In the ever-shifting landscape of human knowledge, both truth and fiction possess curious lifespans, evolving and transforming through time’s passage. What begins as accepted truth can fade into mythology, while yesterday’s fanciful fiction might become tomorrow’s lived reality. This dance between fact and fantasy reveals not fixed categories but a continuous spectrum where truths and falsehoods exchange places with remarkable fluidity.
Consider how historical ‘facts’ once held as absolute truths now provoke disbelief. For centuries, medical texts documented with absolute certainty that women’s wombs could detach and wander through the body, causing ‘female hysteria’—a ‘truth’ defended by the greatest physicians across cultures. The miasma theory of disease transmission, attributing illness to ‘bad air’ rather than microorganisms, guided public health policies for centuries before being thoroughly discredited. These weren’t merely opinions but firmly established ‘truths’ that eventually crumbled beneath the weight of new discoveries. And often, the truth lies inside the lie itself, and vice versa.
Literature offers compelling examples of fiction that transcended its imaginary boundaries to become prophetic through sheer coincidence rather than deliberate speculation. As you’ve mentioned, my novel ‘Bayan’ portrayed political scenarios in Ukraine that later materialised with unsettling accuracy. The book, written in 2014, depicted circumstances that preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Donbas conflict—fictional narratives that subsequently played out on the world stage without any speculative intent from the author. This transformation from fabrication to historical record demonstrates the peculiar lifecycle where fiction outlives its fictional nature through pure accident.
Morgan Robertson’s novella ‘Futility’ (later renamed ‘The Wreck of the Titan’) provides perhaps the most striking example of accidental prophecy. Published in 1898, it described the sinking of a supposedly unsinkable ocean liner called the Titan after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Fourteen years later, the Titanic sank in shockingly similar circumstances. Robertson’s fictional vessel bore remarkable similarities to the actual Titanic in size, speed, and passenger capacity—despite being written years before the Titanic was even designed. The fictional ship even lacked sufficient lifeboats, just as the real Titanic would. This wasn’t speculative fiction attempting to predict the future; it was pure coincidence that transformed fiction into a disturbing premonition.
Edgar Allan Poe’s only complete novel, ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket’ (1838), includes a scene where shipwreck survivors, stranded on a lifeboat, resort to cannibalism and eat a cabin boy named Richard Parker. Forty-six years later, a real shipwreck occurred involving survivors who, after drawing lots, killed and ate a cabin boy—whose name was Richard Parker. This macabre convergence of fiction and reality occurred without any possible causal connection, demonstrating how fictional narratives can eerily materialise in reality through pure coincidence. Later Yann Martel’s Booker winning novel, not a total coincidence, uses the name Richard Parker to The Royal Bengali, the tiger, one of the two main characters in the novel. Therefore, the relationship works bidirectionally.
Historical accounts once treated as unquestionable fact gradually transition into recognised fiction or myth. The extensive writings about the court of King Arthur were long treated as historical chronicles before being understood as largely fictional. Marco Polo’s detailed accounts of his travels, once considered reliable geographical documentation, now contain elements historians recognise as embellished or fabricated. Ibn Battuta’s travel writings, while valuable historical documents, include geographical impossibilities and timeline contradictions that reveal the presence of fictional elements presented as factual observation.
Ancient medical texts offer compelling examples of ‘non-fiction’ that gradually became obsolete. Galen’s anatomical writings, considered medical gospel for over a millennium, contained fundamental errors resulting from his reliance on animal rather than human dissection. His incorrect descriptions of human liver shape and uterine structure were taught as absolute medical fact until Andreas Vesalius demonstrated their falsehood in the 16th century. What began as authoritative medical documentation slowly transformed into medical mythology.
Historical chronicles frequently underwent similar transformations. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘Historia Regum Britanniae’ (History of the Kings of Britain) was long considered authentic British history before gradually being recognised as a creative blend of myths, legends and fabrications. Its accounts of King Lear and Cymbeline provided Shakespeare with material but represented fiction masquerading as historical record. The boundary between documented history and imaginative storytelling often becomes apparent only across centuries.
Even carefully documented ethnographies and travel accounts frequently contain elements that transition from accepted fact to recognised fiction. John Mandeville’s 14th-century travel accounts were considered factual geographic references for centuries before being recognised as largely imaginary. Similarly, numerous anthropological accounts from the colonial era described cultural practices that were either fundamentally misunderstood or occasionally invented outright by observers who believed they were producing objective documentation.
This transience suggests that both truth and fiction serve as temporal vessels rather than eternal categories. They function as containers holding human understanding at particular moments, subject to reexamination and redefinition as our perspective shifts. All knowledge exists in historical context, making its categorisation as ‘fact’ or ‘fiction’ contingent rather than absolute.
Perhaps most fascinating is the moment of transition—when fiction crosses into fact by sheer coincidence or truth dissolves into mythology through evolving understanding. These threshold events often mark significant shifts in human knowledge. When archaeological discoveries revealed that Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of Troy had discovered a real city behind what many had dismissed as Homeric fiction, it transformed our understanding of the relationship between myth and history. Similarly, when medical texts documenting the efficacy of bloodletting transitioned from accepted medical fact to recognised pseudoscience, it marked a fundamental shift in medical epistemology.
The labels themselves—‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’—reveal our problematic tendency toward binary categorisation. Reality operates in gradients rather than absolutes. Historical accounts invariably contain interpretive elements that introduce subjectivity into supposedly objective records. Even meticulously documented journalism includes framing choices that shape meaning beyond raw facts. Meanwhile, fiction frequently incorporates genuine historical events and sociological insights that provide genuine illumination of reality.
This transience needn’t inspire the nihilistic dismissal of all knowledge claims. Rather, it invites intellectual humility—recognising that today’s certainties may become tomorrow’s quaint misconceptions. The most robust approach involves holding multiple possibilities simultaneously, maintaining receptivity to evidence that might transform our understanding. This perspective allows us to engage meaningfully with both factual accounts and fictional narratives, recognising their potential to exchange places through the strange alchemy of time and circumstance.
Pramudith D Rupasinghe
About the Author
Pramudith D Rupasinghe is a Sri Lankan writer and humanitarian. His literary works predominantly unfold in settings beyond his native Sri Lanka, for which he earned the name ‘Writer Without Borders. His work of fiction, ‘Bayan,’ set in pre-conflict Ukraine, won the Golden Aster Prize for Global Literature in 2020 and was longlisted for the 2023 Paris Book Festival. Rupasinghe’s works have been translated into several languages, including Sinhalese, Burmese, German, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian and French. He has also dedicated two decades to humanitarian work, drawing inspiration for his writing from his missions to Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. He is known for his thought-provoking narratives that delve into the human psyche, cultural identities, and global experiences.
