Just The Caffeine Talking: My Canon

In modern geek culture we've begun to use the term "Universe" to refer to a background setting, particularly one which is shared by multiple creative works. The most famous, right now, is probably the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," which encompasses all the Marvel/Disney superhero films and TV series since Iron Man in 2008. There are some odd borderline cases, mostly the result of rights ownership issues, but right now pretty much all live-action films about Marvel characters can be assumed to take place in the same world.

A related concept is "canonicity" — which stories "really happened" in the fictional universe versus which ones are either "imaginary stories" (a term pioneered by DC Comics in the Silver Age) or alternate timelines. The Star Trek universe illustrates this: for a long time the rule was that the live-action TV shows and movies were "real" and thus canon while animated shows, comic books, tie-in novels, and games were not.

There was some permeability, as when the depiction of Klingon society and culture invented by John M. Ford for his novel The Final Reflection and the FASA Star Trek roleplaying game were adopted wholesale by the makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation and thereby became canonical. The 2009 film snarled everything up by introducing a canonical timeline split induced by time travel, so that it's no longer clear which universe is which.

All that throat-clearing accomplished, now I have to grapple with the fact that I seem to be creating a couple of Universes of my own.

Most of my novels and short fiction have been stand-alone works. The world of my first short story "A Diagram of Rapture" has nothing to do with my second story "The Alien Abduction," or my first novel A Darkling Sea. And none of them are connected with The Initiate or "Object Three" or Arkad's World.

However, because I was writing "Abduction" and Darkling Sea around the same time, some concepts and jargon did seep into both. Those two stories can be considered to share the same Universe. Its defining features are:

Very near-future interstellar travel (basically some smart people discover a convenient way to go faster than light next week, and this sparks a boom in space exploration),
Star travel primarily a scientific endeavor, under the auspices of the UN Interstellar Cooperation Agency (UNICA),
Multiple intelligent species, but
Few technological civilizations.

I may return to this Universe again, especially if I want to do another first-contact story. There are some complications about publishing, but nothing insuperable. Possible names for this setting are "the Darklingverse" or "the UNICA/UNIDA universe." At present it includes only the novel and the short story already mentioned.

My second, and more extensive Universe is of course the Billion Worlds. So far it encompasses one published novel, one published short story, a novel in progress and two forthcoming short stories. In addition, some concepts and ideas from some of my earlier works show up again in the Billion Worlds, so I'm inclined to retroactively put those stories into the same history.

So, the official list of Canonical Billion Worlds Universe fiction, straight from the creator, is:

"Balancing Accounts" (2008) — the dawn of autonomous sarcastic artificial intelligence;

"Periapsis" (2014) — first mention of Deimos as an important power center;

Corsair (2015) — the dawn of private space development and colonization;

"Contractual Obligation" (2014) — collective AI runs a military squad, Deimos shows its ruthless side;

"Calando" (2020) — specifically mentions the Billion Worlds, side reference shows up in Godel Operation;

The Godel Operation (2021) — primary introduction of the Billion Worlds;

"Out of the Dark" (forthcoming) — Billion Worlds short story, references Juren habitat;

"The Paoshi Puzzle" (forthcoming) — involves Adya and Pelagia from Godel Operation;

The Scarab Mission (in progress) — takes place a few years before Godel Operation and involves one character from that book.

By including Corsair I can even create a thrilling canon/non-canon debate about its short story progenitor "The Barbary Shore" of 2007. Let the flamewars begin!