Harsher in Hindsight/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Viewers might view the Oompa-Loompas in a different light once they lean about the real life child slavery issue the cocoa industry has.
  • In Animorphs, Jake is shown a Bad Future in which the Yeerks have taken over Earth. The only part of the New York skyline left standing? The World Trade Center.
    • In the last book of the series (published in May 2001, set in 2002 or thereabouts) Jake mentions that since the war ended there's been a rise in terrorism, particularly religiously motivated terrorism.
  • The 2002 novel House of the Scorpion takes place in a fictional nation created and controlled by drug lords that is between Mexico and the United States. Seeing that Mexico's local governments (and national) are becoming more and more influenced by the drug cartels, this is becoming more of a reality.
  • Another 9/11 moment: Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor features at its climax a suicidally depressed Japanese Airlines pilot deliberately crashing his jetliner into the U.S. Capitol building during a special joint session of Congress confirming a newly appointed Vice-President, decapitating all three branches of government. One could say this predicted 9/11 to a certain extent, as Clancy went out of his way to illustrate how easy such an attack might be to carry out.
    • Clancy gives us another one in Teeth of the Tiger. Robby Jackson, Jack Ryan's Vice President at the end of The Bear and the Dragon, would be a natural candidate for the first black President, but instead gets unceremoniously killed off in between books so that the Straw Liberal Kealty can come back and mess up the U.S.' foreign relations. Or maybe because the idea of a black President was too controversial. Fast-forward to 2008...and Barack Obama.
      • Robby DID become the first African American pres. partway through his last term Ryan resigned for personal reasons, making Jackson POTUS, a few months later during a trip to his home state of Alabama, he's shot by "a guy that just couldn't stand the thought of a black president."
    • In Debt of Honor, deaths caused by faulty gas tanks in a popular model of Japanese car prompts the US government to enact punitive trade legislation against Japan. In 2010, major recalls of Toyota cars due to safety defects prompted a Congressional investigation.
    • While technically belonging in the video game section, the first Ghost Recon yet even more proves Clancy is either psychic, or a Time Lord. The main plot of the game is set in the then future year of 2008, and deals with a Russian invasion of Georgia...
  • The ending of Stephen King's The Running Man is another 9/11 example.
    • And then there's Insomnia, where a pro-life extremist (driven mad by the Crimson King) attempts to pilot a Cessna loaded with C4 into the Derry Civic Center while a women's rights advocate is giving a speech.
    • King himself had Rage taken out of print following a 1997 school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky.
  • As the storm clouds gathered over Europe and the Far East, Pulp Magazine hero Secret Service Operator #5 (1934 - 1939) fought attempts by various foreign armies from South America, Europe and the Orient to conquer the United States. The events are completely over-the-top as benefits the pulp genre, except for the time the Japs destroy an entire city (Philadelphia) with their atomic bomb! Only those evil Orientals would do such a dastardly deed...
  • In Spider Robinson's Lady Slings The Booze a throwaway comment is made in connection with a terrorist plot to the effect that they "aren't going to blow up the WTC because that only impresses the people that live within sight of the WTC".
    • You'd think Robinson of all people would have realized that with modern communications technology, the entire world lives "within sight of the WTC".
  • Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake has a passage describing several kinds of futuristic snuff sites. One of them is an assisted-suicide site, founded for entertainment. It's sickening as it is, but then the main character Jimmy goes and compares the site to Alex the parrot saying "I'm going away now." A few years after the book was published, Alex died.
  • Tad Williams' Doorstopper novel The War of the Flowers has a scene in which a skyscraper was set on fire and is in danger of collapse after an attack by a flying, fire-breathing dragon, and the main character, who are trapped on a high floor of said skyscraper, has to climb down flight after flight of stairs in the midst of smoke and flames. The book contains an introduction saying that he wrote the scene before 9/11, and the similarity between the events in the book and the experiences of the 9/11 survivors is simply an unfortunate coincidence.
  • Good luck getting into Logan's Run (a novel about a dystopian society that kills off everyone that reaches 30) after the recent surge (both were 50) of deaths.
  • In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian blackmails a character Alan Campbell into helping him dispose of a body. While not stated outright, the strong implication is that Campbell was Dorian's ex-lover and Dorian was threatening to expose him as homosexual, thereby ruining his professional life and potentially exposing him to the threat of imprisonment. Later, of course, Wilde himself was ruined by exposure of his homosexuality.
  • The Spider novel City Destroyers featured a structure called the Sky Building collapsing. In the 1970's, a redacted version of this novel changed it to the World Trade Center.
  • The Nick Fury novel Empyre featured a Saddam Hussein counterpart masterminding a plot to attack cities by crashing airplanes. Interesting, since at one point, 70% of Americans thought that Hussein had masterminded the 9/11 attacks, when he had nothing to do with it.
