Self Fulfilling Prophecy / Literature

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in Literature.

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• In the 1632 novels, people have gotten into the habit of looking up themselves in uptime reference works. Some of them then decide to try to make the bits about their future that they like come sooner, and the bits that they don't like not happen. In some cases — the matter with Charles I of England and Oliver Cromwell being the most obvious — the manner in which they try to avoid their fate just makes it likely to happen sooner.
• Played with in the Tim Pratt short story "Another End of the Empire": an Evil Overlord receives a prophecy that a child from a certain village will grow up to bring an end to his empire. Rather than wipe them out (he knows how these things work; there will be survivors), he instead uses the village as a test bed for social and political reform, improving education and the general quality of life, hoping to eliminate any possible motive anyone would have for trying to overthrow him. He even adopts the three most likely candidates as his sons and allows them to pursue their own agendas to keep them happy. The twist is that in making all these changes, he has made his empire peaceful and prosperous, his subjects actually like him now rather than simply fear him, and he can even retire happily and pass on rule to one of his more progressive-minded sons. So his empire does come to end, just not the way he expected. Amusingly, both the overlord and his Sybil is aware of this trope and discusses it — it is the reason he is certain there would be survivors, when he complains that his probability witches have been unable to narrow it down beyond the three most likely candidates the Sybil suggests it is a dynamic prophecy and any one of them could be the overthrower if the other two are killed or removed, and towards the end the plan is to continue the course so as to avoid triggering the prophecy before he can die from something less destiny-entangled. It is only at the end he realizes he'd managed to arrange things so the prophecy could be fulfilled in a less personally unpleasant way.
  
  The wording of the prophecy was "If allowed to grow to manhood, he will take over your empire, overthrow your ways and means, and send you from the halls of your palace forever", which almost (one can quibble about one part of it) happened, just not in the way the evil overlord thought: the Empire is taken over by one of the children... because he adopted the child (all of them, but only one wanted to rule) and later abdicated and gave the throne to that child, his ways and means were overthrown... because, in the process of allowing them to indulge in their agendas, that child had introduced extensive but effective reforms far beyond anything the overlord had considered, and while the one that took over the Empire didn't exactly send the overlord from the halls of the palace forever, he did see the overlord do so — because the overlord felt useless and didn't want to stay around after having abdicated.
• In the Victorian heist novel Any Old Diamonds, the main character's Wicked Stepmother always feared that high society, and her new stepchildren, would not accept her because she's a lower-class woman who married a duke. So she rubs her wealth and rank in everyone's face all the time, and is in general a huge Jerkass. (It doesn't help that are some nasty skeletons in the closet regarding her first marriage.) So yes, high society hates having her around and people only invite her to things when they absolutely have to, because she's unbearable. The protagonist notes that there are other women who married into the nobility after careers as dancers and actresses who are now well-accepted after the initial classist hiccups, because they're actually nice to people.
• In Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept: Blue Adept, in (what they thought was) their big showdown, protagonist Stile asks the Red Adept why she was gunning for him. She replies a prophecy had foretold of her destruction at his hands, so she decided to strike first. Stile points out that he never would've heard of her, magic, or the world of Phaze (let alone been able to enter it) if Red hadn't murdered Adept Blue (Stile's Phaze self) and tried to kill him. Turns out the Oracle, which is really a supercomputer, set Red on his trail intentionally, to get Stile into Phaze to play his part to Save Both Worlds.
• In Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest, the night before the group goes out for their first dungeon training, Kaori goes to Hajime's room to tell him she had a dream where he fell down a ravine and disappeared. Unfortunately, one of their classmates, who is one of Hajime's bullies and is obsessed with Kaori, witnesses her going to his room and goes so mad with jealousy that he ends up causing the "accident" that causes Hajime to fall down a ravine and disappear.
• In Astral Dawn, Caspian unwittingly fulfills his destiny by traveling to the Moment of Creation, a point in space-time he was warned never to go.
• In Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon, the different fantasy races hate and fear "Masters" because they tend to be humanity's protectors and avengers. The fact that Masters appear because of their Fantastic Racism and abuse against humans, which leads to the former taking that role, is something that never seems to occur to them.
• In Castle in the Air, Flower-In-the-Night's father locked her up since her birth, after hearing a prophecy that the first man she sees will become her husband. If he hadn't done that, she would have never met the main protagonist Abdullah ...
