Where an author has written a number of novels that don't have a preconceived story arc, they will sometimes have a desire to sweep them all up into a fixed arc at some future date. This will almost certainly require the author to explain away (m)any inconsistencies. This is one side of ret-conning.
If an author has written two different story arcs and suddenly finds a reason to try and merge them, then they will have to come up with a method of explaining the differences away. Perhaps the best known of this sort of revision is the way that Isaac Asimov merged his Foundation and Robot Novels: in the Foundation books (including the Empire books), Earth is horribly radioactive which was thought to have been caused by a war. In the Robot books, Earth had avoided nuclear holocaust, so in the later robot books, a method of making Earth radioactive had to be found.
In neither case is it generally thought to be a Good Thing!!
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