Tunguska event in popular culture

The Tunguska event was an explosion that occurred on 30 June 1908, in the Siberian region of Russia, possibly caused by a meteor air burst. The event has inspired much speculation and appears in various fictional works.

Literature
  • In Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (2015), after the Earth's moon explodes in the first pages of the novel, it is suggested that a small speeding blackhole, such as was hypothesized (and disproven) to have caused the Tunguska event, caused the moon's explosion.
  • Thomas Pynchon's book Against the Day puts forth several possible explanations for the Tunguska event, which affects several of his main characters. Among these possibilities are a meteorite, alien visitation, temporal disturbance and a misdirected energy beam from Nikola Tesla. None of these are specifically indicated as the "correct" answer.
  • Donald R. Bensen's 1978 And Having Writ... features four space travelers whose ship crashes to Earth in 1908 after narrowly missing Tunguska, landing in the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco. The aliens then travel the planet analyzing world affairs and attempt to jump start World War I to improve the Earth's technology level.
  • Science fiction writer Stanisław Lem, in his first science fiction novel The Astronauts (1951) (film adaptation 1960 as First Spaceship on Venus), explains the Tunguska event as the crash of an interplanetary reconnaissance vessel from a Venusian civilization.
  • 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 a historical detail in another Doctor Who novel, The Wages of Sin.
  • The Tunguska event (and the Jackson–Ryan hypothesis that it was caused by a primordial black hole) forms part of the back story for the 1975 Larry Niven novelette The Borderland of Sol.
  • Soviet engineer and science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev in his novel Burning Island mentions the event as the crash site of an alien spaceship, resulting in the discovery of radium-delta, the supposed fuel of the ship. His short story "A Visitor From Outer Space", written in 1946, describes the crash site and eyewitness accounts in detail. In this story a nuclear-powered Martian spaceship, seeking fresh water from Lake Baikal, blows up in mid-air. His story "The Explosion" includes the theory that the Tunguska event was the result of the activities of extraterrestrial beings, including an exploding alien spaceship or an alien weapon fired to "save the Earth from an imminent threat".[1] Many events in Kazantsev's tale, which was intended as pure fantasy, were subsequently confused with the actual occurrences at Tunguska.[2]
  • Czech science-fiction author Ludvík Souček mentions the Tunguska event in his novel Cesta slepých ptáků (The Path of Blind Birds, Czech 1964) and asserts it was a result of a nuclear blast, which caused major damage to the taiga but created no crater.
  • Chekhov's Journey by Ian Watson (1983), posits that the famous playwright Anton Chekhov knew of the 1908 Tunguska explosion back in 1890 which was caused by an out-of-control Soviet time-ship.
  • Alistair MacLean's novel Circus mentions the Tunguska event as the result of an impact by a particle of anti-matter weighing "one one-hundredth of a millionth" of a gram (this is approximately a factor of a hundred billion times less than the real energy of the explosion).
  • 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, since trapped beneath the Earth's surface.
  • In the novel Ice by Jacek Dukaj, following the Tunguska event, the Ice, a mysterious form of matter, has covered the whole Russia. The appearance of Ice results in extreme decrease of temperature, putting the whole continent under constant winter, and is accompanied by Lute, angels of Frost, a strange form of being which seems to be a native inhabitant of Ice. Under the influence of the Ice, iron turns into zimnazo (ice iron), a material with extraordinary physical properties, which results in the creation of a new branch of industry, zimnazo mining and processing, giving birth to large fortunes and an industrial empire. Moreover, the Ice freezes History and Philosophy, preserving the old political regime, affecting human psychology and changing the laws of logic from many-valued logic of "Summer" to two-valued logic of "Winter" with no intermediate steps between True and False.
  • The Tunguska event plays a central role in Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin.
  • The event is referenced in the debut novel by author Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. A group of "peculiars", humans with supernatural abilities, botch an attempt at immortality, which causes the explosion, and turns them into monsters that need to feed on peculiars to live.
  • A semi-serious version of the event is offered in Monday Begins on Saturday (1964) by the 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.[3] In the book, it is implied that a second Tunguska-like event convinced the peoples of Earth to mount a space defence program.
  • The novel Singularity by Bill DeSmedt also features the Jackson–Ryan hypothesis (Black Hole) as explanation for the lack of an impact crater. The story line is about a remnant of the KGB that plots to capture the black hole and then use it to change the path of 20th century Soviet history.
  • The Stargate SG-1 novel Roswell suggests that the Tunguska crash was caused by a crashing Goa'uld vessel that was impacted by the team's Puddle Jumper materializing too close to it during time-travel.
  • 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.

