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One of the things I loved from back-in-the-LJ-days were the long discursive posts on people's list of favourite films, or books in X genre or the like. I have had some recent thoughts on the deeply obscure approach of Top 10 Things in My HeadCanon. Only because I can't leave things simple, this becomes Extended Headcanon. C'mere, let me ramble at you.
The canon of literature is, more or less, the body of work which is considered to be the ‘core’ of fiction, to which other fiction responds and references and in so doing ideally creates new canon works. So clearly, obviously there should be a list of the canon works, which someone getting into literature should be able to read and... no?
There really isn’t. Canon is an idea, not an actual thing. The genre called literary fiction (for which the rules are that characters must be miserable, there isn’t a positive resolution, and the writing is more important than the narrative) has one fuzzily defined set, which often gets the definite article, and other genres have their own canon, and even within a given genre, two critics, writers, or readers might set out a list of canon works that don’t overlap.
“Headcanon” comes from sf fandom and specifically from fanfic, and means a concept that a particular person accepts as fact in a particular setting (giving rise to the slightly different usage of “canon”) even though it hasn’t been actually stated in that setting. Then there’s the “Expanded Universe” idea in Star Wars and Star Trek; the films and TV series are “definitely true”, but there are lots of novels, comics and other works which don’t quite count in the same way but are generally accepted. And there was the decision at some stage that the Star Wars EU was definitely not going to be followed in the later movies, which led to the “disappearance” of beloved characters like Mara Jade, who now never existed.
Pulling these together, I can get to what I call the “extended headcanon”; everyone can have their personal canon, the set of written (or televisual, or whatever) works that they feel form a core of story, genre, or theme that’s meaningful to them. They’re probably not books in the same universe or even the same genre, but they are the books that form the Canon of You, the books that someone would need to read, the films and TV series they’d need to watch in order to have an understanding of the things you reference and respond to.
These extended headcanons are deeply personalised. Sometimes (and I regard this with a little bit of horror), a person’s own canon is going to contain works they haven’t seen, but reference anyway. The Princess Bride seems to be a major influence in this area, as are the works of one William Shakespeare.
I’ve been trying to work out what would be in mine. This is a long project, because we’re not always aware of the things we reference, and sometimes feel that something is a commonplace phrase when it actually has one specific source, or vice versa, or just plain forget where we got the concept that, say, space whales are a thing. I haven’t forgotten that, mind; that was Dragon Magazine Issue 183, published July 1992.
I’m not going to attempt to lay all of my own extended headcanon out here - that would keep me typing for a long time. But I want to poke through a few bits from very early on.
Mostly, it turns out, this is around concepts of how fantasy and sf worlds work. There was pretty limited access to either in Ireland in the early 1980s, and there was no cinema in reasonable distance, so I feel like a lot of this is rather idiosyncratic. The first fantasy book that I read knowing it was a genre was The Hobbit, followed immediately by Lord of The Rings, although I had a solid grounding in Classical and Norse mythology from Newnes Pictorial Encycopedia (published in 1932 or so), and some Irish mythology from history classes in school. Shortly after that I saw a documentary on the making of The Dark Crystal, and then I saw the thing itself (specifically in that order). Star Trek II was on TV around then too - that must have been one of the short periods where we had a TV in the house. I remember seeing He-Man cartoons on TV in a friend’s house, but only briefly. We definitely had Ulysses 31 from an early point, though, and I think I was one of very few kids who got the Greek references.
I read some of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom books early on (they were in the grandparental house of family friends), alongside Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, and various forms of the Matter of Britain, and of course Narnia. Well before that, I had read through Enid Blyton’s frankly rather weird Faraway Tree books, a sort of Land of Oz pastiche filtered through early-mid-twentieth-century British culture and possibly some psychedelics. In looking up the series, it seems that only the overall concept of a gigantic tree leading to many places really stuck, but then that also describes Yggdrasil in the Planescape setting. I know I read John Masefield’s The Box of Delights around this time too, but not The Midnight Folk until much later (and the BBC TV series, which I have literally discovered exists while looking up the book, has some peculiarly familiar sequences, although I would swear I’d never seen it before). We had the Chronicles of Prydain toys that came in Kellog’s Cornflakes packets, but neither the books nor the movie made it to me before I was way older. An aunt gave me and my brothers some of the Star Wars figures (two ewoks, Darth Vader and Chewbacca) way before we ever saw the films. Some friends had Transformers toys; I don’t think I had any until much, much later. I also didn’t see any of the comics or cartoons until much later, just the TV ads for the toys.
