Odd coincidences btw your SF/F reading and the real world

[John (john)]

I'm reading Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge; on a far future Earth he's got a lot of references to spiders and massive webs. "Here the spiderwebs are thickest, a tight dark layer across the treetops.... On a busy day, the top of the kudzu web almost seems to froth, the little buggers are pumping out so much silk."

I read that bit in chapter 9 this weekend, and yesterday popped by io9 and found this post from Friday: http://io9.com/#!5785596/why-are-thes.... Funny!

Have you ever had a similar type of coincidence?

[aldenoneil]

I just finished Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, a book about what happens to corpses after death, after playing through two Dead Space games and Dead Space: Martyr, which are all about reanimated corpses.

I love finding common threads (or, ahem, webs, if you will) between pieces of literature. I did not, however, encounter any corpses in the real world during the time I was reading.

[Basil]

The phenomenon is called "synchronicity".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchron...

[aldenoneil]

I majored in this. Comparative Literature is ideally about comparing literature across languages, but considering I cannot learn Spanish despite my best efforts, I simply read a lot of English literature and talked about it. S&L is my continuing education, in that sense. It's my night school.

[Boots]

I don't know if this is the same thing but when I was reading The Book of the New Sun there was a reference to the Hall of Mirrors in the House Absolute. The very same evening I was watching a BBC show called The Story of Science talking about the Hall of Mirrors. The host said the mirrors represented an idea of individuality in a classless, guild-less society, 'awareness of self'. It was a neat coincidence to me at the time.

I found the clip on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBUzj-...

[Brandon]

The day after i finished the mistborn trilogoy, a thick fog rolled in, and i got the flu.

I havent eaten any metal to see if i snapped yet though.

[Tyrone]

Not really coincidences, more about the perfect accompanyment...
In 1990 i picked up the first 2 volumes of the Necroscope series by Brian Lumley,Necroscope & Vamphyri!. At around the same time i had Depeche Mode's Violator playing constantly...it was the perfect soundtarck for those two books. The two just combined in my head and whenever i reread them the soundtrack playing in my head is Violator.

[Bill]

Tyrone wrote: "Not really coincidences, more about the perfect accompanyment...
In 1990 i picked up the first 2 volumes of the Necroscope series by Brian Lumley,Necroscope & Vamphyri!. ..."
That's interesting...I love that series, especially the way things develop in the third book.
Now I'm going to have to check out that album. I'm only familiar with Personal Jesus, I think...

[Treetop]

Just got home from the nightly constitutional, flipped on the tube, and found a documentary called "Blindsight" about a group of blind Tibetans climbing Everest.

(BTW, I started the book this morning. Not sure how I'm feeling about it yet, but can't wait for the discussion to begin. It's definitely had me thinking.)