Fiction Often Tells Us What’s Coming

“In the years before big dramatic events there’s often something in the air, and sometimes the vibrations enter artists’ brains, whether they’re conscious of it or not, and show up in their work.”
- Peggy Noonan, A Certain Idea of America

Here’s something quite mysterious.

The following story doesn’t get much attention these days. It’s too mysterious, or it’s seen as evidence of something beyond our understanding, something in the physical, observable life that that the nonspiritual amongst us can’t explain because it’s something we can’t see.   

In 1898, fourteen years before the tragic sinking of the Titanic in 1912, an obscure writer, Morgan Robertson, wrote a novella about a famous ocean liner carrying wealthy, prominent people across the Atlantic that went down after hitting an iceberg.

I just read the book.

• The Titanic was 66,000 tons displacement. Robertson’s ship was 70,000.

• The Titanic was 882.5 feet long. The fictional one, 800.

• Both ships could carry 3,000 people.

• Both could go through the water at 24-25 knots.

• Both carried only a fraction of the lifeboats they needed.

• Both were called “unsinkable.”

Amazingly, Morgan Robertson’s fictional liner was even named Titan.

The novella was originally published in 1898 under the title Futility, then revised and re-released as The Wreck of the Titan in 1912, after the Titanic went down.

Think of this the next time you read a fictional story you’re sure will never become a reality. Death in the Kremlin, for instance . . . ?