Tunguska event in fiction

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The Tunguska event was an explosion that occurred on June 30, 1908 in the Siberian region of Russia. The cause of the event was believed to be and probably was caused by a meteorite airburst. This article is about the Tunguska event in fiction.

Contents 1 Literature 2 Cartoon/Comics 3 Games 4 Movies 5 TV shows 6 Songs

[edit] Literature

• A Real Bang-Up Job, a story by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre published in 2000, manages to explain both the Tunguska event and the Roswell UFO incident by linking them, as follows: When time travel becomes commonplace, a steady supply of time-tourists will journey yesterwards to 1947 in order to witness the Roswell event for themselves. A time-traveling criminal named Smedley Faversham is wrecking the time machines of tourists who materialize in Roswell 1947, and diverting their physical bodies to space-time coordinates in midair directly above Tunguska in 1908. Because all the abducted time travelers materialize at the same physical point in space-time, this created the massive explosion of the Tunguska event. Wreckage from the various time machines, left behind in Roswell 1947, has been misinterpreted as UFO debris. A Real Bang-Up Job is clearly offered as a joke solution to both the Roswell and Tunguska mysteries, not an ostensibly true explanation of either.

• Thomas Pynchon's book Against the Day, puts forth a complex explanation for the Tunguska event, centering around the idea that an expedition near the North Pole unearthed a sentient geological being which, after being transported to the Tunguska area, proceeded to unleash rage-fueled destruction on the humans that transported him. Nikola Tesla also figures in this story, and, considering that little in the novel is given as absolute, there are hints that the event might have involved experiments of his.

• A crossover novel featuring Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys, entitled The Alien Factor, reveals that the Tunguska event was due to an antimatter-powered alien lifeboat crash-landing upon the Earth.

• The humorous 1978 alternate history novel And Having Writ… by Donald R. Bensen features four space travelers whose ship crashes to Earth in 1908, after narrowly missing Tunguska, landing in the Pacific Ocean off San Francisco. The aliens then travel the planet analyzing world affairs and attempting to jumpstart World War I to improve the Earth's technology level.

• Science fiction writer Stanisław Lem, in his first SF novel The Astronauts (1951) (film adaptation 1960 as First Spaceship on Venus), explains this event as the crash of an interplanetary reconnaissance vessel from a Venus civilization.

• The novel Blood Rites of The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher indicates that the incident was caused by Ebenezar 'Blackstaff' McCoy, the White Council's wet work man.

• The Tunguska event (and the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis) forms part of the backstory for the 1975 Larry Niven novelette The Borderland of Sol.

• Alexander Kazantsev's novel Burning Island makes mention of event as the crash site of an alien spaceship, resulting in the discovery of radium-delta, the proposed fuel of the ship.

• The book Callahan's Key by Spider Robinson uses the connection between Tesla (made immortal in this fiction) and the Tunguska event. The "death ray" has been stolen by the U.S. government and its use may destroy the known universe.

• Chekhov's Journey by Ian Watson (1983), posits that the famous playwright Anton Chekhov knew of the 1908 Tunguska explosion back in 1890 which turned out to be caused by an out-of-control Soviet time-ship.

• F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack novel Conspiracies included a mention of the Tunguska event as being related to an experiment that Nikola Tesla had been working on.

• The novel Earth by David Brin explores the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis — i.e., the possibility that the Tunguska Event was caused by a submicroscopic black hole still trapped beneath the Earth's surface.

• The novel, Ghost Dancer by John Case explains the Tunguska event as the accidental result of an energy experiment by Nikola Tesla, the Serbian inventor. Tesla was apparently trying to demonstrate the potential of the Earth's energy being beamed without wires into the skies above an Arctic explorer. The novel uses this theory to lend credibility to the main conflict: a terrorist threat to beam major cities into dust!

• The novel Intervention, by Julian May, depicts a commemoration of the 100^th anniversary of the impact, which was caused by the destruction of an out-of-control alien craft. Apparently, if the crew had not activated the self-destruct program, the ship would have crashed into Moscow.