• C. S. Lewis' book The Chronicles of Narnia: The Horse and His Boy is, in theory, based around one of these; the revelation of the content of the prophecy sets in motion the very events that were predicted. Aslan has a carefully judged paw on the scales of the universe throughout — pushing boats to shore, scaring the horses, propping up the central character's failing morale, and generally helping the characters complete his Gambit Roulette. No doubt giving the dryad the plot-triggering prophecy was all according to plan.
• In Corsair, after listening to his brother try to heap guilt on him and justify his actions based on a prophecy made when Canale was born, Canale delivers an embittered speech about how the prophecy about him being the "devil's child" who will wreak "destruction on towns and cities" was rubbish and how his family's reaction to it led to him becoming such a dangerous and destructive force in the first place.
• A Cry in the Night: When Erich learns Jenny is planning on leaving him, he's convinced that his paranoia that she would break her promise and abandon him was justified. However, Jenny was only driven away because of Erich's own jealous and controlling behavior.
• Dune uses this trope in an interesting way. Instead of the seer giving a prophecy and leaving others to fulfill it, the seer is a Messianic Archetype who tries to find the best possible path for the future and enact it himself. The problem is that once humanity is set on a certain path in the present, the number of possible futures diminish and it becomes impossible to switch to a different path for the future without dealing with the effects of the prior path.
• Elemental Logic: In Fire Logic an army attacks the peaceful Ashawala'i people because an oracle told them that someone from there would defeat them. Naturally, the lone survivor does just that because they killed off her people.
• The Eminence in Shadow: Once his paranoia of not having the strength to protect his loved ones get the best of him, Gettan adopts the philosophy of "If you don't want anything robbed from you, you have to rob from others" which he started by raiding his adoring fiance Yukime's village after they refused to join the Cult of Diabolos. However, from that moment onward, Gettan's life slowly spiraled down the drain and he eventually loses everything precisely because of his philosophy starting with his village, Yukime, his tribe, his eyesight, his mercenary army, his company's assets and finally his life. In short, if he hadn't tried to rob from others, they would have never thought of robbing him in the first place.
• Chris and Cathy's incestuous love in Flowers in the Attic. The Grandmother wanted to prevent such a thing, but she actually pushed them together by locking them up for years, isolated from the rest of the world and other kids.
• The Folk of the Air:
  • Dain is told that if his child lives, he will never be king. Attempting to murder his unborn child by poisoning the mother succeeds in killing only the mother. The child ends up in the hands of Madoc who, having his hands on a secret member of the royal family and aware of Dain’s depravity, decides to shift loyalties, resulting in Dain’s murder just as he was about to be king.
  • Jude’s mother is told that her child would alter the fate of the faerie world. Thinking it to be about Vivienne, she fakes her death and flees back to the mortal world. It’s suggested that the prophecy was actually about Jude, who was only born because her mother ran away from Madoc and remarried a human.
• The Nice And Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, from Good Omens work a bit like this:
  Newt: But if you're going to places and doing things because she saw them, and she saw them because you were there, then...
  Anathema: Yes, I know.
• Harminia from Gosick was told at age 6 that she would die when she was 26 years old. She killed the Elder/prophet, and framed Cordelia. Cordelia is exiled, leading to Victorique's birth, and subsequent return twenty years light to clear her mother's name. After Victorique reveals Harminia is the killer, she goes on a rampage, leading to her death.
• In The Graveyard Book, if the Jacks had never taken it upon themselves to kill Bod's family, Bod would never even have made it to the graveyard in the first place.
• Jane Yolen's Great Alta Saga: When Jenna's soldiers capture the Cat and tell her to kill him, as it is prophesized she will, she refuses. That night, the Cat breaks free and Jenna's close friend, called Cat as a nickname, dies in the resulting fight. Thus, Jenna does bring about the death of a Cat.
