Accidentally Correct Writing / Literature

Accidentally-Correct Writing in Literature

• In 1726, Jonathan Swift mentioned in the third part of Gulliver's Travels that the scientists of Laputa had discovered two satellites of Mars, at distances that were much smaller than those of any known moons at the time, and with rotation speeds that also were out of kilter with any known moons. When Asaph Hall discovered the moons in 1877, these numbers were uncannily close to the real ones. One Soviet spacecraft designer even suggested Swift had found Martian records on Earth that revealed this, although naturally more plausible explanations exist (see Kepler below).
• The Twilight Saga:
  • In Eclipse, Bella, Edward, and Jacob hide out in the mountains on the same evening that there is a freak snowstorm. There really was a freak snowstorm in that region of the United States in June of 2006.
  • In both Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, Bella and Jacob get a few laughs out of Bella's made-up term of "beta" to mean the second-in-command of the wolf pack. "Beta" is in fact an outdated^note The term was retired to more accurately reflect what real wolf packs are like. Biologists feel that the word gives people the impression that a pack is a group of wolves vying for dominance with strict rankings won through fighting, instead of the family unit it actually is., but still in very common use by laypeople, term for such a wolf.
• Many people are quite shocked by the accuracy with which Fifty Shades of Grey depicts an abusive relationship. It could be a case of Shown Their Work, except that the book is marketed as erotic romance novel and the author vehemently denies any abuse. On top of that, according to Matthew Patrick's Film Theory episode on the film adaptation, it's a scarily accurate depiction of cult indoctrination.
• J. R. R. Tolkien seems to have acquired the gift of prophecy while writing The Notion Club Papers in 1944, given that he gives 1986 as the date of a space program disaster, a nuclear disaster, and the greatest storm ever to hit England. The last one was a few months off — in Real Life, it happened in 1987.
• The famous incident involving "Deadline", a short story sci-fi pulp written by Cleve Cartmill in 1944 which described how to build a uranium-fission bomb, using information taken from technical articles published before the war. The FBI demanded the issue be removed from the newsstands, but editor John W. Campbell convinced them this would only alert the world that the US government was working on building such a weapon. Campbell himself wrote a story in 1936 called "Frictional Losses" that predicted the Japanese use of explosive-laden kamikaze planes (in that case, to fight an Alien Invasion).
• The 1940 anti-isolationist Lightning in the Night predicted a US war with Japan and Germany would begin with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and end with atomic bombs!
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has the equation 6 x 9 = 42. In the story it's meant to be wrong (due to a computer programme being disrupted), but it is actually correct—in base 13 notation (it's 54 in Base 10, the numbering system we use every day). Douglas Adams responded to the suggestion that this was deliberate with, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13."
• Al Franken's The Truth (with jokes) ends with a letter to his grandchildren, supposedly written in 2015 (the book was published in 2005) about all the things that have happened in politics since then. Some of his predictions are wrong, and some are just for jokes (Karl Rove goes to prison for punching a cop, but continues to advise the 2008 Republican race). He does correctly predict that a Democrat (that he specifically avoids naming) wins in 2008 and again in 2012, and that Al would be elected to the U.S. Senate in 2008.
• The 1981 "honorary Alternate History" novel The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn predicted many things about the state of baseball in the span of 1985 to 1988, but the most correct predictions were that the Dodgers would lose to the San Francisco Giants in their 1988 home opener, and would later play in the 1988 World Series.
• The World Society of Brave New World physically and mentally handicaps its lower castes by injecting alcohol into the uterine replicators in which they are grown. This was written well before Fetal Alcohol Syndrome was actually discovered, but Huxley even managed to get the symptoms almost exactly right. Even prior to its formal identification, however, there was awareness of the link (dating back to ancient Greece, Israel and Rome), if not the reason, later observations being from the 18th/19th centuries. Huxley (coming from a scientific family) may well have known about it before.
• Tom Clancy's description of a submarine's inertial navigation system in The Hunt for Red October would have been considered as Shown Their Work... if it were not classified information. Some high-up people were concerned that Clancy somehow got access to classified information when he extrapolated this himself.
• Yevgeny Zamyatin's We describes a surgical procedure that basically destroys someone's personality and emotions by destroying parts of the brain — the book was written approximately fifteen years before Lobotomy was invented.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban describes the Hippogriff as a half-eagle half-horse creature that is very proud. When approaching a hippogryph, a person should bow first, and then wait to see if it returns the bow. J. K. Rowling probably didn't know this, but there actually is at least one species of giant scary-look bird that displays behavior like this. It is called the shoebill, a very strange bird found in Africa.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: A Twitter thread observed that the "Battle of the Seven Potters" sequence inexplicably manages to display a better grasp of gender identity and pronoun preference than its now-infamously transphobic author. Hermione, a cisgender female, takes Polyjuice Potion to transform into Harry, and given that she complains about such details as getting Harry's terrible eyesight, we have no reason to believe her genitals didn't also change for the duration. Nevertheless, Harry's Internal Monologue continues to correctly refer to her in the feminine, as her gender identity didn't change even though her physical sex presumably did.
