Disturbing ...

[unixronin]

We built five Shuttles.  We've so far lost two of them: Challenger on January 28, 1986, during launch, and Columbia seventeen years later to the day, on February 1, 2003, during re-entry.

I just started reading Titan, by Stephen Baxter (not the one by John Varley).  It was first published in hardcover in November 1997.  The third event of consequence that happens in the book (the first is the arrival of the Huygens probe on Titan) is the loss of Columbia, during re-entry, apparently sometime in 2004.

Coincidence, of course.  But still somehow chilling, and I found myself unable to stop reading at that point.

Would Baxter still have written this if he'd had foreknowledge?  It's probably impossible to say.

Comments

[juuro.livejournal.com]

And would a different publisher have required an amended edition post-accident.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's a good question too, given the frenzied rush post-9/11 to retroactively erase the World Trade Center from everything.... (an action which I have always considered bizarre and cowardly).