Life Imitating Art? Strange Cases Where Fiction has Foretold the Future
Between 1949 and 1950, American novelist Norman Mailer was hard at work crafting the follow up to his breakthrough novel, The Naked and the Dead.
His home and base of operations at the time had been a boarding house
in New York, and the subject of this new work that would eventually
become 1951’s Barbary Shore was, rather transparently, reflective
of Mailer’s current state of affairs: the story was that of a World War
II veteran, holed up in a New York boarding house, trying to write a
novel.
To his credit, Mailer had added amnesia
to his character’s plight, but this alone hadn’t helped make the
post-war novel anything more spectacular than what it was destined
already to be: a shortcoming in the wake of his breakthrough
masterpiece, and one so bad it would launch a decade-long hiatus from
work as a novelist, during which Mailer would turn his attention to
societal themes, writing of (and occasionally berating) hipsters,
politicians, and American life in general.
The otherwise innocuous and disappointing Barbary Shore might
have been forgotten altogether, had it not been for one other unique
facet it possessed. As much as the story had intentionally mirrored the
happenings of Mailer’s life, there were other things occurring beneath
the surface which the author included, though seemingly despite having
no way of gaining knowledge of them at the time.
Norman Mailer
To be specific, another of the book’s themes dealt with a
Soviet spy, who is found to be living undercover in the same New York
Boarding House. Strangely, after the publication of Barbary Shore,
it was revealed that an actual spy, similarly working with the USSR,
had been living within an apartment just above Mailer’s. Despite the odd
foretelling of events that the novel contained, not even this would
help it become memorable in the minds of Mailer’s critics; once, the
occasionally obstreperous writer even went so far as to take out
advertisements quoting the negative critiques his literary adversaries
launched against him.
The theme of “predictions” made by novelists is indeed one that we’ve covered before here at Mysterious Universe. In a 2010 post on the subject, I noted one of the most peculiar of them all, which dealt with Edgar Allan Poe’s one and only novel-length manuscript, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
Here, a similarly striking — if not more unsettling prediction — had
been made, involving a storm that destroys a sailing vessel, leaving the
stranded seamen faced with a damning decision about who would
ultimately survive:
“Among them was a lowly cabin boy named
Richard Parker, who later was cannibalized in what was then known as the
grim “custom of the sea.” Though this series of events was conjured
from Poe’s mind, decades later the [sailing ship] Mignonette was
destroyed under almost identical circumstances, where a sudden 40-foot
wave capsized the ship. Among the survivors–and first to be killed and
cannibalized–was the cabin boy, whose name was none other than Richard
Parker! Captain Tom Dudley, along with those who had helped devour young
Parker, were later discovered alive, and were tried for murder.”
While the similarities here might be
chalked up to coincidence alone, it is worth noting that the turn of
events described above came about resulting from political writer Arthur
Koestler’s interest in psychic phenomena and coincidences later in
life. His fascination was great enough that he proposed a contest in
which an award would be offered for the best example of a bizarre
prediction or coincidence. That award was later given to none other than
Nigel Parker, a relative of the deceased Richard Parker, who shared the
family’s strange story.
Another notable example of a novelist whose work seemingly predicted the future had been Jules Verne, who discussed the future of space flight in his book From the Earth to the Moon. Here,
Verne’s fictional meanderings ended up being uncannily similar to what
would later become the very real American space program’s Apollo
Program. In the book, Verne even wrote that three astronauts were
launched from the Florida peninsula, and recovered through a splash
landing of their spacecraft upon reentry; also in the book, the
spacecraft is launched from “Tampa Town”, whereas Tampa, Florida is
approximately 130 miles from what would later become NASA’s launch site
at Cape Canaveral.
Perhaps among the most famous instances of alleged predictions set forth in novels involved Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novella Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan.
In this book, Robertson wrote of a large sailing vessel which went down
tragically in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg on its
starboard side. The events of the novel transpire in the month of April,
and adding to the tragedy of Robertson’s tale, the fictional Titan would lack enough lifeboats needed to save all its passengers.
The obvious similarities here to the sinking of the RMS Titanic were
indeed noteworthy to many of Robertson’s readers, right down to the
accident’s distance from Newfoundland, and the number of casualties that
would ensue. While Robertson’s readers proclaimed that he possessed the
gift (or perhaps curse) of clairvoyance, the author would maintain that
he had merely deduced such a remarkably similar turn of events based on
his extensive knowledge of seafaring.
The examples cited here are among the
best, though countless other cases of tales spun by fiction writers
which bore similarity to later happenings do exist. Whether or not it is
indeed evidence of psychic abilities or premonitions, it would
certainly seem that on occasion the notion of “life imitating art” does
take on a whole new, and far more literal meaning.
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