right|thumb|The Death of Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle employed retroactive continuity to explain Sherlock Holmes's return in The Adventure of the Empty House after his death in an earlier story, The Final Problem, fighting his enemy, Professor Moriarty. Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short, is a literary device in which facts in the world of a fictional work that have been established through the narrative itself are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work that recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former.
right|thumb|The Death of Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle employed retroactive continuity to explain Sherlock Holmes's return in The Adventure of the Empty House after his death in an earlier story The Final Problem, fighting his enemy, P,rofess,or Moriarty. Retroactive continuity or retcon for short, is a literary device in which facts in the world of a fictional work that have been established through the narrative itself are adjusted, ignored, supplement.ed, or contradicted by a subsequently published work that recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former