Cartoon/comics
  • Prog 81 of 2000 AD had a Tharg's Future Shock short story where a ship went back in time to view the Tunguska event. When it arrived in 1908, the ship went out of control, entered the atmosphere and became the cause of the event.[4]
  • In the first twelve issues of the comic book series of The X-Files the story arc relates to the Tunguska incident with a survivor of the blast included in the chain of events detailed in the issues.
  • In the Atomic Robo storyline "Atomic Robo and the Shadow From Beyond Time", it is suggested that the Tunguska event was the result of Nikola Tesla and several others repelling a Lovecraftian alien beast that existed outside of linear time.
  • In the Battle Angel Alita: Last Order manga by Yukito Kishiro, the Jupiter seed team features one member with various fighting forms, Warmen 609. His final form is named Tunguska and use a wormhole to unleash a devastating laser attack that can cut through anything. The Jupiter people are somewhat inspired by the Soviet Union.
  • In Assassin's Creed: The Fall #2, a comic book mini-series published by Wildstorm based on the Assassin's Creed universe, Nikolai Orelov prepares a dangerous siege on a Templar research station in remote Siberia, which concludes with the Tunguska event. See the Games section below for more details.
  • Jeff Smith's comic series RASL, which features technology inspired by Nikola Tesla's experiments, notes the Tesla theory in issue #7.
  • In the Prequel comic to the 2011 film Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Decepticon Shockwave is depicted as causing the destruction.
  • In the Martin Mystère issue "Tunguska!" (#22, 1984) the event is explained as a "doomsday" of a hidden human civilization, originating from Europeans who fled the Inquisition and into Siberia during the Middle Ages and who, restrained from any repression, developed scientifically and technologically much faster than the rest of the world, inventing nuclear technology by the mid of the 19th century.
  • In East of West #1 the event occurs in the United States instead of Tunguska, after which the comic's universe starts to dramatically diverge from actual history.
  • In Before Tomorrowland, the tie-in comic book to the 2015 Disney film Tomorrowland, the Tunguska event is explained as resulting from an attempt by Nikola Tesla and confederates to rescue explorers from the other side of a wormhole.

TV shows
  • Siberia is an American supernatural drama television series shot in the style of a reality television show where 16 contestants must survive in the Siberian territory of Tunguska, about 100 years after the Tunguska event. Shortly after arrival, the contestants notice strange things and are abandoned by the production of the reality show.
  • 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.[5]
  • The television series The Secret KGB UFO Files (Phenomenon: The Lost Archives) in 1998, broadcast on Turner Network Television, referred to the Tunguska event as "the Russian Roswell" and claimed that crashed UFO debris had been recovered from the site.[2]
  • In the Doctor Who episode "In the Forest of the Night", the Doctor mentions the Tunguska event as an example of where rapid tree growth helped save humanity.[6]

Songs
  • The 10th track on Isao Tomita's 1978 album "The Bermuda Triangle" is titled "The Dazzling Cylinder That Crashed In Tunguska, Siberia (Prokofiev: Symphony No. 6: First Movement)"[7]
  • 2nd single from the 2018 Hopesfall album Arbiter is titled Tunguska. “Yesterday, we actually engaged someone on Twitter about a Ghostbusters reference to the Great Siberian Tunguska of 1908,” vocalist Jay Forrest says. “The song is referencing the real phenomenon.”[8]

References
  1. "Scientist Claims UFO Collided with Tunguska Meteorite to Save Earth". 26 May 2009.
  2. Robert Roy Britt (12 August 2004). "Russian Alien Spaceship Claims Raise Eyebrows, Skepticism". Space.com. Retrieved 2011-09-12.
  3. Clarke, Arthur C. (1994). Rendezvous with Rama (Hardcover ed.). Lightyear Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-89968-449-9.
  4. "Fs 38: Tung Twister". 8 September 2011.
  5. The X-Files – Tunguska/Terma (1996)
  6. "BBC One - Doctor Who, Series 8, in the Forest of the Night - in the Forest of the Night: Fact File".
  7. "The Dazzling Cylinder That Crashed In Tunguska, Siberia (Prokofiev: Symphony No. 6: First Movement)". Discogs.
  8. "Hopesfall break the reunion curse, come back swinging with "Tunguska"". Alternative Press. 2018-06-12. Retrieved 2018-06-12.
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