![]() ![]() There was an aura of strangeness around US writer Edgar Allan Poe – he was “a tortured artist brushed by otherworldly traits” (Credit: Alamy) Poe summoned up in his story the same name of a man who, 50 years later in real life, would be shipwrecked and – exactly as had been described in the book - eaten by his fellow survivors. The book also recounts cannibalism, and this is where it gets truly weird. ![]() The fiction that predicted space travelĪ maritime adventure published in 1838, it’s chockful of seafaring staples like shipwreck, mutiny and corpse-strewn ghost vessels, along with hostile islanders and a genuinely alarming yeti-like menace. Yet for sheer uncanny accuracy, there are few chapters quite so spine-tingling as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe’s only complete novel. Even the Beat poets dabbled in prophetic mystery – here’s Allen Ginsberg’s cry from his poem Magic Psalm: “I am thy Prophet come home this world to scream an unbearable Name thru my 5 senses”. Literary prophecy has a long, fervid history stretching all the way from ancient Greece and biblical Israel, and on into science fiction. But most uncanny is the book he wrote about a ship wreck – and how life imitated art, writes Hephzibah Anderson. ![]() Edgar Allan Poe was a prophetic master of macabre twists and turns. ![]()
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