Novels that appear prescient.

September 13, 2005 5:01 AM

Tom Clancy's absurd Debt of Honor (1992) has a politically motivated suicider crashing an airliner into the capitol building. Hector Bywater's novel The Great Pacific War (1925) sort of kind of predicted December 7, 1941. Any other examples come to mind, novels presaging alarming events? Thanks in advance.
posted by IndigoJones to media & arts (24 comments total)

Wreck Of The Titan (aka Futility by Morgan Robertson was said to have foretold the Titanic disaster and had way too many coincidences to the actual event. Robertson had also written another novel, I believe, that was also prescient, but I can't recall the subject of that book.
posted by missed at 5:11 AM on September 13, 2005

Orwell's 1984 foretold the Bush administration.
posted by realcountrymusic at 5:29 AM on September 13, 2005

OH SNAP
posted by Jairus at 5:31 AM on September 13, 2005

A. C. Clarke (with Kubrick) predicted many innovations in 2001, then again he got a lot of predictions wrong too.
posted by Pollomacho at 5:37 AM on September 13, 2005

"Hard Fall" by Ridley Pearson is a thriller about using airplanes as weapons.
H.G. Wells predicted all sorts of things, including genetic engineering in "The Island of Dr. Moreau."
posted by grumblebee at 5:56 AM on September 13, 2005

"Look at Me," by Jennifer Egan. One character is a Pakistani living in the US who is (it is implied) a terrorist or at least deeply involved in some shadowy doings, fake identities and all. Great book.
posted by scratch at 6:12 AM on September 13, 2005

"Look at Me" was written before 2001, btw. Paperback editions printed after 9/11 have a lengthy preface in which the author comments on the weird coincidence.
posted by scratch at 6:16 AM on September 13, 2005

John Barnes' Mother of Storms was a particularly eerie re-read, considering the events of the last 2 weeks.
posted by thanotopsis at 6:35 AM on September 13, 2005

Jack London's Iron Heel (1908) gets a lot of stuff right about the influence of corporate power on governments in the 20th century. He also predicts a huge war in Europe in the following decade, though I forget the details of what exactly he predicted. I don't know how predictable WWI was generally to intelligent observers in the early part of the century.

He also predicts a lot of socialist-utopia stuff, but that clearly hasn't happened.
posted by stopgap at 6:38 AM on September 13, 2005

In 1898 Morgan Robertson (who also invented the periscope) wrote a story called Futility about an "unsinkable" British passenger liner that hit an iceberg during a voyage in April and sank. The ship was called the Titan.

Fourteen years later, in April 1912, the "unsinkable" Titanic hit an iceberg and sank.

There were several similarities between the fictional Titan and the real-life Titanic. There's a book about the parallels.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:48 AM on September 13, 2005

Oops, I missed missed.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:49 AM on September 13, 2005

There was a lot of press about Chris Cleave's novel Incendiary, about a suicide bombing attack on London, which had the unfortunate luck of coming out on the same day as the London subway bombings.
posted by Juliet Banana at 8:09 AM on September 13, 2005

The Peacemaker, which is about a terrorist bringing a suitcase bomb into the US. Hasn't happened yet, but now it's a big topic.
posted by eas98 at 8:34 AM on September 13, 2005

Not a novel, but this pre-9/11 album art always gets me:



See Snopes for back story.
posted by Mid at 8:45 AM on September 13, 2005

In Quiller Solitaire (1992), terrorist hijack a plane, fill it with explosives and chemical bombs, and have an ultimate destination of DC -- but these terrorists are decent enough to release the passengers, before the final flight.
posted by Rash at 8:59 AM on September 13, 2005

The Jerk, where a psychopath selects Steve Martin's character at random for assassination. Do you remember the 2002 Maryland sniper shootings?
posted by quadog at 11:49 AM on September 13, 2005

Stephen King's book, "The Running Man," also ends with the protagonist crashing an airplane into the skyscraper from which the antagonist runs the show. Of course, in that book, it's supposed to be a victorious act.

