Since high school I’ve been involved in conworlding—collaborative development of fictional worlds and societies, then setting stories or games in them.
Around 2005, I and some friends set a story in a culture with a goddess named Per married to a god named Elith. The religion gets called “Perelithve”.
Skip to 2008. Neil Stephenson publishes Anathem, One throwaway reference mentions two of the avout, a woman named Per who marries a man named Elith. The marriage rite they invent gets called “Perelithian”
If names can have between 3 and 8 letters, and always alternate vowels and consonants, and ″th’ counts as one sound, I calculate that the chances of someone who needs two names coming up with “Per” and “Elith” is on the order of one in a billion. The similarity in stories maybe adds another two or three bits of unlikelihood. If I’ve read 1000 novels, each of which has 100 minor characters, and my conworlds contain 1000 characters, then the odds aren’t really that bad, maybe as high as 1%
I don’t deny that you feel freaked out by this experience, but it isn’t all that surprising. When calculating the probability of an unlikely event, you must also consider all the other events that could have happened and that you would have found equally weird.
Of the trillions of other equally-unlikely coincidences that didn’t occur, here are a few examples:
You take a round-trip flight and the two flight numbers concatenated make your social security number.
As a child, you had a pet cat and dog named Milly and Rex that seemed to behave like a married couple. Later, you meet a married couple named Milly and Rex who like to cosplay as a cat and a dog.
About a hundred years ago, a polyamorous journalist with an interest in human rationality wrote a newspaper column. The name of the column was an anagram for the journalist’s name. This man was also friends with your great-great grandmother.
For more on this subject, I’d recommend Innumeracy, and especially Chapter 2: Probability and Coincidence.
Since high school I’ve been involved in conworlding—collaborative development of fictional worlds and societies, then setting stories or games in them.
Around 2005, I and some friends set a story in a culture with a goddess named Per married to a god named Elith. The religion gets called “Perelithve”.
Skip to 2008. Neil Stephenson publishes Anathem, One throwaway reference mentions two of the avout, a woman named Per who marries a man named Elith. The marriage rite they invent gets called “Perelithian”
If names can have between 3 and 8 letters, and always alternate vowels and consonants, and ″th’ counts as one sound, I calculate that the chances of someone who needs two names coming up with “Per” and “Elith” is on the order of one in a billion. The similarity in stories maybe adds another two or three bits of unlikelihood. If I’ve read 1000 novels, each of which has 100 minor characters, and my conworlds contain 1000 characters, then the odds aren’t really that bad, maybe as high as 1%
Still freaks me out, though.
Unless you were both influenced by Perelandra, in which case the odds are much higher.
Is it possible Stephenson read your story?
I don’t deny that you feel freaked out by this experience, but it isn’t all that surprising. When calculating the probability of an unlikely event, you must also consider all the other events that could have happened and that you would have found equally weird.
Of the trillions of other equally-unlikely coincidences that didn’t occur, here are a few examples:
You take a round-trip flight and the two flight numbers concatenated make your social security number.
As a child, you had a pet cat and dog named Milly and Rex that seemed to behave like a married couple. Later, you meet a married couple named Milly and Rex who like to cosplay as a cat and a dog.
About a hundred years ago, a polyamorous journalist with an interest in human rationality wrote a newspaper column. The name of the column was an anagram for the journalist’s name. This man was also friends with your great-great grandmother.
For more on this subject, I’d recommend Innumeracy, and especially Chapter 2: Probability and Coincidence.