• Author Isaac Asimov had a character in his story "The Mad Scientist" attempt to explain the Tunguska event. The character told the plight of a physicist who may have rediscovered the event's cause: production of energy via creation of a "particle-antiparticle pair, well separated, in a vacuum — without any energy input, of course, since in the forward motion they produce energy". The story also notes that although such a great number of trees were knocked down, there was no crater at the site. This story was published in Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection (HarperPrism, 1996).

• A semi-serious version of the event is offered in Monday Begins on Saturday (1964) by Strugatsky brothers. In it, the explosion is caused by a spaceship of aliens from a different universe who move backwards in time relative to us. Consequently, it is of no use to search for the remains of the spaceship now, after the event, because these remains have only existed at the site before 1908.

• The Star Trek novel Prime Directive depicts the Tunguska incident as the result of benevolent Vulcan interference in human history, in which an anthropological survey ship deflected a meteor (that would otherwise have struck Western Europe and destroyed much of civilization) into a largely uninhabited part of the planet.

• Arthur C. Clarke's introduction to his novel Rendezvous with Rama includes a very brief mention of the Tunguska event without explicitly naming it.

• The novel Sandstorm, by James Rollins (2004), uses the circumstances of Tunguska event — in this case, a meteor composed of anti-matter — as evidence to suggest the cause of the explosion in the book's opening pages, and the set-up for the cataclysmic events of the book's climax.

• On 365 tomorrows, the story Search and Recovery describes an alien meeting discussing the cover-up of the crash of an alien ship.

• The novel Singularity by Bill DeSmedt also features the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis.

• The story Storming the Cosmos, by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker (1985), depicts a Soviet recon mission to the site of the explosion, led by scientists responsible for rocket technology in 1959. Indeed they find a device which is referred to as "rocket-drive". It is then used too hastily in late 1960 in a rocket prototype, leading to the Nedelin disaster. The hypothesis that an UFO crash-landed or deliberately buried vital gadgets for the human race to find is thus linked to the space race of the 1950s and 1960s.

• The novel Timeline mentions the disaster as a possibility of "accidentally" sending someone to a time just before the event happens, in order to silence people that know of the research if they start to tell others about it.

• Matthew Reilly's short story Complex 13 suggests that a Soviet base, the equivalent of Area 51, was constructed in Tunguska upon discovering that the Tunguska Event was the site of a UFO crash-landing.

• The Doctor Who novel Birthright involves the villain Jared Khan attempting to possess the TARDIS after its exterior has temporarily been split into two shells. The Doctor's companions, Ace and Bernice Summerfield, manage to drive Khan's mind out of the interior of the TARDIS and into the empty shell, which is then expelled from the Time Vortex and explodes in mid-air over Tunguska, opening a temporary dimensional rift. The explosion was also mentioned as an historical detail in another Doctor Who novel, The Wages of Sin.

[edit] Cartoon/Comics

• In a Doctor Druid mini-series, the event is related to a group of mystics and their plan to maintain a "world illusion".

• In a Marvel Comics trilogy of publications entitled Ultimate Nightmare (2004-2005), Ultimate Secret (2005), and Ultimate Extinction (2005), the Ultimate universe characters confront the mystery of the event, linking it to an alien encounter with the Ultimate version of Galactus. Ultimate Nightmare #1 has moved the year of the Event as 1904 (four years off), and depicting it as leaving a rather large impact crater (it left none). According the book's author, Warren Ellis, "The Tunguska Event was in 1908-I moved it forward on Ultimate Earth-as was essentially depicted in Ultimate Nightmare; an explosion over the Tunguska river area in Siberia of nuclear proportions..."

• In the late Predator comics, it is revealed that the Tunguska event was due to a Predator or Predator ship's self-destruct technology. It was either triggered by the Predators themselves, to conceal their sophisticated technology from humanity, or by either Russian or American officials to keep the technology from the others.