• Harry Potter:
  • The series is built around one, as explained by Dumbledore in Book 6: Voldemort indirectly hears half of a prophecy about a boy about to be born who will be his nemesis. With two possible choices, Harry Potter and Neville Longbottom, he chooses Harry, but in the process of trying to kill him, gives him both the power to defy him and a reason to. What's the best way to turn an otherwise unimportant young wizard into your mortal enemy who's well-equipped to defeat you? Well, murdering his parents and spending the better part of a decade sticking him in convoluted death traps is not a bad start. What's more, Dumbledore hints that not all prophecies have to be fulfilled. The only reason Harry is going to fulfill the prophecy is that he would never rest until Voldemort was dead, and the same goes for Voldemort. The only way to avoid it coming true is if they both stop, which certainly won't happen. Worth noting, the prophecy only actually says that one of the two (Voldemort, Harry) will kill the other. Since Harry was a baby at the time Voldemort heard it, striking immediately seemed to make sense. Voldy really should have put more thought into it, though. JK Rowling has said that had the roles been reversed, Neville would have been just as capable of walking the same path Harry did. There was a third option available to Voldemort, but it was one that his ego and paranoia would've never allowed him to take even had he been aware of it: do nothing. That would've resulted in neither Harry nor Neville being "marked as the Dark Lord's equal" and gaining the power to defeat him.
    Dumbledore: Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back! Voldemort is no different!
  • Played for Laughs with some of Trelawney's "predictions". The first time we see her, in the third book, she asks Neville to use one of the blue cups for tea-leaves-reading after he breaks his first one. Neville, already nervous at the best of time, promptly breaks the first cup he uses. She ends the lesson by telling him he'll be late next time, "so mind you work extra hard to catch up". Hermione believes this is why people die when they see "the Grim"; since it's believed to be an omen of Death, many people get so scared to see it that they die of fright.
  • A similar example is mentioned in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them; the Augurey's mournful cry was once believed to foretell the death of whoever heard it (in reality, they were predicting rain). The entry goes on to mention how several wizards suffered fatal fear-based heart attacks after hearing an unseen Augurey's cry.
• In Horatio Hornblower novel Lieutenant Hornblower, Captain Sawyer's deteriorating mental state turns him into The Paranoiac. He abuses and undermines his lieutenants because he's convinced (with no evidence) that they're conspiring to mutiny against him. As a result of this behavior, his lieutenants reluctantly consider the prospect of mutiny... and then comes Saywer's mysterious fall down the hatchway.
• Inverted in I, Claudius. A prophecy is made that Caligula (yup, that one) can "no more become Emperor that he can ride across the bay from Baiae to Puteoli". One of Caligula's first acts as Emperor involves a very long bridge...
• In book 2 of The Incorrigible Children Of Ashton Place, one character refuses to tell Penelope what's going on for fear that Penelope's attempts to avoid it will lead to this.
• Inheritance Cycle:
  • In Eragon the title character is asked by a mother to bless her child. He scrapes together some magic words and does. Then his dragon kisses the child, leaving a mark on their forehead. When Eragon protests that he didn't really do anything, someone points out that the kid has both the blessing of a dragon rider and the mark of a kiss from a dragon. They're probably not going to be satisfied as, say, a grocer or blacksmith. Unfortunately, Eragon screwed up the wording, and accidentally cursed Elva.
  • This is discussed later on in the series, and it's stated that the only sure way to prevent one of these prophecies coming to pass is to immediately kill oneself (an example is given of an elf seeing a premonition of him killing his son in battle and committing suicide so he wouldn't do it), because the premonitions don't tell you what choices you made to make the future that you saw.
• The Licanius Trilogy: Given that this story has both prophecy and time-travel as major components of the plot, this trope comes up a lot.
  • In the first book, the Augur Kol has a vision that he will be killed by Scyner. Upon meeting Scyner, he promptly attacks and Scyner kills him in self-defense.
  • When he was still a youth, Gassandrid's home city was destroyed by an unknown catastrophe. Millennia later, he attempted to travel back in time and prevent this, only for the backlash from his malfunctioning time travel attempt to cause that very catastrophe
• Subverted and lampshaded in Calderon's Life is a Dream, where Segismund — the subject of an Oedipus Rex-type prophecy — points out that it would be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, while preventing it from getting fulfilled.
  My father, who is here to evade the fury
  Of my proud nature, made me a wild beast:
  So when I, by my birth of gallant stock,
  My generous blood, and inbred grace and valour,
  Might well have proved both gentle and forebearing,
  The very mode of life to which he forced me,
  The sort of bringing up I had to bear
  Sufficed to make me savage in my passions.
