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Naturally, a great many movies and TV specials have been made regarding the disaster, not least of which is the popular 1997 film, but I'm avoiding these for the scope of the article, in that while they deal with the events, they're literally /just/ dealing with the events. For my purposes here, I'll be looking more at references to the Titanic, rather than actual historical films.

Depending on where you stand on such things, the disaster regarding the sinking of the RMS Titanic could be one of the few examples of an event which had influences on popular culture long before it actually happened; to wit, the novel 'Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan' by Morgan Robertson. Published in 1898, it deals with the sinking of a ship remarkably similar not just in name but in specifications and other many odd coincidences, and all this 14 years before the Titanic ever actually set sail. Whether you fall in the 'Prophecy' or 'Odd coincidence' camps, the parallels are remarkable.

Non-linear examples aside, the Titanic has become a reoccurring archetype in popular media and literature; not simply as an event, but perhaps as a metaphor for the hubris of mankind. Even on a more visceral level, phrases like 'Re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic' (signifying the futility of attempting to make minor changes during the course of a major disaster), or 'Winning tickets for the Titanic' (an event which sounds like great luck, but has unforeseen consequences'.

The Titanic and its maiden voyage seems to be something of a magnet for fictional time travellers, as would be expected of any such major disaster. The US TV series 'The Time Tunnel' visited the ship in one episode, the characters in the Terry Gilliam movie 'Time Bandits' were present during its sinking, and the archetypal time traveller from BBC TV's 'Doctor Who', The Doctor, has been seen in photographic evidence as being present shortly before the launch of the ship, and claims to be have been left clinging to an iceberg shortly afterwards. He also maintains it wasn't his fault. An episode years later actually has his own ship rammed by the Titanic, though it turns out this was merely a starship built as a replica by aliens.

Speaking of aliens ships using the name Titanic and allusions to the original, it would be worth mentioning Douglas Adams at this point; in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he makes mention of its namesake, an interstellar luxury liner carefully designed so that it would be 'infinitely improbable' that it could ever be destroyed. He goes on to point out that anything infinitely unlikely to happen will most likely happen straight away, and the ship disappeared from its berthing bay in a puff of logic seconds after its launch.

What was ostensibly a throwaway one-liner in one of his novels actually became the focal point of an ambitious CD-ROM based game by Adams years later, 'Starship Titanic' (1998), a MYST-style adventure with an advanced lingual processor that featured the player exploring and attempting to save the doomed ship. In an even more deeply nested recursion, Monty Python member Terry Jones ended up writing the novel based on this game that was based on a novel.

One final reference just to get away from turning this into an entirely scifi-based article; Intel's 'Itanium' processor chip has become commonly known as the 'iTanic' in the industry, as to date its sales have fallen spectacularly short of expectations.

Learn more about this author, Dave Simmons.
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