Case story: fourteen years before the Titanic sank, an English writer imagined in a novel called Futility an 800-foot, triple-screw liner labelled unsinkable, with too few lifeboats, filled her with the rich and complacent and sank her on an iceberg in the Atlantic on a cold night. The White Star Line then built just such a ship, filled her with the wealth of Europe and America, and she went down on an iceberg on a cold April night. Neville's proof that there is no fiction.