Examples of Continuity Lock-Out in Literature. Beware of potential unmarked spoilers.
- Crescent City has continuity lock-out for a different Sarah J. Maas series, namely A Court of Thorns and Roses. The end of House of Sky and Breath features the main characters meeting up with the Inner Circle, who are the protagonists of A Court of Thorns and Roses. Unless you've read at least up to A Court of Mist and Fury, or at bare minimum used the internet to familiarize yourself with the main cast of ACOTAR, you'll probably be clueless as to who these people are and why this is significant.
- The Elder Scrolls novels are based on the video game series, and if you don't know the continuity and lore, then most of the events of the novel will sound like an Ass Pull when it actually does Make Sense In Context.
- John Varley, in an introduction to one of his Eight Worlds novels, admits that he's locked himself out of his own continuity — he's long since lost track of all the background details of the series and has given up trying to make the later novels fully consistent with the early ones.
- Terry Pratchett, in the introduction to the first edition of The Discworld Companion, also admits to locking himself out of his own continuity. He had two ways of working around it, and the first was to consult the Fandom VIPs who knew more about his books than he did, including Companion co-author Stephen Briggs. The other was to Hand Wave inconsistencies in the series as an In-Universe disruption to the space-time continuum that the History Monks weren't able to totally fix.
- The first four books of The Wheel of Time are pretty good at keeping the reader up to speed in what happened in earlier installments, but the fifth book onward assumed that the reader was all caught up and made no effort to help. There is a glossary, but it won't list anyone who last appeared more than three books ago. But characters do have a habit of disappearing and reappearing several books later — even main characters. Two main characters, Mat and Perrin, have been absent from whole books entirely. And when the reader meets up with them again, they've had adventures off-page that aren't well-explained and that the reader has to infer. And since there are a lot of characters, and the books can be Doorstoppers, it's difficult for a non-aficionado to keep track of everyone.
- Foundation Series: Isaac Asimov put his series on a decades-long hiatus in the 1950s partly because he was exhausted from having to reread the material to keep it consistent and to write an engaging synopsis of previous events to prevent new readers from feeling locked out of the current story. A fan later handed him a long list of inconsistencies within the Foundation stories.
- The Dresden Files has fallen more and more into this as the series progressed. The first few books are more or less Monster of the Week fare, and you can probably jump in anywhere in the first five books without a problem. However, once the series passed ten or so books (not even halfway through the Myth Arc), things get harder to follow. Plot events from the early books become important again a dozen books later, the list of recurring allies and enemies gets longer (but they disappear for several books at a time), and each book starts to lead directly into the next one without a breather. Changes, the twelfth book, starts with a Wham Line delivered by a character who last appeared seven books ago, and Battle Ground starts literally minutes after the previous book ends. Ironically, the latter book is packed with little reminders of who's who and what's going on, but it's impossible to learn everything just from that.
- Glass's Guide is a rare example of a non-fiction series becoming this. It a series of four guides covering used car, commercial vehicles including motorhomes, motorcycles and caravans became this to people in the British motor trade; the myriad of specifications for vehicles and valuations per monthly issue and specification changes meant it was pretty difficult to get into for a newcomer unless you had someone more experienced in the motor trade (or motorcycle and caravan trade) to teach you how to use the guides and understand them. The caravan guides were notable for being prone to this as well. The books could be incomprehensible even to automobile enthusiasts. There was also specialist math which made the continuity lockout harder. It should be noted, the publication was in print from 1933-2016 for the car values, the 1950s-2018 for commercial vehicles and motorbikes and 1971-2018 for the caravans.
- Harry Potter is pretty good at avoiding this in the first three books; they give short explanations for characters' backstories, major events, and running plot threads. But the fourth book, Goblet of Fire, is the series' Wham Episode, and after that it became practically impossible for the books to carry on without relying on the previous books' events. The last book in particular is pretty much impossible to read without reading all the others. J. K. Rowling was aware of what she was doing but basically said that if you start a seven-book series midway through, you shouldn't expect to know what's going on.
- Trying to get into George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire involves going through several Doorstoppers, each with so much continuity. The
Fan Dumb is pretty persistent though — it's understandable that Martin is taking so long to finish it, because he knows if he creates a Plot Hole, some idiot is going to call him on it. Martin came up with an interesting solution by writing a small series of prequel novellas, which do a good job of distilling the universe's vast political intrigue in easily digestible format for newcomers — only problem is that you're still left scratching your head trying to connect all that to the characters' adventures in the mainline series. - Stephen King hired author Robin Furth to be his archivist and continuity editor to assist him in writing the final books of The Dark Tower. She compiled an encyclopedia that King referred to during writing that was published itself as Stephen King's The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance. He says in the foreword to that book that there was no way he could have completed the series without such a document. And sadly, it shows — many of the books' most important plot points are mentioned only in passing, which can result in a whole mess of confusion even for those who have read all the books in order.
