When Robertson wrote Futility, there were no ships anywhere near the size of Titanic in use, or being built. However the writing concept he used was always futuristic. Of course ships in the future would be bigger and faster. The plot needed drama around a event uncontrolale by man. Fire "could" be controled and was not so uncommon however striking a iceberg was out of the unusual and damage would be beyond repair at sea and able to suspend readers in a drawn out inevitable drawn out result. The ship dimensions were surprising close but even a broken clock is right twice a day. But what is really scary is that Robertson later wrote a book called "Beyond the Spectrum". In this book, he described a futuristic war fought with aircraft that carried what he called "sun bombs". These bombs were so powerful that with one brilliant flash of blinding light, one single bomb could destroy an entire city (much like a nuclear bomb ). When this book was written, airplanes were still tiny, dangerous machines that could barely carry one man, and crashed frequently, and this was decades before the Germans started their "heavy water" experiments, trying to construct a nuclear device.

Robertson's future war begins in the month of December (much like the actual WW II, which began in December) when the Japanese stage a sneak attack on Hawaii. (WW II was started when the Japanese launched a sneak attack on an American base -Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii.)