Transformers Legends (book)

The name or term "Legends" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Legends (disambiguation).

Ceci n'est pas canonique.
Transformers Legends
Publisher	ibooks
First published	November 30, 2004
Editor	David Cian
Continuity	Various
ISBN	ISBN 0743497910 ISBN 978-0743497916
Page count	304

Transformers Legends is an anthology of Transformers short stories published in November 2004 by ibooks. It was edited by David Cian, who had previously written the second half of The Transformers Trilogy.

The book went out of print almost immediately, and for years commanded at least 4–5 times the original cover price on the secondary market.

Table of contents

• Introduction by David Cian
• A Meeting of Minds by Simon Furman

Maximal fights Maximal as Megatron fights Megatron over a body.

• Collect and Save by Tim Waggoner

Welcome to the Planet of Junk. You check in, but you don't check out.

• Paddles by Jean Rabe

The lost Dinobot.

• Redemption Center by Alexander B. Potter

Starscream gets to be a nice guy for a little while.

• Something Robotic This Way Comes by John J. Miller

Trick or... treat? Yeah. Treat. Beep.

• Two for the Price of One by Brandie Tarvin

Political intrigue in Carbombya.

• Joyride by Jenifer A. Ruth

Bumblebee gets carjacked. Again. Dude needs to install Lojack or something.

• Lonesome Diesel by David Bischoff

A Mini-Con schtupps a truck.

• Prime Spark by Sean P. Fodera

Four Optimuses walk into a bar...

• Parts by Donald J. Bingle

Prowl is an insensitive prick. Also, meet Geosensus.

• Healers, Fighters, and Transformers by J. Steven York

Ratchet helps a hurtin' human.

• Fire in the Dark by John Helfers

Beast Armada?

• Singularity Ablyss by Robert N. Skir

Why Beast Machines-era Megatron is frickin' hardcore.

Continuity

David Cian's 2 page foreword to the anthology includes contradictory statements about the standing of the stories found within. He first let us know what the ground-rules to the authors were:

The rules, as the saying goes, were simple. Write a Transformers story set in any of the various timelines or universes. Don't break things, but have fun. Optimus Prime can't show up with a heretofore unknown short-range tactical nuke in his helmet, but he can have an adventure that no one has ever heard before.Cian tells writers to write in existing continuities and be careful not mess anything up.

He then concluded the introduction by explaining:

But remember, none of the stories in this volume are part of continuity. In other words they don't count for future "facts" in the Transformers universe except as they should: these stories are for fun, giving us the chance to read about characters we've come to love. Enjoy the journey!Cian "reminds" readers that none of these stories count.

To even further confuse the issue, the book's back cover states that its stories are guided by "no hard and fast rules [and] no themes."

Cian's odd "future facts" phrasing suggests he was doing some CYA, since at least one of the stories ("Two for the Price of One") was set in the future of the then-ongoing Dreamwave G1 comic, with no guarantee that the events of the short story would 'fit' when the comic caught up to it. As it happened, there was no conflict... though of course Dreamwave's bankruptcy kinda helped in the end.

Readers considering Cian's credo may, as always, make up their own minds on the matter of authorial intent. Many of the stories are easily identifiable as fitting within specific continuities and events already established in other fiction; one of them, "Singularity Ablyss", occurs seamlessly within a single episode of Beast Machines and was written by that series' editor. Though perspectives differ, the area of overlap on nearly all of these stories is negligible—that is, they would have no impact on broader continuity even if they had been inserted without any proviso.

Some believe Cian may have been speaking from the perspective that there is a set and specific number of continuities into which all stories had to fit somewhere, similar to the pre-"Crisis" DC comics. This would leave Legends stories as "imaginary tales," to be enjoyed but not made to fit in, and not "counting" as TF stories — almost as though they were examples of pseudocanon. This is difficult to reconcile with Hasbro's earlier published policy of creating an all-encompassing multiversal metastory in which all TF material from any media are legitimized, every single one of them recognized as having "happened" somewhere. One Legends story, "Prime Spark", depicts deceased characters from two of those universes dimension-hopping to visit each other and Primus, a multiversal singularity of precisely this nature.

For the sake of practicality and consistency, TFWiki generally ignores the whole "does not count" claim, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions as to whether the stories from the anthology belong in micro-continuities or applicable parent continuities.

Notes

• Online listings give ibooks editor Steven A. Roman a co-author/editor credit alongside Cian. The extent of his contribution to the book is unclear, and Cian himself has said this is an error which probably originated on Amazon .