Cyberbian,
The concept of a Novelist that can reach the collective unconcious in his books is not restricted only to Jules Verne. There is a so famous case in the end of the the XIX Century, and it was an actual and so impressive predicton of sink of the Transatlantic Titanic. This Novel was published 13 years before the White Star decided to builld that line of Olympic ships.
Morgan Robertson (September 30, 1861 - March 24, 1915) was a well-known American author of short stories and novels, and the possible inventor of the periscope.
Nowadays he is best known for the short fictional novel Futility, first published in 1898. This story features an enormous British passenger liner called the Titan, which, deemed to be unsinkable, carries insufficient lifeboats. On a voyage in the month of April, the Titan hits an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic with the loss of almost everyone on board.
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, which was written 14 years before RMS Titanic's ill-fated voyage, was found to have many parallels with the Titanic disaster; Robertson's work concerned a fictional state-of-the-art ocean liner called Titan, which eventually collides with an iceberg on a calm April night whilst en route to New York.
Huge amounts of people died because of the lack of lifeboats. Both Titan herself and the manner of her demise bore many striking similarities to the eventual fate of Titanic, and Robertson's novella remains in print today as an unnerving curiosity.
All this information is posted in the Titan pages on Wikipedia, if you want to know more about it.
thanks,
your friend,
The Angel of lightness