- Perry Rhodan has a real problem with this. With a backstory of over 2500 issues in the main series alone that might become relevant for the current plot at any time, and story arcs that last for 50 to 100 issues, it can be quite hard for new readers to break into the series. Nowadays they take some pains to make the round numbers a good place to start, without too much pre-knowledge. And each issue has a small glossary explaining plot-relevant background that a new reader might not know (or an old reader might not remember).
- Warrior Cats: It is possible, if not a bit difficult, to start reading the second series without reading the first series. However, by the third series, things get nigh incomprehensible for people who haven't read all of the previous books. The fifth series is a prequel, which could be read without reading the other books, but the prologue and first chapter or so of The Sun Trail would be kind of baffling (and very spoilery) for a newcomer.
- Katharine Kerr's 15-book Deverry series is divided into four parts. Starting at the beginning of any one of the latter three will cause you to only miss half of the significance of what's happening. The Dragon Mage (3rd series) is probably the worst offender, since it tells about the end of the civil war, which has been earlier covered in three other books.
- To keep up with all the various plots and many characters in Honor Harrington by David Weber, you not only need to read the mainline titles, but the sub-series and short story collections, which are themselves not in chronological order. Go here for a reading order
. You could skip the first book, On Basilisk Station, and start the second, The Honor of the Queen, and still mostly understand the plot — but after that, you haven't got a chance. That said, the Star Kingdom Spin-Off series generally averts this, thanks to a time shift of several hundred years into the past, before Manticore became enthralled in transgalactic political espionage and warfare. It's also written for a Young Adult audience, so its action is pretty much confined to Sphinx. And also, the mainline books are mostly free, so an Archive Panic won't set you back much. - Eric Flint's 1632-verse is a "shared universe" open to anyone who wants in. In other words, any fan of the series can write their own contributions to it and have them entered into canon if they pass muster with a review board for the series. Flint and his co-writers then tend to take characters introduced in these stories and work them into the main series. Thankfully, the short stories that have the most impact on the main story have been collected into their own "Ring of Fire" anthologies.
- Various Star Wars Expanded Universe works assume the reader has at least basic Broad Strokes knowledge of important EU events and don't even try to make sense otherwise. Amazingly, other works still manage to remain accessible, though the knowledge of the movies is still required.
- The Babylon 5 novels are plagued by this, because while some of them are noted as taking place after the events of specific episodes, they aren't necessarily sequential, and are all written by different authors.
- The Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde do a brilliant job of constantly inventing new concepts, settings, and characters while referencing and being consistent with previous books. But if you read them out of order, they'll make almost no sense at all.
- L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz books could get like this. Not only did he assume readers would remember much of Ozian geography and politics, he also had a tendency to make lots of characters and reuse them almost at random. Almost every book would have the characters everyone knows from the movie like the Lion, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and often the Wizard — but then you'd run into all manner of other characters like Button-Bright, Ojo, Cap'n Bill, Uncle Henry, Tik-Tok, the Patchwork Girl, the Frogman, The Woggle-Bug, the Hungry Tiger... people only familiar with the film would be totally lost. Even Baum himself could get lost in the character mess; in one novel, he has the Shaggy Man and Polychrome meeting for the "first" time, apparently having forgotten that he had them traveling together in a previous novel.
- Both the series of post-TV-show prose Doctor Who spin-offs from the "wilderness years", the Doctor Who New Adventures and the Eighth Doctor Adventures, suffered badly from this, with many novels from both series being completely incomprehensible if you hadn't read earlier books in the Story Arc. And preferably watched some of the less-regarded episodes of the series, possibly while taking notes of every throwaway line that mentions an alien race.
- The Star Trek Expanded Universe novels, especially the "Relaunches", will frequently tell one long story and don't believe Status Quo Is God, so even a committed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fan who's seen all the episodes might be confused by jumping into the middle of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch series.
- Goosebumps: The HorrorLand series debuted nearly 10 years after the 2000 series, and featured a Crisis Crossover with many heroes and villains from the original series, published long before their target audiences were even around. In order to alleviate the lockout, every book came with a reprinted edition of the classic book the new one continued, or at least one that was thematically similar.
- Seanan McGuire has stated that she tries as much as she can to make each book able to tell a self-contained story, but several of her InCryptid books will make no sense if you haven't read the previous ones. Antimony's books form a Plot Arc, and the Sarah books (which are essentially a Multi-Part Episode) rely on you knowing the events of Midnight Blue-Light Special, though they do have a few This Is My Story moments. Angel of the Overpass, which is set in the same universe, is entirely driven by the aftermath of the InCryptid book That Ain't Witchcraft. You could read it without having read That Ain't Witchcraft, but it would basically amount to saying the Crossroads was Killed Offscreen. Regarding the short stories, whether free on her website, published in anthologies, or Patreon-exclusive, it's not necessary to read them to understand the plot of the novels, but it definitely enhances the experience.
