Long before 1961, when Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shephard became the first humans to journey beyond Earth's atmosphere, writers envisioned spaceflight and life on other planets. These authors, all born before 1900, took their readers to the moon ... beyond ... and into our future.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Morgan Robertson (1861-1915)

Morgan Andrew Robertson, son of Andrew Robertson and Amelia Glassford, was born in Oswego, NY on 30 Sep 1861 and died in Atlantic City, NJ on 24 Mar 1915.

Morgan went to sea as a cabin boy and was in the merchant service from 1866 to 1877, rising to first mate. Tiring of life at sea, he studied jewelry making at Cooper Union in New York City and worked for 10 years as a diamond setter. When that work began to impair his vision, he turned to writing sea stories, placing his work in such popular magazines as McClure's and the Saturday Evening Post. Robertson never made much money from his writing, a circumstance that greatly embittered him. Nevertheless, from the early 1890s until his death he supported himself as a writer and enjoyed the company of artists and writers in a small circle of New York's bohemia.

First Edition (1898)
He is best known for his short novel Futility, first published in 1898. This story features an enormous British passenger liner called the SS Titan, which, deemed to be unsinkable, carries an insufficient number of lifeboats. On a voyage in the month of April, the Titan hits an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic, resulting in the loss of almost everyone on board. There are some similarities to the real-life disaster of the RMS Titanic. The book was published fourteen years before the actual Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 15, 1912 and sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic. Like the Titanic, the Titan was trying to break the speed record.

Author ‘Predicts’ Titanic Sinking, 14 Years Earlier

By Heba Hasan - April 14, 2012

The novella Futility, written in 1898 by U.S. writer Morgan Robertson, shows some eerie similarities to the famed story of the sinking of the Titanic, the Associated Press reports. Just how many similarities? Let’s take a look:

  • Name: In Futility, the boat is described as the largest ship of its day and was called the Titan.
  • Size: The ships were practically the same size, with the Titanic measuring only 25 meters longer.
  • Date: Both ships, described as “unsinkable,” hit an iceberg and went under in mid-April.
  • Speed: Both were capable of speeds over 20 knots.
  • Safety: Despite having thousands of passengers on board, both ships carried the bare legal minimum number of lifeboats.
These eerie “coincidences” strike most as borderline creepy. But was Robertson really some prescient writer?
Probably not, according to Paul Heyer, a Titanic scholar and professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. Heyer explains how most of the similarities can be explained by looking at the author’s biography. “He was someone who wrote about maritime affairs,” Heyer said. “He was an experienced seaman, and he saw ships as getting very large and the possible danger that one of these behemoths would hit an iceberg.”
Robertson’s real-life experiences and knowledge of naval trends probably gave him plenty of material for writing accurately about maritime catastrophe.
The novel however, doesn’t focus solely on the Titan. The story’s main focus is a Titan naval officer who finds God, gets the love of his life back and fights alcoholism after the Titan’s sinking. Robertson also throws in some interesting action sequences — like one where the protagonist slays a polar bear to rescue a small child.
After the sinking of the Titanic, Robertson gained great acclaim for being a clairvoyant, a title he denied. “No,” he would reply. “I know what I’m writing about, that’s all.”
Expert on maritime trends? Absolutely. But realistic polar bear slaying sequences? Maybe not.
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