearing in both the Scarecrow adventure Hell Island and the West novels - it's outright confirmed in The Four Legendary Kingdoms, the fourth Jack West Jr book, that the two series take place in the same universe, with Scarecrow appearing as a main character. And then The Three Secret Cities even off-handedly reveals that The Tournament is also a canon historical event, integrating that one too.
• The Giver Quartet: initially a standalone, The Giver is about a boy named Jonas who lives in a False Utopia; he escapes at the end, along with baby Gabe, but their fate is ambiguous. Another Lois Lowry book, Gathering Blue, is set in a primitive village After the End, but the characters eventually find a more advanced village with characters who might be Jonas and Gabe; Word of God initially said that it was up to reader interpretation. The following sequels, Messenger and Son, slowly do away with any ambiguity.
• Clive Barker did this with The Scarlet Gospels distinctly bringing Harry D'Amour and The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser character Pinhead together, but there were hints in earlier books this may have been planned for longer. A passing reference in the same novel also ties in the otherwise unrelated Coldheart Canyon.
• The Five Kingdoms series is set in the same Multiverse as that of the author's previous work, The Beyonders. Two characters who died in the previous series show up in the world's shared afterlife in Five Kingdoms, and it's mentioned by those characters that the creatures known as torivors who trouble the Outskirts are a problem in their world, too.
• Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis: A Fan Sequel to the Foundation series retcons several setting details and ties in Dr Asimov's otherwise unrelated Novelette "Nightfall (1941)". Since it's not "official", it's free to ignore the Robots connection, and does so.
• Rex Stout, creator of the Nero Wolfe series, also wrote a 1937 novel called The Hand in the Glove starring a female private investigator called Dol Bonner. The character didn't really take off in the same way that Wolfe did, and eventually Stout incorporated her into the Wolfe series in the 1950s as a recurring character.
• Andrey Livadny has recently combined his extensive The History of the Galaxy series with several other series and stand-alone novels into a single multiverse titled The History of Worlds. The only commonality between the five distinct universes is the existence of Earth and humanity. Alien races are all different.
• The works of Arthur Machen are all implied to take place in the same universe. Most of his stories are set either in London or somewhere in the English countryside, and there are multiple mystery stories revolving around a Mr. Dyson which are often revealed to have a supernatural element, making it an early example of the Occult Detective trope. His most famous novel, The Great God Pan, has one-shot main characters, but one of them —the doctor who witnesses the Body Horror scene in the climax— sends a manuscript detailing the events he witnessed to "[his] friend D.", a passage which most readers agree to be a reference to Dyson.
• James Ellroy wrote his most famous books, the LA Quartet, then followed them up with the Underworld Trilogy, set a few years later. A couple characters from the Quartet appear in the Trilogy (Pete Bondurant, most prominently), but it wasn't until Ellroy began his second LA Quartet with Perfidia and This Storm that he started formally welding together the first Quartet and Trilogy into a single universe.
• A passage in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens has Ebenezer Scrooge witness spirits outside his chambers after Marley's ghost departs the room, callously greedy people in life who are doomed to wander alone with heavy chains attached to them for eternity, filled with regret for their cruelty in life but can never interfere with the physical world (though Marley's ghost was able to warn Scrooge of his fate should he not change his ways, giving his partner a chance to perform a Heel–Face Turn). The Canon Welding comes in when Scrooge recognises one of the spirits as a man in a white waistcoat weeping at being unable to help a poor woman and her child. Word of God says that this man is the same man in the white waistcoat from Oliver Twist, who had refused food or help to Oliver when he had asked for more.
• Seanan McGuire's InCryptid and Ghost Roads take place in the same universe, and the ghost characters Rose Marshall and Mary Dunlavy appear in both. Rose guest-stars in the InCryptid short story The Ghosts of Bourbon Street (free on the author's website) and later appeared in book seven of the main series Tricks For Free. Mary appears as a major character in Tricks for Free and the eighth book, That Ain't Witchcraft.
• In Sarah J. Maas' Crescent City, it's revealed that the various magical creatures who live on Midgard originally came from different worlds. The second book ends with the protagonist accidentally transporting herself to the world of A Court of Thorns and Roses, while there are other references connecting it to Throne of Glass as well.
• Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere is a case of this being planned out from the start. Most of Sanderson's major works (including Elantris, the Mistborn cycles, Warbreaker, and The Stormlight Archive) are all set in the same universe, with a shared backstory, cosmology, and underlying rules for the various magic systems. To begin with the individual stories are essentially independent, with the crossover elements little more than easter eggs, but as the Cosmere progresses the various continuities are gradually woven together. Increasingly, what happens in Series A will have an impact on what's going on in Series B and C.
• Jenn Mc Kinlay brought her three Cozy Mystery series together in Library Lovers Mysteries book 8 (Death in the Stacks), in which the main characters from the Hat Shop Mysteries and Cupcake Bakery Mysteries series visit Briar Creek and attend the library's annual Dinner in the Stacks fundraiser. Nick, a photographer from Hat Shop Mysteries, even lends a brief hand in solving the case by letting Lindsey Norris (the protagonist of the Library Lover's Mysteries series) look through the photos he took of the event.
• Goblins in the Castle: While the original story was a standalone, follow-up material connected it to some of Coville's other works.
  • The 2008 short story The Boy With Silver Eyes features both the goblins' home of Nilbog and a Guardian of Memory from The Unicorn Chronicles, revealing those settings are connected, and by extension the Magic Shop series (both The Unicorn Chronicles and the Magic Shop series have mentioned the wizard Bellenmore, who helped the dragons leave Earth when it was too dangerous for them to remain).
  • Goblins on the Prowl elaborates on this, explicitly mentioning Bellenmore and the departure of the dragons, along with mentioning the events of The Dragonslayers (that book's Princess Wilhelmina is noted as now being Queen of the Forest of Wonder) and The Foolish Giant as having happened in the past, with Harry (the titular giant) being a cousin of the father of Bonecracker John, who's a friend of Igor's and tells the story to he and his traveling companions. The story's villain, an evil wizard who ends up being hit with his own Spell of Stonely Toadification, is actually the giant stone toad of Toad-in-a-Cage Castle. And he's also not actually evil — it was an act to acquire the Artifact of Doom he was trying to get away from the villagers.
• Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson is a sequel to REAMDE that also includes references to Cryptonomicon (which is itself strongly tied to The Baroque Cycle).

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