  • Van Wyck Mason wrote a novel positing an attack on Pearl Harbor, written in the early 1930's. Actually, numerous works depicted this, such as the first Shield/Wizard meeting.
  • There's a long, long history of this. A novella called Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan was written wherein a drunken old captain has to fight for his life after the ship he pilots -- described as "the largest ship in the world" -- is sunk by an iceberg. The novel was written fourteen years before the Titanic went down. It was initially rejected for publication due to being "unbelievable."
  • In the Clive Cussler book Valhalla Rising, the Corrupt Corporate Executive bad guy plans to have his goons blow up an oil tanker in San Francisco Harbor, thereby destroying the SF "World Trade Towers", making America revolt against imported energy, and increasing the value of his own domestic oil holdings. Wincing yet?
    • It gets better; one of his lieutenants leaks the plan, and the ship is boarded by special forces troops, who find it a perfectly normal oil tanker. The hero of the book realizes that the baddie had planned to say "World Trade Center" as a decoy, and had not gotten SF's WTC and the one in New York confused. Yes, that's right, the bad guy planned to blow up the base of the Twin Towers and a good portion of Manhattan. Thanks to the Freudian slip, the real ship being delayed, and the hero's submersible, disaster is averted. But barely.
  • David Weber pulled one on himself, as he says in the Author's Note in Flag in Exile. He first wrote the manuscript in 1994, and mentions the Oklahoma City bombings that took place between his writing and the publishing in 1995 had this effect on him [dead link]. (Link contains some spoilers)
  • Although the work wasn't published until the 2000s so no-one could have read it, but JRR Tolkien's story The Notion Club Papers, written in 1944, is set in 1987. The characters mention that six months ago in 1986 there was 1) a disaster involving a spacecraft, 2) a nuclear disaster, and 3) during the course of the book the greatest storm in history hits England. All three proceeded to happen in Real Life.
  • The Zack Files book Never Trust A Cat Who Wears Earrings features a curse that is turning Zack into a cat that he can only break by performing a ceremony in the shadow of the World Trade Center. Reading it now, the Fridge Logic seems to be that he would keep turning into a cat...which is Nightmare Fuel.
  • The 1996 book Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre has a doctor character who is described as the worst serial killer in British history, with a kill count of about 30. And then, just two years later...
  • The fact it's just so damn easy to put 1984 into this territory these days might be the reason why Orwell's Magnum Opus wasn't mentioned in this article until now.
    • This claim tends to be made of almost all works of dystopic fiction, but it's invoked so often that it's lost a lot of its meaning, and has even begun to rob the original works of their relevance. Basically, it would be safe to assume that for every work of fiction set Twenty Minutes Into the Future, there's someone who feels this trope applies.
      • Still, the work itself applies. Try to reread it after you finished it once. It's never the same again. ESPECIALLY if you managed to avoid knowing storyline beforehand.
    • Specifically the article linked above, which shows the prevalence of CCTV monitoring in the UK - including a half dozen cameras with direct views either to Orwell's apartment. That definitely counts.
  • Double whammy for Sylvia Plath. "How did I know that someday--at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere--the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" In the month following the publication of The Bell Jar, she killed herself. For the same reason, Lady Lazarus, a poem about her previous suicide attempt and foreshadowing her next attempt, is just heartbreaking when she writes: This is Number Three./What a trash/To annihilate each decade.
  • In Dame Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, the German Lady's-Maid comments on the kidnapping and murder of a child, then adds: "We are not so wicked as that in Germany." The novel was written in 1933.
  • There is a detective novel written and set around 1936, where a cab driver goes on and on about the success of German industry, and the failure of British industry, and ends his rant with "What this country needs is a Hitler!"
    • Don't forget that a lot of people - including King Edward VIII - thought like that before the full extent of Nazism was known. OK, so most people even in 1936 thought that Hitler was a rather unpleasant thug but London cabbies at least are generally stereotyped as being very right wing, and would have been exactly the people you'd expect to hear saying that.
    • The novel you're thinking of is probably Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers. The (very minor) character who say it isn't a cab driver, but that line is exactly what he says. There are a couple of other examples from Sayers' work in which a positive view of fascism is expressed by working-class Britons.
      • Truth in Television: Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists was composed mainly of working-class men and women from the East End.
  • In Kim, the title character is when you think of it, a typical starving, drug-addled slum-child, of the type that inhabits most cities, and would normally end up dead in an ally except for the good fortune that an espionage agency considered him talented enough at surviving to give him a good education so that he might be exploited more effectively.
  • The Robin Cook thriller Vector features an antagonist (formerly an employee of a Russian government-run bioweapons project) who manufactures anthrax in preparation for a biological attack and kills someone with an anthrax-laced letter as a test to see how potent his toxin is. The book was published in 1999. Then two years later, it happened for real...
