prophecy
People who saw what was coming and were ignored until it arrived.
I Have Not The Time
In prison, drunk for the first time, he told his cellmates he would die in a duel over a woman. Nine months later, a woman wrote him a letter.
The Birthday Cake
A deaf arithmetic teacher in a Kaluga log cabin derived the rocket equation between marking schoolboys' sums, and kept a trapdoor in his ceiling his family called the door to outer space.
The King of Time
A Russian poet did the math on every empire that ever fell, got an answer, and predicted the Russian Revolution five years early in a pamphlet nobody read.