The Tunguska event—an enormous explosion in a remote region of Siberia on 30 June 1908—has appeared in many works of fiction.
The event had a long-lasting influence on disaster stories featuring comets.[1]
While the event is generally held to have been caused by a meteor air burst, several alternative explanations have been proposed both in scientific circles and in fiction.[2][3][4] 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".[3][5] It gained prominence following the publication of Russian science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev's 1946 short story "Explosion";[3][4][6] 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.[4][7][8] 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,[4][6][9] while a human-made one is to blame in Ian Watson's 1983 novel Chekhov's Journey.[2][3][4] Additional variations on the spaceship theme appear in Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling's 1985 short story "Storming the Cosmos" and Algis Budrys's 1993 novel Hard Landing, among others.[3] 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" and Bill DeSmedt's 2004 novel Singularity.[4][10]
In Donald R. Bensen's 1978 novel And Having Writ..., the course of history is altered by the arrival of aliens to Earth in 1908, which also causes the Tunguska event.[3][11] The 1996 The X-Files episode "Tunguska" revolves around the impact possibly having introduced alien microbial life to Earth.[4] Ice from the impact turns out to have peculiar properties in Vladimir Sorokin's 2002 novel Ice and Jacek Dukaj's 2007 novel likewise titled Ice.[12]