  What a strange method of restraining them!
• In the universe of Lintang and the Pirate Queen, propheseeds are creatures which foretell when and how you will die. One general, after hearing from them that he would die by drowning, locked himself inside a fort in the desert. This fort then flooded in a freak rainstorm, killing him.
• An old Spanish romance named ''The Lover and Death" features a man in love meeting Death. Death tells him that he has one hour left to live. Desperate, the man seeks the company of his girlfriend, wishing to spend his last moments with her. Problem — her parents left and the door's locked, so she can't open the door for him. So she decides to help him climb to her balcony with a thread of silk. He falls to his death.
• In the Hindu Mythology epic Mahabharata, possibly the Ur-Example, the story of Krishna begins with his uncle Kamsa, the king of the Mathura kingdom, being told a prophecy that predicted his death at the hands of his sister Devaki's child. Out of fear, he imprisons Devaki, planning to kill all of her children at birth. Eventually, her eighth child Krishna is born and is smuggled out to be raised by foster parents in the village of Gokula. Years later, Kamsa learns of his survival and sends demons to kill him. The demons are defeated by Krishna, who as a young man returns to Mathura to overthrow his uncle, resulting in Kamsa's death at the hands of his nephew Krishna. It was due to Kamsa's attempts to prevent the prophecy that led to it coming true.
• In the short story The Man Outside by Evelyn E Smith, someone called Martin is destined to have a son who develops the interstellar drive, resulting in the exploitation of other planets and their native populations — so one of his descendants (Conrad) plots to travel back through time to kill him, preventing the birth of his son. Martin's other descendants get wind of this, and themselves travel back to protect Martin from Conrad, including anyone from Martin's time who might be an agent of Conrad. When Martin is old, childless, and on his deathbed, Conrad finally turns up — and confirms what Martin had worked out years earlier, that his plan all along was to deliberately allow his "death threat" to leak, panicking his brothers and sisters into acting as they did, and thereby achieving the same result without the assassination actually needing to be carried out.
• Mr. Casaubon's posthumous attempt in Middlemarch to prevent his widow, Dorothea, from marrying Will Ladislaw using a codicil in his will that removes her inheritance if she does so. At the time of Casaubon's death, they have no serious involvement and certainly no plans to marry, but Dorothea's sense of injustice helps to attract her to Will, and in fact, her money is one of the things standing in the way of the relationship...
• A mundane version is mentioned in Night Watch Discworld with the paranoia of Homicidal Lord Winder. He has the brutal Cable Street Particulars continually root out plots and spies... and as the narrator says, the thing about rooting out plots and spies by such measures is that if there are no plots and spies to begin with, there will be plots and spies very soon.
• The Clayr in the Old Kingdom series apparently see nothing odd about inducting a member into their ranks because they Saw themselves inducting her into their ranks.
• Paycheck offers a twist on this. Instead of trying to prevent the prophecy from happening, the protagonist Jennings is actively trying to figure out how to fulfill it. Jenning has an envelope of items, which will help him to survive. At all times, there is the appearance of free will; only at certain moments do the items reveal how they are useful. Jenning's frenemy seems to defeat Jenning's mission (the prophecy) with a reveal but then the time scoop shows up to reveal the final item's worth. The movie by the same name (see above) plays with the trope in a different way.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • There was a great prophecy stating that a child of the "Big Three" (Zeus, Poseidon, Hades) would make a decision that will decide the fate of Olympus upon turning sixteen. Those three gods formed a pact to stop having children as a result, and to kill the ones they currently had before they turned sixteen. Suffice to say that if not for that pact Hades' lover Maria wouldn't have been killed, Hades wouldn't have cursed the Oracle, Luke's mother wouldn't have gone insane trying to become the new Oracle, Luke wouldn't have tried to bring back Kronos, and there would have been no decision for the kid in the prophecy to make in the first place.
  • It's implied that Luke's mother was driven mad from the visions of her son's rather unpleasant future. As mentioned above, his mother's insanity drives Luke down the path of evil. This makes it a rare instance where merely viewing the prophecy made it come true without any actions being made to prevent it.
