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The Tunguska event was an explosion that occurred on June 30, 1908, in the Siberian region of Russia, possibly caused by a meteoroid air burst. The event has inspired much speculation and appears in various fictional works. == Literature == * In ''Seveneves: A Novel'' by Neil 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. * Charles Stephenson’s 2013 novel ''The Face of OO'' culminates with the explosion over Siberia. In this story a hijacked airship, which is carrying a ‘divine weapon’ mentioned in the Indian great epic, the Mahabharata, explodes causing the massive blast.〔http://www.amazon.com/The-Face-Oo-Charles-Stephenson/dp/1782995501〕 * Barry Klemm's 2010 novel ''The War of Immensities'' explores the possibility that the Tunguska event was a mini black hole impacting the earth. The lack of an exit event is explained by the singularity then being captured by Earth's gravity and orbiting the core beneath the surface. The ensuing damage caused is then used as the main context for the action in the novel.〔http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9680116-the-war-of-immensities〕 * 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. * 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 attempt to jump start 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 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 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 wetwork man. * 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". Many events in Kazantsev's tale, which was intended as pure fantasy, were subsequently confused with the actual occurrences at Tunguska.〔 * The book ''Callahan's Key'' by Spider Robinson posits a connection between Tesla (made immortal in this fiction) and the Tunguska event. In the book, Tesla constructed a so-called "death ray", and the result of the initial test firing was that "some trees decided to lay down for a while" in Siberia. * 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). * 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. * JD McDonnell's short story "Live For the Sun" mentions that the Tunguska Event was the result of an ancient vampire experimenting with sunscreen. The experiment fails. * 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. * Cesar Sirvent's short comical sci-fi story "Deuterio" ("Deuterium"), in Spanish, explains the "deuterium comet hypothesis" and introduces the idea, after Edward Teller, of using a space station to launch blocks of ice from low orbit against Earth's surface to test for the cometary hypothesis. This proposal of experiment is modified, using deuterated (heavy) water. * 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. * The novel ''Extinction Event'', set in the Primeval universe, claims the Tunguska event opened a gargantuan anomaly that periodically opens every few decades. The anomaly is linked to the late Cretaceous, just hours before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, forcing Cutter and his team to detonate an EMP to seal the anomaly before the backlash from the Chicxilub impact can pass through the anomaly and devastate the present-day Earth. * ''Fox Hunt'', the first Lachlan Fox thriller from James Clancy Phelan, features the rare extraterrestrial element Theterium that was found at the Tunguska site. * 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. * 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 novel ''Intervention'', by Julian May, depicts a commemoration of the 100th 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 of 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). * 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. * The book ''Operación Hagen'' (Spanish, not translated to English) by Felipe Botaya, claims the explosion was the result of the WWII Nazi nuclear weapons program (purportedly, the Nazis blasted Tunguska in a desperate attempt to stop the war by showing Soviets the power of their nuclear bombs. The explosion was covered up with a small meteorite impact that happened in 1908 in the same location). * "A Real Bang-Up Job", a tongue-in-cheek science fiction story by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre published in 2000, links the Tunguska event and the Roswell UFO incident: in a future where time travel becomes commonplace, time-tourists will journey afterwards to 1947 in order to witness the Roswell event for themselves. A time-traveling criminal wrecks the time machines of tourists who materialize in Roswell 1947, and diverts their bodies to space-time coordinates in midair directly above Tunguska in 1908. All the abducted time travelers materialize at the same physical point in space-time, creating the massive explosion of the Tunguska event. Wreckage from the various time machines, left behind in Roswell 1947, has been misinterpreted as UFO debris. * Arthur C. Clarke's introduction to his novel ''Rendezvous with Rama'' includes a very brief mention of the Tunguska event without explicitly naming it. 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 ''Sandstorm'', by James Rollins (2004), uses the circumstances of the Tunguska event — which he supposes was 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. * 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 story "Storming the Cosmos", by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker (1985), depicts a Soviet reconnaissance mission to the site of the explosion, led by scientists responsible for rocket technology in 1959. They find a device which is referred to as the "rocket-drive". It is then used too hastily in late 1960 in a rocket prototype, leading to the Nedelin disaster. The hypothesis that a 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. * In the Alfred Szklarski adventure book ''Tomek's Secret Expedition'', the Tunguska event plays an important role. Main characters use the sudden earthquake and "sky set on fire" to defeat an overwhelming pack of bandits when traveling through the region near the site of event. The author describes the event as the effect of a meteor impact. * In the book ''Pandora's Curse'' by Jack DuBrul, the Tunguska meteor is a highly radioactive object referred to as "Satan's fist" by a group sworn to encapsulate and destroy any piece on earth. A large fragment that veered off towards Greenland after the explosion is one of the last remaining pieces. * The novel ''Retromancer'' by Robert Rankin states that the Tunguska event was caused when time-travelling magician and immortal Hugo Rune and his acolyte Rizla 'divert' a bomb that was about to destroy New York in 1945 to Tunguska, Rune reasoning that the bomb has been diverted from a populated area to an uninhabited location where it will cause virtually no damage. *The novel ''Goliath'' by Scott Westerfeld depicts the aftermath of the explosion. The crew of the airship ''Leviathan'' come across the blast zone of the event along with the remains of several war beasts. The crew then come across Nikola Tesla who had come to the site to research the blast and claims it was caused by a weapon created by him, the Goliath. Towards the end of the book it is revealed that the event was caused by a meteor after all, but Tesla was too unhinged to believe it. *The comic novel ''Hamish X and the Hollow Mountain'' by comedian Sean Cullen asserts that aliens, bent on attacking Earth arrived through the event, although it also claims that Portuguese scientists feel the event was caused by a duck with gastro-intestinitus. *''Jasper Ffordes novel ''The Woman Who Died a Lot'' explained the event as a "practice smite" undertaken by a deity who thought no one would be watching in an empty region of the planet. *''The novel The 5th Amulet'' by SJ Hailey: A mythical device that protects the earth from asteroids and other Earth bound objects. It is inspired by the Chinese Legend of the Ten Suns. The Tunguska Event was caused by this device firing a directed energy weapon at the object. * In the Sherlock Holmes pastiche "The Adventure of the Russian Grave" by William Barton and Michael Capobianco, Professor Moriarty predicts the Tunguska Event from astronomical observations and leaves clues designed to lure Holmes to the site at the time of the impact as a form of posthumous revenge. * Side B of the novelization for ''Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles'' featured the Tunguska event as being a fairly major element in the chapters depicting the climax of the game, as the Umbrella Russian plant was established largely because of the Tunguska event and the main antagonist, Sergei Vladimir's weaponry was derived from the same metal discovered in the event. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tunguska event in popular culture」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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