Revising Reality is, as its subtitle suggests, a fascinating look at how the world can be understood through the lens of narrative devices like sequels, remakes, retcons, and rejects. The book is an ambitious project that navigates through a sea of examples from literature, popular culture, history, politics, law, and science in order to show that the stories we tell about the world—as well as the world itself—are not fixed, but rather fluid, malleable, and ever-changing.

The book opens with an in-depth look at the terms and devices listed in that title. Essentially, sequels are stories that come after stories and continue a storyline; remakes are retold stories; retcons—short for “retroactive continuity”—are retroactively reimagined stories; and rejects are revised or reimagined stories that don’t pass muster with reading, viewing, or otherwise participating publics. All of these are terms arising from the worlds of comic books, science fiction, fanfiction, and other popular culture realms, but the authors show over the course of the book how these concepts apply just as readily to the “real” worlds of politics, law, history, and science.

Revising Reality is a wild and exuberant ride, looking at everything from Obamacare and MAGA to Superman and critical race theory. It’s very much a book of the Trump era—a time in which facts don’t seem to matter as much as the stories told about facts—and Revising Reality attempts to provide an antidote to the existential nausea that many of us find ourselves experiencing in this moment. This antidote, ultimately, takes the form of a post-structuralist practice of analyzing and making sense of retold, remade, and retconned stories in order to develop some degree of understanding of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

In the book’s introduction, the authors identify the devices that interest them and then show how they can be used to understand the “real” world: “Our actual world and its actual people are observable in multiple ways that we then construct into stories. These factual stories are then revisable in (mostly) the same ways as fictional ones” (p. 3). This contention is informed by a central tenet of cultural studies: Anything and everything can be read as a text. Novels, comic books, films, and TV shows aren’t the only texts that can be analyzed using narrative and post-structural theory: podcasts, political speeches, advertisements, legal cases, scientific studies, and just about anything else that humans create can be, as well.

The different types of revision offer various degrees of freedom, agency, and creativity to both content creators and audiences. While they revise texts, for instance, sequels and remakes don’t generally re-envision the entire universe of a text. Retcons, on the other hand, often reimagine some of the basic realities of a text’s world. Because of their sometimes radical nature, therefore, retcons—of both fictional and real texts—can be some of the most powerful and controversial of the revisionary strategies. For that reason, some retcons find themselves summarily rejected by those who might not want a text’s world—or their own—to be completely reinterpreted or transformed.

In the book’s first chapter, called “Rejecting Possibilities,” the authors look at this process of rejection across culture, and they analyze what it says about the people and cultures who do the rejecting. One of their examples is the Prequel Trilogy (PT) movies in the Star Wars universe. As the authors say,

At the time, lots of fans took issue with the PT. One reason had to do with their being not entirely prequels (merely filling previously vague gaps) but retcons reinterpreting and so altering what had been understood as established facts. Particularly, they reinterpreted the Force. (p. 16)

The audience’s hesitancy or outright rejection of these films had to do, the authors suggest, with the difficulties that arise when re-imagining not just one text but an entire universe. Retcons can be difficult to process, since they require revising both forwards and backwards, and they tend to throw entire narratives into question.

At the same time, however, retcons and radical revisions open up possibilities for reimagining not just the universe of a text but the universe inhabited by the audience as well. Thus, revisionary interpretations like Amazon’s prequel series, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, can raise questions about race and identity not just in the original texts but in the realities of viewers. As the authors say in Revising Reality, “Why couldn’t elves, dwarves, and hobbits be Black?” (p. 21) Tolkien, they argue, left open the possibility of racial and ethnic diversity in his universe, and it might not therefore be all that radical to imagine such a possibility—both within the world of the original texts and outside of it. Rejecting this possibility might reveal more about racism inherent in the culture consuming the texts than the texts themselves:

Tolkien fans are free, of course, to reject The Rings of Power prequel series—just as fans of all fictional franchises are free to reject whatever revisions their franchise makes. Though it’s morally repugnant, that includes rejecting them based on racial prejudice. It’s just good to be clear of their motives. (p. 24)

The authors, in other words, think it just as valuable to analyze cultural rejections of retcons and other revisions as it is to analyze the revisions themselves.

After focusing on a variety of literary and fictional texts, the authors move into the worlds of history, politics, and science to see how these devices are used by both progressive and less-than-progressive thinkers. In a chapter entitled “Making America,” for instance, they look at the Trump-era call to “Make America Great Again” and ask, “But when exactly was that, and what facts established that period’s greatness?” (p. 74) One possibility, according to a Trump interview they quote from The New York Times, is the Gilded Age at the turn of the twentieth century. Another era referenced by MAGA supporters is the post-World War II period. Or maybe it was the year 2000, before 9/11. The authors argue, however, that none of these possible “great” periods were as great as the MAGA movement likes to think: “MAGA is a kind of fictional remake of the facts, a reimagining of what actually happened.” (p. 75)

In the case of the MAGA movement, the authors argue, retconning is done by politicians in order to create a kind of nostalgic fog from which populist political power arises. It’s a rewriting of history in order to drum up support for the MAGA platform, but it’s based on stories rather than facts—on wishful thinking rather than truth. In this way, the authors connect the narrative-making of politics and the storytelling devices of literature and films, showing that not all retcons and revisions are progressive. The technique of retconning can just as easily be co-opted by less-than-progressive forces.

The book meanders through a wide range of texts and historical periods, looking at the ways these techniques are used for a variety of ends. What the book seems to be saying, ultimately, is that all of us need to be smart consumers of texts and narratives. We need to be able to read both original texts and sequels, remakes, and retcons with a critical eye, understanding how narrative theory can help inform our analysis of all manner of imaginary and real landscapes. We also need to understand the process of rejecting, even as we hone our own rejection skills. As they say in their conclusion:

We hope in this book to have revised the reality of how we understand the ineluctable roles of revision. When it comes to our stories and epistemologies and understandings, we can continue as before, providing them sequels. We can reinterpret what came before, offering retcons. We can redo, and sometimes even fictionalize, what came before, making a remake. And we can refuse to countenance any or all of those, insisting on a reject. (p. 193)

There’s a lot of power to be had in understanding the process of making sequels, revising, remaking, retconning, and rejecting, and this book goes a long way toward giving all of us a sense of that power.

We’re all readers of the culture in which we live. Sometimes we read closely, but often—overwhelmed by the sheer volume of textual noise swirling around us—we simply skim. Or, worse yet, we tune it all out. In a world awash with stories and often short on facts, however, being a close and careful reader of texts, politicians, history, and media offers a sense of hope, agency, and power. This, I think, is the ultimate goal of Revising Reality, and for that reason it’s worth a read. It gives us the tools we need to understand how narratives can be constructed, deconstructed, and reassembled, and it might make us all better readers of the world(s) around and within us.