• In The Rising of the Shield Hero, King Melromarc has a severe disdain for demi-humans, and the legends of the Four Cardinal Heroes said that the Shield Hero would be heavily associated with a party made of them, as well as demi-humans worshipping the Shield Hero for being a champion of demi-humans according to their legends. Thus, he enacts a hidden plan to discredit Naofumi, the titular Shield Hero, which results in him being considered a pariah by almost every member of his kingdom. Naofumi becomes jaded and distrustful toward everyone as a result, and only takes on slaves (the majority of which being demi-humans) as party members because they are unable to disobey him.
• Rose Princess Hellrage starts with the execution of the title character because her father was deposed and murdered by his evil younger brother who wanted the crown. The usurper played on a dubious prophecy that children born with silver hair and eyes are "cursed" and destined to doom the country. Since he used this premise to take the throne, he couldn't deny his fanatical Knight Templar followers who wanted to hunt the child down and preemptively end the menace. When these knights find the child and her mother, they put the pair of women through hell for at least a month before dragging her to the guillotine and then throwing a party over the defiled corpses. They also pointedly ignore the executioner, who is accustomed to seeing undead rise at execution sites if proper measures, like a pre-execution sanctification and a memorial service aren't held, saying "a memorial service for that 'evil' child is a sacrilege." To the surprise of everyone (including the executioner, but only because of her power level), Rene rises up as a powerful undead and immediately starts carrying out her vengeance, only momentarily stopped by an army of the king's strongest elites, and only because she wasn't accustomed to her powers yet, nor had any solid plans or strategies in place...
• In Shannon Hale's Princess Academy, the priests of a country traditionally predict what city the prince's future wife will come from, and then the prince goes there to meet all the local girls and get married. The current prince is told that his bride will come from the remote village of Mount Eskel, so the kingdom hurriedly sets up the titular academy to give the local peasant girls a decent education before one of them becomes queen. The prince ends up proposing to Britta, a girl he knew from back in the capital, whose parents had shipped her off to Mount Eskel to get her into the pool of potential brides. The priests are quick to close this loophole for future prophecies, and the main character later wonders why the prophecy didn't point to the city that Britta was originally from, but decides that it was because Mount Eskel "needed an academy more than a princess".
• In The Shattered Kingdoms, the "curse" of Norland (actually a disease) wouldn't have been released if the Emperor hadn't unsealed a tomb where a weapon against the cursed is supposed to be obtained.
• In Sleeping Dragon by Johnny Nexus, five people in a Dungeon Punk world are teleported to the same place and given a mission. They eventually learn that five hundred years earlier, the wizard who invented the meta-spells that make modern industrial magic possible prophesied that the world was doomed, and so created a spell that would summon the five greatest heroes of the age to stop it. (They also learn that "heroes" are in short supply, so the spell summoned the five people who came closest to fitting the criteria and then had a breakdown, but that's by-the-by.) Much later, they discover that the threat is a product of industrial magic, and then realise that the wizard only researched meta-spells in the first place for the specific purpose of creating the summoning spell. Their own wizard says that prophecies always work like this, which is why nobody attempts them any more.
• In Smoke and Shadows, Arra insists that before she fled her world every divination that she cast said that the Shadowlord could not be stopped even if her colleagues put their plan to invoke the Light of Yeramathia into motion. Tony notes that, by her own account, Arra (one of the most powerful wizards) had pretty much already decided to flee to another world rather than trying the spell. Thus, she fulfilled her own prophecies. When convinced to try it on Earth, with a little help from Tony, she succeeds at destroying the Shadowlord.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Cersei Lannister had her fortune told when she was a child, and every attempt she's made to say Screw Destiny seems to bring her closer to fulfilling various conditions.
    • Part of the fortune was that "the valonqar" — the younger sibling, implied to be male — would murder her. She decided that this meant Tyrion and began treating him like complete dirt, thereby giving him several very solid, personal reasons to dream of killing her as he grew up. But, her increasing paranoia (and stress-drinking-and-sleeping around) over what the prophecy could mean has caused massive rifts between her and the "safe" Jaime, who is younger than her by a matter of seconds, and as of A Feast for Crows, he may be able to fulfill the prophecy by refusing to save her from the Swords and Stars. Alternatively, the prophecy says "THE valonqar", not "HER valonqar" — which means the prophecy may actually refer to some other acknowledged set of notable siblings' young/er/est member, and Cersei's bloodthirsty plotting has left many of those with a serious wish to take revenge on her in its winding wake.