  • The Robert R. McCammon novel Swan Song has a chapter where a militant cult is laid siege to. The siege ends when their building burns down with them in it. A few years later, this happens to the Branch Davidians.
  • State of Fear is a 2004 technothriller by Michael Crichton, about a global conspiracy of Animal Wrongs Groups who falsify data to support Hollywood Global Warming. Fast-forward to November 17 2009 - Playful Hackers release evidence of a conspiracy by the Climatic Research Unit to falsify data to support Hollywood Global Warming. Welcome to ClimateGate!
  • Aaron Allston's Sidhe-Devil came out in June 2001. The back-cover blurb (accurately) describes part of the situation the heroes have to deal with as "a mad genius is sending fiery destruction against the city's skyscrapers."
  • Reading older Discworld books is very much this trope regarding the Bursar and PTerry's recent diagnosis.
    • YMMV on this one. Alzheimer's is a terrible condition with an inevitable end, whereas it is very strongly suggested that the Bursar's particular brand of reality is self-imposed, so he doesn't have to deal with Ridcully.
    • Far more depressing is in one of the later books, Wintersmith when Roland reflects on his time in the world of the fairies and all it's horrors. He makes the following statement, which just kicks you right in the teeth now: Roland hates things that make you forget who you are. Once you forget who you are, you lose everything.
  • Erik's deceptive communication with Christine in The Phantom of the Opera must have been creepy enough in 1910, but its resemblance to the m.o. of modern Internet predators makes it even creepier a century later.
  • The Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" features a villain who's locked his daughter up as a tormented prisoner, and whose young son tortures helpless animals. At the time, the son's behavior was seen as a hereditary clue to the father's cruel nature, and the villain's motives were financial only; nowadays, readers are more likely to deduce the man was molesting (or beating up) both his kids.
    • And the first line he says to Watson ("I see You are from Afganistan") is somehow made more cringeworthy by the fact that now, over 100 years later, this still makes sense.
  • In the movie version of Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan, Gloria finds out her ex-husband is gay after trying to seduce him. Years later, Terry McMillan and her husband split up after he reveals that he was gay and marrying her to get a green card.
  • In the final chapter of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel about a soldier's experience during World War I, the protagonist, Paul Bäumer, reflects on how miserable the rest of his life is going to be if he does manage to survive the war. One of the reasons he gives is that the next generation, having not known war, will not be able to understand what he endured.
  • The German story Mario and the Magician written in 1929 and set in 1926, describes the changes happening to fascist Italia, as seen by eyes of a liberal family from then democratic Germany, and repeatedly shows how the change makes Italian people intolerant, arrogant and aggressive. When Nazis came to power, they made the same to Germany, only much, much more worse.
    • Also in the end, Cippola is shot dead by Mario, whom he previously braiswashed into doing icky things. Mussolini (for whom Cippola was an obvious stand-in) was in the end shot by people of his own nation.
  • In the fantastic history book A Little History of the World it talks about how humanity has come a long way from mindless persecution and hatred of other cultures and at the end of the original print, which was about WWI, it had a message of hope for the future. This was in 1935; the German-born Jewish author added another chapter after WWII really lamenting some of the things he said in the book.
  • In Isaac Asimov's short story "Evidence", Stephen Byerley is a candidate for mayor of NYC who is accused of being a robot, which would disqualify him from the election. The premise seems kind of silly and it's hard to believe that so many people would believe that Byerley is a robot based on such flimsy evidence. Fast forward to 2008, when people are arguing that President Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, and it seems much more plausible.
    • It´s a little more harsher than that: Quinn, the political boss who propagates the rumor, is a conservative Sleazy Politician who admittedly couldn’t care less for the civil rights of his people, and so his subordinates. Byerley is a liberal public prosecutor who really is doing things to stop crime and redeem criminals. Quinn only opposes Byerley liberal position because, well, he is a conservative. To be a robot is a rumor so incredible that when it proves false, only shows the extremely superficiality and stupidity of those who oppose Byerley.
    • Humorously, there, in fact, Aint No Rule that says that a robot can't be mayor of New York.[1] The only legal leg to stand on would be arguing for or against citizenship of a robot. This is also the case for the US President, who has but three requirements, none of which refer to species.[2]
  • The Great Gatsby has the Jewish mobster Meyer Wolfsheim who works in an office labeled "The Swastika Holding Company." The book was written in the 20s. Oh Crap.
    • This troper and his English teacher had an interesting discussion about that exact passage, needless to say he mentioned at the time the different meaning behind the swastika.
  • In the first book from the series A Song of Ice and Fire, Tyrion and Jaime Lannister discuss the fate of Bran Stark, who'd fallen from a tower and would be crippled for life even if he survived. Jaime, who'd been the one to throw him from the tower, commented that if it had been his decision, he'd euthanize the boy rather than having him grow up a cripple. Tyrion disagreed, since he himself was a dwarf, and stated that death was too final and that life held endless possibilities even for "cripples and grotesques." Three books later, Jaime himself became a cripple when his sword hand is cut off and he contemplates letting himself die, before being convinced to live in order to see his family again and avenge himself.
