Maybe.
Maybe they read the book and got an idea.................
There have been lots of strange cases where fictional books have come close to ‘predicting’ things that later happened. I guess the most famous is ‘The Wreck of the Titan’:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Titan:_Or,_Futility
A lot of the ideas written about by science fiction writers eventually come true. The same is true of science fiction TV shows and movies. This one is pretty interesting.