Superhero comics weren’t really an available thing, but Eagle was available, and I know the Doomlord storyline stuck solidly in my mind. I also have an odd conviction that the Wildcats comic was out before 1988, because I “remember” reading it before my mother’s death in December of 1987 - I’m almost certainly conflating it with something else, although I can’t at present imagine what. Eagle’s Survival strip (kids in a world where adults have been killed off by a disease) also stuck in my head in odd ways, and made me treat the later in-school reading of Lord of the Flies with rather more scepticism than the rest of my class. And I must have encountered the Battle comic at some stage, because the Storm Force strip from it is also embedded around that level.
More fuzzily, I know I had seen images of mecha somewhere by the age of 8, because I remember trying to build one from beehive frames and a go-cart chassis in the workshop in Camolin, and we moved out of there shortly before my ninth birthday. Around the same time, I know I carefully put together skeletal remnants of birds and rabbits, and while I don’t think I had any serious expectation of re-animating them, I gave it a go. My concept around that was “cute skeletal pet” more than “horrifying necromantic abomination”, and I honestly have no notion where that came from.
I know that I and a school friend got out VHS tapes from his local video rental shop and watched them. I’m pretty sure Ghostbusters was one of those. The Terminator was probably another. I know his older brother confiscated one that had a recommended viewing age on it which was well above our ages, possibly added together. I have no memory of what that actually was, just the indignance with which we protested. And I saw Splash at a different friend’s house, and was somewhat puzzled by how prosaic it was about mermaids (I also had to go digging just now to get the title of Splash, because it definitely wasn’t in any accessible part of my memory, and seems to have become confused, at least partially, with Desperately Seeking Susan).
All of that was before the age of 10 or 11. Sometime around then, I bought Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters and Raymond E. Feist’s Magician (the original, badly edited one) on the same day, and from there I was into a more coherent fantasy universe, wherein there was intended form and rules, and not just a mix of stuff. But I think my expectations had been set before that, and to some degree remain so.
I know the fascination with colony ships and fleeing destroyed worlds (a concept that comes up in my own writing and games frequently) is pretty directly from Wildcats, and a lot of the very basic images I have around ships and travel from place to place in fantasy comes from a combination of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and some sequences in The Box of Delights. Masefield is also responsible for a lot of my feeling about dreams in fiction, crossing genres, big old houses, and the concepts of guardianship and responsibility, which is a lot for a kids’ book from 1935. And in retrospect, I wonder if Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising wasn’t influenced by it as well, although I didn’t discover her work until my late teens.
The Barsoom books definitely set some visual concepts in place early on - the Martian aircraft in particular, and the term “sky raft”, although I’m not sure it actually occurs in the books. A combination of Burroughs’ Mars and the Dark Crystal documentary led to a nameless paracosm constructed in sandpit-constructed canyons with chunks of slate for roads and slabs of pine-bark operating as aircraft, carrying cargoes of fuchsia berries and yellow flag pods, and with the Star Wars figures as pilots and inhabitants. Some elements of that are still in my head too. Weirdly, perhaps, the persistent lack of clothes in the books didn’t make it into my head at all, and I only noticed it on re-reading them shortly before the film John Carter was released.
Ghostbusters gave me the concept of entrapping spirits, and might even be responsible for the unholy love of undead that players in every game I’ve run since have noted. I suspect it’s also responsible for some of the ideas that surface around the crossover between science and magic, and I definitely associate it with spell diagrams, although I couldn’t say for certain there are any in the film itself. The Terminator (along with The Box of Delights, again) is probably to blame for my fascination with time travel - I know most people associate Back to the Future more strongly with that, but I didn’t see that until later. The Terminator robot itself crosses over a bit with John Storm from Storm Force in my head, and accounts for a lot of my interest in the human/machine (or later, human/magical armour) interface.
Ulysses 31 is to blame in large part for my fascination with retellings. Huge chunks of my writing and games are conscious remixes and reskinnings of myths and other stories because of that, and it and the few episodes of He-man, together with King Arthur’s Excalibur, have made magical or technological swords, and the transformation of their wielders, a mainstay of my visual library.
