Why so much synchronicity?

Tony Ellis · 20 Aug 2006, 15:16 · from 2006-August.txt.gz

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From: tonyellis69 at btopenworld.com (Tony Ellis)
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2006 16:16:37 +0100
Subject: (urth) Why so much synchronicity?
Message-ID: <000001c6c46b$a18e7350$6501a8c0@cthulhu>

Junk06 wrote:
> Why? It smells of ham handedness, as someone mentioned recently.
> Anyone have theories as to why so many coincidences fill the series?

And Bob Miller:
>life is also full of these "coincidences", the result of a 
>possibly ham-handed Divine Providence. i.e., life and history are full
of 
>incidents of such incredibly low probability that
>"no author would dare" use them.

Absolutely. Wolfe uses synchronicity because it's realistic. 

As Dan'l says, Wolfe is a Dickens fan and Dickens put a lot of
coincidence in his novels - but *why* did Dickens do that? Because that
was how he saw the real world. A crazy place where unlikely things
happened all the time. I suspect that Wolfe, who ended up married to the
little girl who once lived next door, has a similar world-view.

In any event, while the modern convention in novel-writing is to shun
coincidence like the plague, it really is just that: a convention. And
if there's one thing Wolfe enjoys in his writing, it's flaunting those.

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