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From: Cryptoengineer <petertrei@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Near-Future SF That Almost Forecast Actual Events
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:45:23 -0500
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 1/19/2025 3:58 AM, Charles Packer wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Jan 2025 14:29:26 -0000 (UTC), Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> 
>> On 2025-01-18, Robert Woodward <robertaw@drizzle.com> wrote:
>>
>>> People have been writing near-future SF for decades and when the future
>>> comes, it doesn't resemble those books. However, on occasion there have
>>> been odd matches.
>>
>> It's hard to beat the Québécois TV show _Épidémie_, which was presumably
>> shot in summer 2019, aired from January to March 2020,
>> and presented the fictional outbreak of a coronavirus epidemic in
>> Montréal.
> 
> You could go back to 1979, where the movie "The China Syndrome"
> seemed to prophecy the Three-Mile Island accident.
> 
> In 1886 W. T. Stead wrote a novel that seemed to prophecy the
> Titanic disaster. But that was so far ahead of the event that
> it might not have registered in public consciousness as
> prophecy. But he did go down with the Titanic, so he gets
> extra points...


I don't know about Stead, but in 1898 Morgan Robertson
published "The Wreck of the Titan", in which a huge
"unsinkable" ocean liner strikes an iceberg in fog
while sailing from Ireland to America, sinking with
few survivors.

This was 14 years before the Titanic. It was republished
after the sinking, with some modifications apparently to
make it an even closer match to the Titanic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Titan:_Or,_Futility

pt