Impact events in fiction

Impact events have been a recurring theme in fiction since the 1800s.

Artist's depiction of an apocalyptic impact event

History

Impact events have been a recurring theme in fiction since the 1800s.^[1] The earliest such stories tended to depict impacts by comets,^[a] though other objects such as asteroids and meteoroids became more common in the 1900s.^[2] Impact events from more massive celestial objects also appear on occasion.^[1] The theme increased in popularity from the 1950s onward, possibly as a result of nuclear anxiety following World War II,^[4] and received additional boosts in popularity in 1980 with the publication of the Alvarez hypothesis, which states that the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was caused by an asteroid impact that created the Chicxulub crater off the coast of Mexico,^[5][6][1] and in 1994 with the collision of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter.^{[6][7]: 79–82}

Disaster

Impact events are a common disaster scenario in fiction.^[8][9]

Tunguska event

Further information: Tunguska event in fiction

Trees felled by the 1908 Tunguska event

The 1908 Tunguska event—an enormous explosion in a remote region of Siberia—has appeared in many works of fiction. It is generally held to have been caused by a meteor air burst, though several alternative explanations have been proposed both in scientific circles and in fiction.^[1][10][11] A popular one in fiction is that it was caused by an alien spaceship, possibly first put forth in Ed Earl Repp's 1930 short story "The Second Missile".^[10][12] It gained prominence following the publication of Russian science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev's 1946 short story "Explosion";^[10][11][13] inspired by the similarities between the event and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Kazantsev's story posits that a nuclear explosion in the engine of a spacecraft was responsible.^[11][14][15] An alien spacecraft is also the explanation in Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem's 1951 novel The Astronauts and its 1960 film adaptation The Silent Star,^[11][13][16] while a human-made one is to blame in Ian Watson's 1983 novel Chekhov's Journey.^[1][10][11] Additional variations on the spaceship theme appear in Donald R. Bensen's 1978 novel And Having Writ... and Algis Budrys's 1993 novel Hard Landing, among others.^[10] Another proposed explanation is that the cause was the impact of a micro black hole, as in Larry Niven's 1975 short story "The Borderland of Sol".^[11] Some stories nevertheless accept the conventional meteorite explanation, such as the 1996 The X-Files episode "Tunguska" that instead revolves around the impact possibly having introduced alien microbial life to Earth.^[11]

See also

• Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction
• Asteroids in fiction
• Comets in fiction
• Disasters in popular culture

Notes

1. Comets have a long history of being associated with disaster, stretching back to at least the year 1200,^[2] but the conception of comets as a purely natural—as opposed to supernatural—source of destruction did not emerge until the second half of the 1700s with the work of French astronomer Jérôme Lalande.^{[3]: 113–114}