The Dramatic Revelation of secrets from the backstory is a useful term for forming the story, recommended as far back as Aristotle 's Poetics .
- In Science Fiction , Frank Herbert's '' Dune '' series has an extensive back-story, which has allowed other authors to write a series of Prequel s based on it.
- When George Lucas wrote the original '' Star Wars '' movies, he wrote a back-story to explain where the characters came from. That backstory became the source of a Prequel trilogy of movies and the Expanded Universe.
- The movies '' Memento '' and '' Irréversible '' feature the novel orientation of being told backwards in time, scene by scene, with the concluding scenes occurring first, and so in some sense they may be considered as entirely comprising back-story. An episode of Seinfeld had a similar sequence following the story of an Indian Wedding and Kramer 's argument with Franklin Delano Romanowski.
- Many Christian Theologians consider the Old Testament to be the back story for the New Testament . For example, those who hold this view consider Jesus Christ to be the "new Adam" and see many of the incidents in the action of the Old Testament narrative as representing Types and prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah . For example, the allusion to the serpent who will bite the heel of the one who crushes its head is regarded by such thinkers as referring, respectively, to Satan and to Christ. Likewise, The Ark that saves a remnant of humanity from God's wrath, as represented in the Old Testament flood, is considered a type of Christ, in whom a remnant of humanity (the elect) is saved from the wrath of God to come. Indeed, Jesus himself seems to have considered many of the incidents of the Old Testament as types and prophecies concerning him. As a boy, he reads one such Prophecy , concerning the coming of the Messiah, and declares, "Today, this prophecy is fulfilled." For those who regard the Old Testament as the back story for the New Testament, this is the longest back story known in the Literature of the Western world.
In a Shared Universe more than one author may share the same back-story. The later creation of a back-story that conflicts in some way with a previously written main story may require the adjustment device known as Retroactive Continuity .
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