• As pointed out in the afterward for the 2020 English translation, Quest for Fire portrayed a paleolithic world inhabited by multiple human species at the same time decades before this was found to be correct. There is even a species of dwarf humans that resemble Homo floresiensis or Homo luzonensis. Later on in the story, the protagonists encounter a tribe of giant apes, a clear reference to the (at the time) recently discovered Mountain gorilla and thus out of place in the setting of Pleistocene Asia. Since then, the large gorilla-like ape Gigantopithecus blacki was unearthed in Asia and has become a staple of prehistoric media. The latter end of its temporal range even overlaps with the time period of the story!
• In Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need, the brief paragraph describing Wyoming claims that the Grand Tetons "get their name from the Indian expression 'Get a load of those Tetons'". Though it's actually French, the word does in fact mean what it sounds like.
• Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, written by Morgan Robertson and published in 1898, chronicles the final voyage of a luxury liner named Titan, which sinks after striking an iceberg a few hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland while sailing in mid-April. A large number of the passengers die in the sinking because the ship carried too few lifeboats. While Morgan Robertson simply made an educated guess about what would happen if a luxury liner collided with an iceberg, he had no idea that fourteen years later a similarly-named ship, sailing in the same month, would sink from the same causes, with a huge loss of life for the same reason...
• In Stray, Pufftail repeatedly laments about how cats prefer the company of each other over humans and how they are social animals. At the time of release in the 1980s, cats were seen as loners, with feral/stray colonies being the exception to the rule. Since then, further research has shown that domestic cats aren't as asocial as once thought.
• What are the chances that the creator of Maya the Bee knew that beekeeping was an important economic activity for the ancient Maya?
• Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs features a scene where a horse dies of a marijuana overdose. Considering the book is pretty hardline in its Drugs Are Bad stance, it seems to have been saying that people can die of marijuana overdose—which, for a human, would require the user to be too young to smoke cigarettes. It's generally accepted that the most dangerous part of smoking a joint is the smoke itself.^note Just remember the cultivated plant has a much higher concentration of THC. As for the smoke, it does contain a gooey, very sticky substance. However, marijuana actually is pretty toxic to horses, so the events could have happened... well, if you got a horse to smoke a joint, anyway.
• The Divine Comedy: In Purgatorio, the mountain island of Purgatory is in the southern hemisphere at the antipodal point relative to Jerusalem, placing it in what we now know to be the South Pacific ocean about halfway between Chile and Australia. Dante describes a constellation of four stars similar to the Southern Cross about 200 years prior to the age of European discovery. This might not've been accidental; the Southern Cross was visible in southern Europe prior to about 400 CE (before the Earth's axial precession brought it too far south to be visible from European latitudes), and its stars were well-known to the ancient Greeks, but there's no way for us to know if Dante was aware of this or not.
• The Diplomatic Corps Entrance Exam is a licensed book with quizzes and puzzles about the early Star Wars Legends books. A couple of its multiple choice questions had answer choices that weren’t correct at time of publication, but became correct later. One asks which of Luke’s students fell to the dark side. The book's correct answer is Brackiss, who was a character in one of the early novels. However, another choice is Jacen Solo. Years later, he fell as well, becoming Darth Caedus in Legacy of the Force. Another asks who Luke's true love was. The Callista arc was ongoing at the time, and she was being heavily pushed as Luke's true love. Another choice, though, is Luke's actual true love, Mara Jade.
• By the Waters of Babylon: Many have noted that the description of the "Great Burning" which destroyed the US could fit well with nuclear warfare, though the author likely didn't know or intend that, since it was published in 1937 before the first atomic weapons. The "deadly mist" that fell on New York City was likely meant to be toxic gas, not nuclear fallout, and poison the survivors feared in the area could have resulted from that. However, it works both ways and thus could be read as prescient in the Cold War or beyond. The inspiration for the story was Guernica, a Basque town in Spain, being mostly destroyed by German bombing (which also inspired Pablo Picasso's eponymous famous painting).
• In Out of the Silent Planet, Weston's explanation that his spaceship operates by "exploiting the less observed properties of solar radiation" is given as a Hand Wave by C. S. Lewis, who was no scientist and said the mechanics of space travel were not relevant to the story. Later on, Lewis was amused to learn that spacecraft powered by solar wind were indeed being developed.
• In a case where it's unclear if it's accidental or simply not properly explained in-story, The Eye of Argon gets soundly mocked for featuring a "scarlet emerald", but there actually is such a thing in real life. It's another term for the extremely rare and valuable bixbite, or red beryl.
• Redwall: The mole characters Diggum and Gurrbowl switch genders between books. This was clearly an error as this fact wasn't known at the time the book was written, but "female" moles are in fact intersex, changing between male and female outer appearances due to hormone changes depending on whether they're ready to breed or not.
• One of Agatha Christie's lesser-known works, the Tommy and Tuppence novel N or M, featured a "Major Bletchley" as one of the characters; at the time it was published, MI-5 investigated Christie due to the fact that the character shared the name with Bletchley Park, the cryptographic capital of Britian's war effort, and Christie was friends with one of the code-breakers there. Christie gave Bletchley the name out of spite, as she had been stuck there during a train ride between Oxford and London and took revenge on the city by naming one of her "least-lovable characters" after it.

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