    • She also seems to be on her way to fulfilling her own personal interpretation of the part regarding her children — "gold shall be their crowns, and gold shall be their shrouds". She sees it as "they'll be crowned, then they'll die and then you'll be left with your life wrecked and you'll die" — even though there are other interpretations. They're all born blond — aka "golden-haired" (which is a bit odd for Baratheons), hence... they may not necessarily need to actively rule anything (with her as the puppetmaster of their lives) to meet the "golden crown" conditions — but, that's what she aims to do, regardless of the known risk. And, as pure little Lannisters, "golden shrouds" are a given; red and gold are the House colours. It also does not necessarily say that her children will definitely die before her to make everything she wants to go down the drain enough to have her weep buckets (although it's heavily implied by following the mention of shrouds), but she certainly fears that it definitely does. However, the way she raised Joffrey, partly thanks to her worries, helped turn him into a monster, which set him up to be killed by the Tyrells to protect his bride, Margaery Tyrell... which then allows her to marry the more pliable Tommen... who becomes a boy-king at a very, very unstable time liable to generate numerous ways to get him torn from Cersei's smothering grasp, turned against her, maimed and/or killed: all outcomes she'd not want. Meanwhile, Myrcella is "taken" from her and sent to Dorne as part of an arranged betrothal, surrounded by people with a more progressive outlook which, if she adopts it, might distance her enough from her birth family to actively fight Cersei at some point. Although the Dornish also have little cause to love Lannisters, despite Myrcella being an olive branch between kingdoms, so that not only had the chance to lose the prospective Princess her looks through misadventure, but could still blow up in the way Cersei expects... And, all because Cersei refused to undergo another political marriage, mainly so she could remain at King's Landing to keep a paranoid eye and over-firm grip on the "more important" boys.
  • Each Targaryen attempt to outright force the Prince That Was Promised prophecy into happening in their specific generation (as it turns out, most of them premature, at best) has had long-lasting effects. Most being tragic ones, when not being outright stupid and tragic together. Yes, each and every attempt has, ultimately, led to the situation in which dragons were, finally, hatched again. And, arguably, after enough failures... somebody would eventually get it right, if only by accident; so, it was always going to pass in some manner. Whether the price will ultimately prove worth it? We'll have to see.
  • When Tyrion was born, some very snide comments/rumours/wishful satire started circulating about how such a deformed birth boded nothing but ill for the prideful Lannister House. Both Tywin and Cersei certainly had other reasons on top of this to dislike him all his life, but perhaps horrifically abusing him for years was not a sound long term plan if you maybe, might, perhaps have to rely on him to stay loyal?
  • Fire & Blood: According to at least some sources, Aegon II was initially unwilling to overrule his father's decree that Aegon's half-sister Rhaenyra become ruler ahead of him until his mother and Criston Cole said Rhaenyra would kill his children to secure her reign. In the events that followed, after Rhaenyra's own children were killed, two of Aegon's three kids died, in circumstances that wouldn't have happened if he hadn't made the grab for the crown.
• Done with a Prophecy Twist in Peter David's Star Trek: New Frontier novel Martyr. A prophet 500 years in the past predicts the savior of his people will come when certain events happen. When those events do happen, Captain Calhoun is revered as that Savior. The Twist? The actual Savior is the man who thinks he's appointed to kill the Savior, whose traits include a scar (which Calhoun has... and gives the appointee while he's struggling). He does kill the Savior — himself — accidentally. And then it's subverted by the fact that the prophet was cheating by using Advanced Alien Technology to look into the future.
• Star Wars Legends: In Fate of the Jedi, it is revealed that Abeloth used to be a mortal woman. Fearing that her immortal family would abandon her once she became old and decrepit, she drank of the Font of Power and bathed in the Pool of Knowledge. Doing so gave her immortality and incredible powers, but mutated her into her current form. Her family abandoned her in disgust.
• In the Dale Brown novel Starfire, the Russians attacking the space station that the eponymous solar power collector is installed on out of fear that it gets weaponised against them is exactly what leads to it being weaponised in self-defense.