"The Art of War" is almost a line-by-line caution against Bush's military strategy, does that count?
posted by Crosius at 12:06 PM on September 13, 2005

One interesting prefiguration was the film Grand Canyon, which dealt with, among other things, the racial and class divide in Los Angeles. In the film, Kevin Kline is menaced by black thugs, but rescued by a black tow-truck driver. This seemed to echo the circumstances of Reginald Denny, a year later, who was beaten up by black thugs and rescued by black citizens from the neighborhood (some had seen it on TV and rushed to the intersection).

And the film The Siege is about Islamic fundamentalist terror attack on the US, which responds by rounding up innocent men using the military. But the bombers may be connected to the CIA.

Probably the freakiest of them all is The Manchurian Candidate, which was about a political assassination orchestrated by reactionary forces. It came out in 1962.

Another odd one is the obscure The Chairman, which flagged China as the major threat in the world and had the US and USSR teaming up to counter it. Certainly at the time few would have foreseen the (opposite) move of Nixon going to China, which partly led to the defeat of the Soviet Union, and left China as the main superpower rival to the US.

I used to think things like the Titan/Titanic were eerie, but later I realized, thanks to Martin Gardner, that coincidence is very often the things that we see versus the things that we don't see. He wrote a column for Scientific American detailing coincidences between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, a list which has been added to and -- divorced from its original context -- redistributed endlessly since then. But Gardner wrote it (and his column makes clear) that he carefully selected these "coincidences", sometimes using very broad criteria ("Southerner"). Gardner's point was that when we look for coincidences, even between events that have no logical relationship, our human minds will find them. We're wired for that sort of order.

All this by way of explaining that the book about the similarities -- which is also by Gardner -- is a debunking in the same vein. It really wasn't foretold. It really wasn't that amazing that an author predicted a ship of the dimensions and passenger capacity of the Titanic. Given the technological trends of the day, shipbuilders were already looking forward to being able to build ships that size, they just needed a few more innovations to get there. Ultimately the sheer number of people speculating about the future means that almost any possible event is "foretold" in some fashion. Robertson's forgettable book is remembered, but we forget all the other shipwreck books that didn't appear as similar. We note when a sports figure has "streaks" of success or "droughts" of failure, while being unaware of statistical clustering which says that this happens naturally.
posted by dhartung at 1:20 PM on September 13, 2005

The Turner Diaries,is a novel that ends with the hero flying an atom bomb into the Pentagon with a crop duster, on Nov.9. .Martial law is declared and neo nazi's take over the country begining the Thousand year Riech.
posted by hortense at 4:45 PM on September 13, 2005

Nancy Stouffer wrote a bunch of books about Larry Potter. Her books had muggles and a sister named Lilly Potter.

She sued JK Rowling and lost.
posted by i love cheese at 6:37 PM on September 13, 2005

Jonathan Swift described the twin moons of Mars in the "Laputa" chapter of Gulliver's Travels, more than a century before their discovery.
posted by SPrintF at 7:34 PM on September 13, 2005

Lots and lots of science fiction should be listed here, particularly Isaac Asimov and his robotics stories, William Gibson and "Neuromancer", etc. My favorite book, Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", has the spookily accurate plot twist that...

SPOILER WARNING in case no teacher made you read the book in high school

...the censorship and book-burning in the society was, in fact, not instituted by the government at all. It was instead forced into law by the people, who were constantly outraged about every little potentially-offensive thing, and decided to ban books and turn to bland inoffensive entertainment (the wall-length TV's, etc.) instead. In other words, Bradbury predicted bottom-up extreme political correctness.

Also, his book predicts televised police chases (filmed via helicopter) on the aforementioned wall-length TV's, and how they would become entertainment for the masses.
posted by Asparagirl at 9:06 PM on September 13, 2005

Some cynics have suggested that a certain D.C. personage codenamed "Turdblossom" has closely studied Wag the Dog.
posted by rob511 at 12:50 AM on September 14, 2005

It's been so long since I've read John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up that I can't remember all of it. but parts come to mind more and more often.
posted by furvyn at 1:48 AM on September 14, 2005