Neville tells his audience that fourteen years before the Titanic sank, a writer he describes as English (Morgan Robertson, though in fact American, is not named) published a novel called 'Futility' about a fictional 800-foot, triple-screw, 24-knot 'unsinkable' liner carrying a passenger list worth a fortune -- nearly identical to the real Titanic in size, speed, and clientele, and which meets the same fate. He offers the novel's imaginative conception of the ship as itself the seedtime of which the real disaster was the harvest.