From time to time, Clarke's characters refer to a motion picture or a novel about the Titanic. But even more overt help comes to the reader in Clarke's closing sections of the book. Following the last chapter of fiction, Clarke gives several pages of bibliography and comment in an easy conversational style. He confesses to using the premise of a space ship Titanic in a story "Icebergs of Space," a work he destroyed rather than publish. He has dedicated The Ghostfrom the Grand Banks to moviemaker Bill MacQuitty who made the 1958 film about the Titanic's voyage, A Night toRemember, and he credits Walter Lord's books A Night to Remember (1976) and Night Lives On (1986), as well as Robert Ballard's The Discovery of the Titanic (1987), and Charles Pelligrino's Her Name, Titanic (1990) as most valuable to his rendering of the situation and salvaging of the sunken vessel.

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