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     Seanmcd (Seanmcd) Username: Seanmcd Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 86.151.243.114 |
Morgan Robertson's 1898 Novella 'Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan' was about a supposedly unsinkable giant luxury passenger liner, named Titan, striking an iceberg whilst crossing the Atlantic on a cold April night with catastrophic loss of life due to there being too few lifeboats. The pilot episode of 'The X Files' spin off show 'The Lone Gunmen' broadcast on March 4th 2001, was about a government conspiracy to fly a commercial airliner into the World Trade Center thus causing global panic,an increase in wars, and ultimately an increased arms trade for US companies. Edgar Allan Poe's 'Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket' published in 1838 described the shipwreck of four sailors and how one of the four,Richard Parker, is cannibalized by the other three. In 1884 a British vessel, the Mignonette,sinks leaving 4 drifting survivors. Eventually 3 kill and cannibalize the fourth,the cabin boy, named... Richard Parker. Amazing. Are there any more, big or small? | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.4.250.191 |
Wow! Weird.... That second one, I wonder, how much of a coincidence that was or not.... I remember something from a novel that this reminds me of - possibly THE REBEL ANGELS, by Robertson Davies? - where a character mentions a professor or something, who was obsessed and spent his life searching through old books for prophetic references in typos, like a word misspelled "Hitler" found in some old book... can't remember what it all added up to.... Yeah. Great story, Craig. | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 142.179.19.195 |
Robertson's FUTILITY is certainly the biggie in terms of amazing prophetic coincidences in fiction. A more recent one is the eerie similarities between Alice Munro's short story 'Dimensions' (originally published in THE NEW YORKER in 2006) and a terrible triple murder in the small town of Merritt, BC, about 75 miles from Ashcroft. In Munro's story, a blue collar labourer who is afraid his wife is going to leave him kills their three children by suffocating them; bruises on the neck of the eldest child show he fought back. The wife is away at the time of the killings, and is the one who finds the bodies. Afterward, the husband claims he killed the children to spare them from the misery of their mother leaving, and is deemed insane. In the Merritt case, a blue collar labourer named Allan Schoenborn was afraid his common-law wife was going to leave him, and while the wife was out he killed their three children, by stabbing the eldest (bruises on her neck show she fought back, and that her father then suffocated her) and suffocating the younger two. The wife discovered the bodies, and Schoenborn - currently on trial at Kamloops Crown Court - has claimed he killed the children to save them from humiliation (he also claims they were being poisoned and molested, claims which have not been substantiated). He has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and paranoia, and the defence is arguing that he should not be found criminally responsible because of mental illness. In a recent interview, Munro said that 'Dimensions' is the only story in her recent collection TOO MUCH HAPPINESS that she cannot reread, although she did not say why. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.171.167.11 |
Bear mauls man in Bern Park Zoo, Berne ...... Switzerland (home of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider). Well, can it now get any stranger via a vis Cern Zoo?http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1229998/The-horrifying-moment-bear-ma uls-man-climbed-zoo-enclosure.html (see 'The Lion's Den' story in particular). |