Some of the people who’ve played in games I’ve run are probably - if they’re familiar with the source materials I’ve pointed at - wondering if I have any original ideas at all, and I’m not sure I really do. But then, I’m not sure anyone has had any really original ideas since about Babylonian times.
The canon of literature is, more or less, the body of work which is considered to be the ‘core’ of fiction, to which other fiction responds and references and in so doing ideally creates new canon works. So clearly, obviously there should be a list of the canon works, which someone getting into literature should be able to read and... no?
There really isn’t. Canon is an idea, not an actual thing. The genre called literary fiction (for which the rules are that characters must be miserable, there isn’t a positive resolution, and the writing is more important than the narrative) has one fuzzily defined set, which often gets the definite article, and other genres have their own canon, and even within a given genre, two critics, writers, or readers might set out a list of canon works that don’t overlap.
“Headcanon” comes from sf fandom and specifically from fanfic, and means a concept that a particular person accepts as fact in a particular setting (giving rise to the slightly different usage of “canon”) even though it hasn’t been actually stated in that setting. Then there’s the “Expanded Universe” idea in Star Wars and Star Trek; the films and TV series are “definitely true”, but there are lots of novels, comics and other works which don’t quite count in the same way but are generally accepted. And there was the decision at some stage that the Star Wars EU was definitely not going to be followed in the later movies, which led to the “disappearance” of beloved characters like Mara Jade, who now never existed.
Pulling these together, I can get to what I call the “extended headcanon”; everyone can have their personal canon, the set of written (or televisual, or whatever) works that they feel form a core of story, genre, or theme that’s meaningful to them. They’re probably not books in the same universe or even the same genre, but they are the books that form the Canon of You, the books that someone would need to read, the films and TV series they’d need to watch in order to have an understanding of the things you reference and respond to.
These extended headcanons are deeply personalised. Sometimes (and I regard this with a little bit of horror), a person’s own canon is going to contain works they haven’t seen, but reference anyway. The Princess Bride seems to be a major influence in this area, as are the works of one William Shakespeare.
I’ve been trying to work out what would be in mine. This is a long project, because we’re not always aware of the things we reference, and sometimes feel that something is a commonplace phrase when it actually has one specific source, or vice versa, or just plain forget where we got the concept that, say, space whales are a thing. I haven’t forgotten that, mind; that was Dragon Magazine Issue 183, published July 1992.
I’m not going to attempt to lay all of my own extended headcanon out here - that would keep me typing for a long time. But I want to poke through a few bits from very early on.
Mostly, it turns out, this is around concepts of how fantasy and sf worlds work. There was pretty limited access to either in Ireland in the early 1980s, and there was no cinema in reasonable distance, so I feel like a lot of this is rather idiosyncratic. The first fantasy book that I read knowing it was a genre was The Hobbit, followed immediately by Lord of The Rings, although I had a solid grounding in Classical and Norse mythology from Newnes Pictorial Encycopedia (published in 1932 or so), and some Irish mythology from history classes in school. Shortly after that I saw a documentary on the making of The Dark Crystal, and then I saw the thing itself (specifically in that order). Star Trek II was on TV around then too - that must have been one of the short periods where we had a TV in the house. I remember seeing He-Man cartoons on TV in a friend’s house, but only briefly. We definitely had Ulysses 31 from an early point, though, and I think I was one of very few kids who got the Greek references.
I read some of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom books early on (they were in the grandparental house of family friends), alongside Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, and various forms of the Matter of Britain, and of course Narnia. Well before that, I had read through Enid Blyton’s frankly rather weird Faraway Tree books, a sort of Land of Oz pastiche filtered through early-mid-twentieth-century British culture and possibly some psychedelics. In looking up the series, it seems that only the overall concept of a gigantic tree leading to many places really stuck, but then that also describes Yggdrasil in the Planescape setting. I know I read John Masefield’s The Box of Delights around this time too, but not The Midnight Folk until much later (and the BBC TV series, which I have literally discovered exists while looking up the book, has some peculiarly familiar sequences, although I would swear I’d never seen it before). We had the Chronicles of Prydain toys that came in Kellog’s Cornflakes packets, but neither the books nor the movie made it to me before I was way older. An aunt gave me and my brothers some of the Star Wars figures (two ewoks, Darth Vader and Chewbacca) way before we ever saw the films. Some friends had Transformers toys; I don’t think I had any until much, much later. I also didn’t see any of the comics or cartoons until much later, just the TV ads for the toys.