[edit] Games

• In the computer/video game Area 51, the player can find references that the KGB found a partially destroyed craft, as well as evidence the spacecraft had been in that position for 10,000 years and that the Tunguska event was caused by another craft firing upon the buried craft.

• In Destroy All Humans! 2, it is suggested the crash was caused by an alien battleship; the alien species within being the Furon enemy.

• The Call of Cthulhu RPG explains this and similar phenomena as the result of Outer Gods like Azathoth entering the Earth's reality.

• The 1995 Forgotten Futures RPG adventure "The Fist of God" by Marcus Rowland, set in the word of Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger stories, assumes a human cause for the disaster.

• In the game Impossible Creatures, it is said that the Tunguska event is caused by a test of a "Death-Ray" developed by Nikola Tesla and Erik Chanikov, killing Dr. Chanikov's wife and driving him into exile. At the start of the 15-missions campaign, a newspaper clipping is shown on a desk with the headline: "Dr. Chanikov's appearance linked to Tunguska Event." There is also a map called Tunguska in the game, which is a wasteland scattered with coal (which can be gathered and used as fuel). Like all other maps, this map is an island in the South Pacific.

• In the game Resistance: Fall of Man, released in November 2006, the Tunguska meteorite brings the Chimera virus to Earth, which transforms humans into cannibalistic mutants. This is shown on maps on the "RFoM website".

• The 2006 adventure game Secret Files: Tunguska, published by Deep Silver, is based on the Tunguska event.

• In the fighting video game SNK vs Capcom: Chaos, one alien-like character called the Mars People has an ultimate attack which is named "Tungus Incident", where he (it?) sends UFOs crashing down on the enemy.

• In the White Wolf Werewolf: The Apocalypse supplement "Rage Across Russia", the Tunguska blast is explained as the result as of a battle between a dragon and powerful Mage.

[edit] Movies

• In the 1960 movie First Spaceship on Venus, based on Stanisław Lem's novel, an expedition discovered a magnetic recording device at Tunguska, determined its origin as the planet Venus, and a newly-completed spacecraft was sent to Venus instead of Mars as originally planned. The expedition determined, from translation of the recording, that the aliens planned to occupy Earth, but they discovered that the people of Venus were abruptly rendered extinct by their incomprehensible machinery.

• In the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, Dr. Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) refers to the Tunguska Event in the line: "You have been a participant in the biggest interdimensional cross-rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909!" — which is off by one year.

• In the director's cut of the 2004 film Hellboy, Grigori Rasputin purchases a stone key monolith which the Russians had hidden since it landed in Tunguska. Rasputin states that the Ogdru Jahad sent it as a way to assist him in bringing them to Earth.

[edit] TV shows

• "Listening to Fear", a fifth-season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, involves a meteor impact, thought to be the newest in a series dating back to the twelfth century. Willow Rosenberg notes that "the most recent meteoritic anomaly was the Tunguska blast in Russia in 1917", getting the date wrong by nine years and ascribing it to the year of the Bolshevik Revolution.

• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "That Which Survives", after the landing party experiences an unusually large seismic event, Sulu begins to recount the Tunguska event as a possible cause for the quake they experienced.

• In a two-episode story arc of The X-Files ("Tunguska" and "Terma"), the Tunguska incident was purported to be caused by an asteroid impact. Fox Mulder traveled with Alex Krycek to the site of the impact, where they discovered a military installation mining the rock and experimenting with the black oil found inside, which contained a microbial form of alien life capable of possessing a human body.

[edit] Songs

• Alan Parsons' 2004 release entitled A Valid Path features a nine-minute epic entitled "Return to Tunguska" that, in his famous instrumental fashion, plays with some of the more other-worldly notions surrounding the event.

• The Red Sparowes' 2006 Split EP with Gregor Samsa contained a song named "I Saw The Sky In The North Open To The Ground And Fire Poured Out", and the record sleeve features other quotations from eyewitnesses to the Tunguska event.