Robertson was still alive in 1912, and he was asked to comment on the similarities between his story and the Titanic's sinking. He denied having any prophetic or clairvoyant abilities and said many of the most striking details were the product of his own detailed understanding of the shipping industry - his father was a captain on the Great Lakes, and he himself had been a mariner for 11 years (1877-86) before swallowing the anchor and turning to a writing career.

It's also important to see the Robertson affair in its broader context. The Titanic went down at a time when spiritualism was highly popular and interest – and active research – in psychical research was also at a height. There was actually a significant spate of accounts of supposed "psychic forewarnings" of the tragedy, of which Robertson's happens to be the only one remembered today, as Behe's solo book on the subject makes quite clear. People were on the lookout for such accounts and believers in psychical phenomena actively expected them to occur.

Three other points are worth noting.

First, Robertson's story was originally titled, simply, "Futility". It was reissued under its more familiar title after the Titanic disaster by a publisher hoping to capitalise on the similarities between the two tales.

Second, the list of "coincidences", or "prophecies" that appear in Robertson's work is cherry-picked. The original story contains plenty of things that never featured in the Titanic's history, such as fights with polar bears.

Third, there is a second example of Robertson's foresight that gets a lot less attention for some reason. In 1914 he published another story, "The Spectrum," which is an account of a surprise Japanese naval attack on an American fleet at anchor in Hawaii, and how that attack leads to a Pacific war between the US and Japan.

Sources

Debra Groom, "The strange tale of an Oswego man who wrote a book predicting a Titanic-like disaster ... 14 years before it happened," Syracuse Post-Standard, 11 December 2011

Michael Goss and George Behe, "RMS Titanic: the unsinkable," in Lost at Sea: Ghost Ships and Other Mysteries, Prometheus 1994.

George Behe, Titanic: Psychic Forewarnings of a Tragedy, Patrick Stephens, 1987