Superhero comics weren’t really an available thing, but Eagle was available, and I know the Doomlord storyline stuck solidly in my mind. I also have an odd conviction that the Wildcats comic was out before 1988, because I “remember” reading it before my mother’s death in December of 1987 - I’m almost certainly conflating it with something else, although I can’t at present imagine what. Eagle’s Survival strip (kids in a world where adults have been killed off by a disease) also stuck in my head in odd ways, and made me treat the later in-school reading of Lord of the Flies with rather more scepticism than the rest of my class. And I must have encountered the Battle comic at some stage, because the Storm Force strip from it is also embedded around that level.
More fuzzily, I know I had seen images of mecha somewhere by the age of 8, because I remember trying to build one from beehive frames and a go-cart chassis in the workshop in Camolin, and we moved out of there shortly before my ninth birthday. Around the same time, I know I carefully put together skeletal remnants of birds and rabbits, and while I don’t think I had any serious expectation of re-animating them, I gave it a go. My concept around that was “cute skeletal pet” more than “horrifying necromantic abomination”, and I honestly have no notion where that came from.
I know that I and a school friend got out VHS tapes from his local video rental shop and watched them. I’m pretty sure Ghostbusters was one of those. The Terminator was probably another. I know his older brother confiscated one that had a recommended viewing age on it which was well above our ages, possibly added together. I have no memory of what that actually was, just the indignance with which we protested. And I saw Splash at a different friend’s house, and was somewhat puzzled by how prosaic it was about mermaids (I also had to go digging just now to get the title of Splash, because it definitely wasn’t in any accessible part of my memory, and seems to have become confused, at least partially, with Desperately Seeking Susan).
All of that was before the age of 10 or 11. Sometime around then, I bought Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters and Raymond E. Feist’s Magician (the original, badly edited one) on the same day, and from there I was into a more coherent fantasy universe, wherein there was intended form and rules, and not just a mix of stuff. But I think my expectations had been set before that, and to some degree remain so.
I know the fascination with colony ships and fleeing destroyed worlds (a concept that comes up in my own writing and games frequently) is pretty directly from Wildcats, and a lot of the very basic images I have around ships and travel from place to place in fantasy comes from a combination of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and some sequences in The Box of Delights. Masefield is also responsible for a lot of my feeling about dreams in fiction, crossing genres, big old houses, and the concepts of guardianship and responsibility, which is a lot for a kids’ book from 1935. And in retrospect, I wonder if Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising wasn’t influenced by it as well, although I didn’t discover her work until my late teens.
The Barsoom books definitely set some visual concepts in place early on - the Martian aircraft in particular, and the term “sky raft”, although I’m not sure it actually occurs in the books. A combination of Burroughs’ Mars and the Dark Crystal documentary led to a nameless paracosm constructed in sandpit-constructed canyons with chunks of slate for roads and slabs of pine-bark operating as aircraft, carrying cargoes of fuchsia berries and yellow flag pods, and with the Star Wars figures as pilots and inhabitants. Some elements of that are still in my head too. Weirdly, perhaps, the persistent lack of clothes in the books didn’t make it into my head at all, and I only noticed it on re-reading them shortly before the film John Carter was released.
Ghostbusters gave me the concept of entrapping spirits, and might even be responsible for the unholy love of undead that players in every game I’ve run since have noted. I suspect it’s also responsible for some of the ideas that surface around the crossover between science and magic, and I definitely associate it with spell diagrams, although I couldn’t say for certain there are any in the film itself. The Terminator (along with The Box of Delights, again) is probably to blame for my fascination with time travel - I know most people associate Back to the Future more strongly with that, but I didn’t see that until later. The Terminator robot itself crosses over a bit with John Storm from Storm Force in my head, and accounts for a lot of my interest in the human/machine (or later, human/magical armour) interface.
Ulysses 31 is to blame in large part for my fascination with retellings. Huge chunks of my writing and games are conscious remixes and reskinnings of myths and other stories because of that, and it and the few episodes of He-man, together with King Arthur’s Excalibur, have made magical or technological swords, and the transformation of their wielders, a mainstay of my visual library.
Some of the people who’ve played in games I’ve run are probably - if they’re familiar with the source materials I’ve pointed at - wondering if I have any original ideas at all, and I’m not sure I really do. But then, I’m not sure anyone has had any really original ideas since about Babylonian times.