• All prophecies in the Sword of Truth series are self-fulfilling. Richard, the main protagonist, also makes a strong argument for just letting things run there course as part of it. Throughout the series, every prophecy has been twisted because of interpretation, and no one knows what the actual meaning is to properly use. Even then, there are "dead branch" prophecies because some are either-or. Combined, this meant that trying to invoke a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy or prepare for it could actually prevent or impair it.
• In Through a Brazen Mirror: The Famous Flower of Servingmen, the sorceress Margaret is haunted by a vision that her daughter and an unknown man will kill her; since the laws of magic prevent her from killing family without magical backlash, she tries to break the prediction by getting rid of the likeliest candidates for the man. These candidates are her daughter's husband and son. She doesn't realize the son also counts as her family, and his death sets her up for failure for the rest of the book. She is eventually executed for the deaths of her grandson and son-in-law, as well as all the people she kills trying to indirectly kill her daughter afterward.
• About thirty years before the start of the Vorkosigan Saga, Mad Emperor Yuri became convinced that his relatives were planning to kill him and seize the throne for themselves. So he sent teams of assassins to kill all of his successors before they could strike. Those of his relatives who survived the attacks, along with their in-laws (Including the greatest warleader in the empire, General Count Piotr Vorkosigan, who did not take having his wife, daughter and oldest son murdered at the dinner table well) decided that they'd had enough of Yuri's insanity and launched a coup which resulted in his death.
• In The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Grace is convinced that Mori will either convince Thaniel to leave her or use his manipulation of probability to Murder the Hypotenuse. She ends up attacking Mori and creating a bomb from one of his clockwork creations, which injures him, and in doing so causes Thaniel to leave her for Mori.
• In The Weakest Tamer, the village chief of Ratomi, the priest of the local church, and Ivy's own parents believe the existence of a "starless" child will doom their village. So when Ivy's parents take her to the temple and she is revealed to have the [Tamer] skill with no stars, Ivy's parents have a panic attack, and starting the next morning do everything in their power to drive her out of the village, especially Ivy's father who beats the ever loving shit out of her at age 5, shouting at her that the family are the ones troubled, after Ivy finds her place at the kitchen table missing. Over the next three years, the local fortune teller, who can see the future and can see Ivy's circumstances but not the reason for them, is the only villager who treats her kindly. As a result, the village chief denies the fortune teller life-saving medicine when she gets ill, and then conspires with Ivy's father to go into the woods to hunt Ivy down, just to make sure. Ivy overhears it and flees the area entirely. Not long afterward, the village economy collapses because the fortune-teller is dead at the chief's hands, and her ability to properly predict the perfect ripeness of the village's cash crop was the only thing keeping the economy afloat. In a surprise twist, the adventurer's guild, investigating the chief's repeated wanted posters for Ivy, finds out that the chief himself is entirely responsible for the village's fate, as he's both incompetent and corrupt, constantly embezzling the village treasury, but refuses to take responsibility for his actions.
• In The Wheel of Time series Mat learns he would marry the Daughter of the Nine Moons. Much later, she comes across him trying to flee from a city and has to be tied up. When Mat finds out what she is, having already learned the hard way that You Can't Fight Fate, he changes his mind about hiding her in the lofts and kidnaps her instead. And much later, Tuon only completes the marriage ceremony Mat accidentally started because of the marriage prophecy she got.
• In the Back Story of Whit by Iain Banks, Isis's Great-Aunt Zhobelia has a vision that the large bag of banknotes discovered near Isis's grandfather before he set up his cult, and which she's been hiding ever since will bring disaster to the cult. So she decides to burn it. This causes the fire in which Isis's parents were killed.
• The dragonet prophecy in Wings of Fire is actually a lie spread by Morrowseer, but nearly everyone in Pyrrhia knows it and believes in it. So, when a group of dragonets who fit the prophecy show up, they are given significant political power (if only because of their reputation)...which they naturally use to end Pyrrhia's Civil War. Exactly as Morrowseer said they would.
• When the Slaughterhouse Nine come to Brockton Bay in Worm, Dinah Alcott predicts that if their leader Jack Slash escapes, he'll end the world in two years. Jack learns about this prophecy, grabs some resources, and goes to ground for two years while he puts together something that could do the job.
• In Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure, Zeus's original order that the gods withdraw from the mortal world was Zeus's attempt to outwit a prophecy of his murder, which, eventually, wound up making it come true.

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