Retrotemporal citogenesis

Retrotemporal citogenesis was the frowned-upon practice of time-travelling historians influencing historical facts so that they matched more closely with the historical sources that they cited in their own work. Motivations for this, according to Dr Olivia Kagg Waldermein's footnotes, could either be earnest intentions to "repair" what they saw as an "historical aberration", or a "deliberate cost-saving measure." She stated that the consequences of retrotemporal citogenesis were significantly worse than "wanton vandalism" and that "one simply cannot be, at once, an active interventionist time-traveller and a responsible Meta-Historian."

In around 2311, Doctor A. V. Fairchild was expelled from the Plutonian Academy for committing retrotemporal citogenesis by breaching meta-time "to convince a minor player fated to an early death some millennia before the Cosmic War that she ought to dye her hair blue." (PROSE: Love & War ^[+]Loading...["Love & War (short story)"])

Behind the scenes

The word citogenesis is generally synonymous with circular reporting, though more frequently used in reference to its prevalence on Wikipedia. It was first coined by Randall Munroe in an xkcd comic in reference to this dynamic as a wordplay on the biological term cytogenesis. Retrotemporal seems to refer to the concept of retrocausality, in which later events affect earlier ones.