Tunguska event in fiction

The Tunguska event, a massive explosion in Siberia on 30 June 1908, has inspired numerous works of fiction and remains a significant reference in disaster-themed storytelling involving comets. While the widely accepted cause is a meteor airburst, fictional accounts have proposed alternative explanations, such as alien spacecraft. This idea gained traction after Ed Earl Repp's 1930 short story "The Second Missile" and was further popularized by Alexander Kazantsev's 1946 story "Explosion," which linked the event to a nuclear explosion from a spacecraft. The alien spaceship theory also features in Stanisław Lem's 1951 novel *The Astronauts* and its 1960 film adaptation *The Silent Star*, as well as Ian Watson's 1983 novel *Chekhov's Journey*. Other fictional works, like Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling's 1985 short story "Storming the Cosmos" and Algis Budrys's 1993 novel *Hard Landing*, explore variations of this theme. Another theory posits a micro black hole impact, as seen in Larry Niven's 1975 short story "The Borderland of Sol" and Bill DeSmedt's 2004 novel *Singularity*.

In fiction, the Tunguska event is sometimes used to alter history or introduce alien elements. Donald R. Bensen's 1978 novel *And Having Writ...* suggests that alien arrivals in 1908 caused the event. The X-Files episode "Tunguska" (1996) explores the possibility of alien microbial life being introduced by the impact. Additionally, ice from the explosion is depicted as having unusual properties in Vladimir Sorokin's 2002 novel *Ice* and Jacek Dukaj's 2007 novel *Ice*.