What are some examples of something that was portrayed in a work of fiction (book, play, movie, etc), and then later something very similar happened in real life? I’m interested in cases where the prediction was sheer coincidence, not an extrapolation of current technology or events. So I’m not interested in a 1950 story about a moon landing, or an 1880 story that describes an airplane.
A couple of examples of the kind of thing I’m thinking about:
Gulliver’s Travels mentions that Laputan astronomers discovered that Mars has two moons, with orbital periods of 10 hours and 21.5 hours. It was 150 years later that the two moons of Mars were discovered, with periods of 7.5 and 30 hours.
The story Futility was published in 1898, describing the sinking of the world’s largest ocean liner, named Titan, after striking an iceberg on a trip between America and Ireland in April. Most of the passengers die, partially because there were an insufficient number of lifeboats because the ship was considered “unsinkable”. The parallels to the sinking of the Titanic 14 years later are remarkable.
Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor notably ends with a hijacked commercial airliner being crashed into the United States Capitol. Its sequel, Executive Orders, revolves around a viral pandemic which results in schools and nonessential services being forced to close (though the fictional pandemic peters out much faster than the real one has) and sees the Ayatollah assassinated via a missile strike.
Hijacked plane hits government building: The Running Man, first published in 1982 under the Richard Bachman pen name, set in 2025.
Viral pandemic: first done in “Night Surf” with the fictional A6 virus, first published in spring 1969 in the University of Maine literary journal Ubris, later collected in Night Shift (1978). He of course expanded on this for The Stand, which also had the US military intentionally dropping the virus in other countries as a “taking you with us” move.
When I was in fifth grade I checked out a book from the school’s library. It was about money or banks and post offices, so it discussed about who made coins and stamps, along with drawings of coins and stamps. One envelope in the drawings showed a postmark that was the exact date and time that our class was at the library. It was so unusual that I showed it to my teacher.
Not a coincidence, but it is something portrayed as fictional that later happened in real life.
In 1983, a television ad for a UK classfied phone directory (remember those?) depicted an elderly man enquiring at bookshops for a book called Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley. After several unsuccessful visits to shops, he eventually tracks down a copy of the book by ringing second-hand bookshops listed in the directory. Subsequently, bookshops received a large number of requests for the non-existent book, and there were even enquiries to the British Library.
An author who had just completed a book on fly fishing spotted an opportunity, and published his book under the name of J. R. Hartley. The book was very successful , and reached the top of the Christmas bestseller list in 1991..
Swift’s idea of two moons for Mars is intriguing, but I strongly suspect that he had two different moons so he could demonstrate that they obeyed Kepler’s Third Law
The square of a planet’s orbital period is proportional to the cube of the length of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
He needed at least two moons to demonstrate this, and needed diffeences in the orbital periods and sizes of the orbits. The numbers he came up with worked, but aren’t particularly close to the real ones.
The 1972 novel “Artery of Fire” by Thomas N. Scortia takes place on Planet Emeritus Pluto. It contains a passing allusion to a KBO, mentioning a “massive body beyond Pluto that moved in an eccentric orbit, inclined 60º to the ecliptic.” And guess what the name of that body was called: Charon. Pluto’s large moon would not be discovered until 1978.
Interesting that at the time, Pluto was still thought to be much, much larger than later measurements showed, 2½ or ~14 times smaller, depending on whether you’re measuring diameter or volume.
Morgan Robertson, the author of Futility, also wrote a short story in 1914 called Beyond the Spectrum that predicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. developing the atomic bomb. The man was clearly clairvoyant:
In this visionary story, Robertson describes a futuristic war between the United States and Japan. The Japanese stage a surprise attack in Hawaii, and the U.S. ultimately deploys aircraft carrying “sun bombs”—weapons that produce a blinding flash of light capable of destroying an entire city (strikingly similar to a nuclear bomb).
Not literature and real life, but two works of literature: Both the US and Britain launched the comic strip Dennis the Menace on the same date. The two strips are entirely unrelated.
There are a lot of precursors to nuclear bombs in fiction. One we’ve discussed here before was a story written before 1900 (i.e., before Einstein’s Theory of Relativity) that included a matter-annihilation weapon, and the author was only a factor of 2 off on the actual energy yield of such a process.
There was also H.G. Wells’ novel The World Set Free (1913) in which what Wells called “atomic bombs” were dropped from airplanes on the opposing side’s cities and destroyed them. The difference was that it was a relatively slow reaction, as suggested by physicist Fredrick Soddy, not the rapid chain-reaction that lead to a rapid explosion. But Leo Szilard said that it inspired him in proposing the real atomic bomb, nd let him see the political effects of it.
Early in Bleak House, the protagonist meets a character whose first name is “Prince.”
A few hundred pages later, another character shows up wearing what sounds like a garment the musician Prince would have worn in his prime: “a blue velveteen waistcoat with a double row of mother-of-pearl buttons.”
The original cover art for the album Party Music by The Coup showed the World Trade Center being destroyed with bombs. The cover was created in June 2001. The album was officially released in November 2001, but with different cover art.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s only finished novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket published in 1838 -three survivors of shipwreck draw lots and kill and eat their companion-Richard Parker.
In 1884 three survivors of a real shipwreck kill and eat one of their shipmates-- a cabin boy named Richard Parker!
And with regard to “Dennis the Menace,” not surprisingly that phrase was already part of the lexicon before the comic strips. I found it being used occasionally in the 1940s.
The pilot episode for The Lone Gunmen (spin-off of The X-Files) had a hijacked commercial airliner hitting the World Trade Center. It was shot in spring 2000 and first aired in March 2001. (Their plot had it as a false-flag, but the protagonists WERE a group of conspiracy theorists.)
One I’ve long wondered about, and have mentioned on this Board before. In In Fleming’s original novel Moonraker the character of the villain, Hugo Drax, is said to be that of “a Lonsdale type”. When they finally got around to filming Moonraker (1979), Hugo Drax was played by – Michel Lonsdale! If it’s not a coincidence, you have to assume that the folks at Eon Productions were influenced by the description n the book (which wasn’t referring to Michel Lonsdale at the time, obviously)
In the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses, the narrator lists each of the previous chapters alongside the biblical rite or ritual it corresponds to. The rite for the “Cyclops” chapter, where Bloom butts heads with an antisemitic Irish nationalist, is “holocaust.”
