Thursday, March 01, 2012

The Rare Book That Predicted the Titanic Disaster


Intrigued?

From a piece in the Kennebec Journal...

It's a familiar story: The largest ship ever built, billed as "unsinkable" by its British owners and the press, strikes an iceberg one April and goes down. Due to a lack of lifeboats, more than half the passengers perish in the North Atlantic.

Except The Titan is a fictional ship, and author Morgan Robertson first published his novella, "Futility," in 1898 — 14 years before the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 14, 1912.

The similarities between Robertson's plot and real life have given "Futility" an uncanny reputation among cognoscenti, with references popping up in everything from Walter Lord's 1955 nonfiction account of the Titanic sinking, "A Night to Remember," to Alan Moore's graphic novel "A League of Extraordinary Gentleman." The "Doctor Who" audio play "The Wreck of the Titan" is partly based on Robertson's novella.

"If you have any interest in the Titanic, it's a must-have," said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare books and special collections department at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. "It's a great collectible book and there's this odd aspect to it makes it completely interesting."


And, for further reading, Smithsonian Magazine's cover story, "Why the Titanic Still Fascinates Us."

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