Eclipse Tricks: You have angered the gods! Of science! We shall therefore exterminate you! Extinction event! Extinction event! Extinction event! #47

"Christopher Columbus, in an effort to induce the natives of Jamaica to continue provisioning him and his hungry men, successfully intimidated the natives by correctly predicting a total lunar eclipse for 1 March 1504." "In an interesting postscript to this story, in 1889, Mark Twain, likely influenced by The Eclipse Trick, wrote the novel, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." In it, his main character, Hank Morgan, used a gambit similar to Columbus. Morgan is about to be burned at the stake, so he "predicts" a solar eclipse he knows will occur, and in the process, claimed power over the sun. He gladly offers to return the sun to the sky in return for his freedom and a position as "perpetual minister and executive" to the king. The only problem with this story is that on the date that Mark Twain quoted — June 21, 528 — no such eclipse took place. In fact, the moon was three days past full." Via Space.com "H. Rider Haggard used an altered version of the real story of the rescue of Columbus in his novel King Solomon's Mines (first published 1885), where hero Allan Quatermain and his companions recruit supporters for their cause from the local tribe by predicting a lunar eclipse. (In early editions, this was a solar eclipse; Haggard changed it after realising that his description of a solar eclipse was not realistic)" "In Mark Twain's 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the protagonist, Hank Morgan, a time-travelling 19th-century resident of Hartford, Connecticut, escapes being burned at the stake by predicting a solar eclipse in early medieval England during the time of the legendary King Arthur. Bolesław Prus' historical novel, Pharaoh, written in 1894–95, also uses this trope." "A similar plot also features in The Adventures of Tintin comic, Prisoners of the Sun, first published between 1946 and 1948." "The Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso used a similar plot in his short novel El eclipse, published in 1959 in Obras completas (y otros cuentos), but with an opposite ending, sarcastic and anticolonialist."