  • In Bridge to Terabithia, there is a scene where Leslie (child from non-religious family) discusses faith with Jess and Maybelle (children from religious family), and the latter says to Leslie: "If you don't believe in Jesus, you go to Hell when you die". Then later Leslie dies in a freak accident and Jess fears she is in Hell - and all because he wasn't there to save her. This is just one big Tear Jerker
    • And, while chronologically this is NOT "in hindsight", Leslie's death became even more tragic for this troper when he read the afterword and learned that the book is based on the experience of the author's son (and surely many readers felt similar when reading the afterword).
  • Averted in Dr. Strangelove: They quickly dubbed over all mentions of "Texas" because of the Kennedy assassination.
    • Not just Texas. Dallas.
    • And of course, most people nowadays who've seen the movie know the line was dubbed, so YMMV on whether this is averted.
  • The Cthulhu Mythos gives us Yog-Sothoth, a tentacled monstrosity who impregnates a human woman. Squicky, yes. But it gets even worse when you consider hentai.
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: Since the beginning of his career as a writer, Verne has being accused by critics of being ‘’”only”’’ a HardScifi writer that paid little heed to the social ramifications of technology. But with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Verne wrote in 1869 about Captain Nemo, a man from an oppressed country who had training in the west, and has money enough to pay a country’s national debt, who decides to create an organization strong enough to fight an entire Western country through terrible acts of violence, and therefore is chased as a menace by all established countries in the West. After Osama Bin Laden, 9/11 and The War on Terror, we must admit that Verne really knew much more than anyone ever suspected about how the world will turn in the next 130 years!
  • In the technothriller series Talon Force book Dire Straits published a few months before 9-11 the plot revolves around Islamist terrorists trying to take over Turkey. Osama Bin Laden is mentioned to be a major backer of the terrorists and one character laments that he's been tried in absentia.
  • When The Tomorrow Series was first published, an attack on any Western state that could actually threaten it seemed inconceivable. Then came 9/11.
    • Another point is that it depicts Australian people fighting the occupiers - but shortly thereafter, Australia itself participated in the Iraq occupation.
  • Anthony Horowitz wrote a short story called The Man With the Yellow Face, where a boy is frightened of a mysterious man he believes is coming to kill him, and worries that the man might be "one of those suicide bombers you read about in the Middle East." The story was published in 1998 ...
  • Some of the early Star Trek: The Next Generation novels become Harsher in Hindsight with regards to Tasha Yar. The novel "Survivors" contains an epilogue that takes place during "Skin Of Evil", but this dialogue from "The Children of Hamlin"[3], which is chronologically right before that episode according to Memory Beta contains rather creepy Irony:

Dr. Crusher: Tasha, stay out of trouble. I don't want to see you in sickbay again for a long time.
Yar: Don't worry, I'm not coming back.

    • It's true, too. She didn't. Not alive, anyway.
  • In-Universe in the Dale Brown novel Shadows of Steel: Hal Briggs is chastened for taking a risk that gets him hurt by a ZSU-23 antiaircraft gun. Guess how he dies, several books later?
  • In Young Jedi Knights, one of the earlier Star Wars book series, Jacen and Jaina are tricked by Sith into fighting each other to the death (each is forced to believe that the other is actually an unknown Sith), but recognise each other just in time. Much later, in Legacy of the Force series, they fight again - this time Jaina kills Jacen, who was now really a Sith, but considered surrendering and repenting.
  • The theocratic dystopia pictured in The Handmaid's Tale has many parallels with the Taliban, who seized power in Afghanistan barely a decade later.
  • Stephen Baxter's Titan (written in 1997) opens with the Shuttle Columbia suffering an accident on re-entry, which causes the death of an astronaut and the loss of the orbiter. Cue 2003.
  • In another 9/11-related entry, it gets a bit harder to root for the hero of The Running Man when he rams a hijacked passenger airplane in a suicide attack on the television network's high-rise headquarters.
  • The Hunger Games novels were about 24 juveniles being selected for a battle to the death. The trilogy was written in 2008 and concluded in the 2010. Fast forward to 2012, when a gunman killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary school, all but 6 of the fatalities were children. To top it off, the author of the series, Suzanne Collins and her family, resides in… Sandy Hook, CT.
  1. ↑ " He or she needs to be 18 years old and a resident of NYC on Election Day."
  2. ↑ be a natural born citizen of the United States; be at least thirty-five years old; have been a permanent resident in the United States for at least fourteen years.
  3. ↑ Published 1988, probably written 1987
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