The largest vessel ever to float, 800 feet long and displacing 45,000 tons, declared unsinkable by all who had seen it was gliding through the water with roughly 2,500 peacefully sleeping passengers. Then, suddenly it struck an iceberg on its starboard side, moving at 25 knots.
The ship was 400 nautical miles from Newfoundland. The ship sank quickly, and due to a lack of lifeboats, it took most of its passengers with it.
The story sounds familiar to anyone with even minor knowledge of the Titanic.
However, the story does not describe what happened to the Titanic.
It is the plot of an 1898 novella by Morgan Robertson titled “The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility,” 14 years before the Titanic ever set sail.
“She was that largest craft afloat, and the greatest of works of men in her constuction and maintenance were involve every science profession and trade known to civilization,” the manuscript opens. “On her bridge were officers, who besides being the pick of the Royal Navy, had passed rigid examinations in all studies that pertain to the winds, tides, currents and geography of the sea.”
Ambrose Bierce disappeared without a trace in Mexico at some point in 1913. He was known for his stories of time-slips and mysterious vanishing, as in “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field.”
“The coachman was directed to drive back, and as the vehicle turned Williamson was seen by all three, walking leisurely across the pasture. At that moment one of the coach horses stumbled and came near falling. It had no more than fairly recovered itself when James Wren cried: ‘Why, father, what has become of Mr. Williamson?’”
In a letter to his niece Lora, Bierce wrote: “Goodbye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia. ”
Just before he entered war-torn Mexico, he again wrote Lora, “I shall not be here long enough to hear from you, and don’t know where I shall be next. Guess it doesn’t matter much. Adios, Ambrose.”
“Deadline” is a science fiction short story by Cleve Cartmill, published in Astounding Science Fiction in March 1944. The piece described the still-under-development and secret atomic bomb in some detail, prompting a visit from the FBI.
Cartmill gleaned from unclassified scientific journals on Uranium-235 to make a nuclear fission device.
As Tom Shipley posits in his 2016 thesis, The Cold War in Science Fiction, 1940–1960: “For a while, aficionados liked to recall the incident of the visit of Military Intelligence to the offices of Astounding in 1944, prompted by Cleve Cartmill’s otherwise undistinguished U-235 story ‘Deadline.’ That showed science fiction had to be taken seriously! If only the rest of America had realised in time!”
The 2022 movie White Noise is an adaptation of the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo. One of the plot points in both the book and film concerns a train crash near East Palistine, Ohio, releasing clouds of toxic chemicals into the air.
In an interview with People, East Palestine resident Ben Ratner, featured as an extra in White Noisepoke about the strange parallels between the film, and the Fri., Feb. 3 real-life 50-car train was derailment transporting chemicals that have left toxic smoke drifting over East Palestine, Ohio, currently.
“Talk about art imitating life,” he said. “This is such a scary situation. And you can just about drive yourself crazy thinking about how uncanny the similarities are between what is happening now and in that movie.”
But unlike the book and movie, where the characters break out in dance inside a grocery store at the end, this tragedy may not conclude as superficially.
The Old Blog in the Desert 