Impact events have been a recurring theme in fiction since the 1800s. The popularity has varied in waves; periods of increased interest include the 1890s fin de siècle era, the years following the 1910 appearance of Halley's Comet, and the concluding part of the century following the 1980 publication of the Alvarez hypothesis about the extinction of the dinosaurs and the 1994 collision of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter. Impact events by asteroids or comets are a common disaster scenario, and ones caused by larger objects such as rogue planets or the Moon also appear on occasion. Stories about impact events often focus on the societal impacts, and efforts to prevent the collision are common. Variations on the theme include placing the impact in the past, near misses instead of direct collisions, and other celestial bodies than the Earth such as the Moon or Sun being struck. In some stories impact events are caused intentionally, be it to be used as a weapon or as a tool for terraforming. The 1908 Tunguska event—an enormous explosion in a remote region of Siberia generally held to have been caused by a meteor air burst—has also appeared in many works of fiction.
History Impact events have been a recurring theme in fiction since the 1800s. David Pringle, in The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, attributes the emergence of the theme at this time to two advancements in astronomy: the discovery that meteors ("shooting stars") are caused by objects from space entering Earth's atmosphere, and a more acute appreciation of just how many objects exist within the Solar System. Brian Stableford, in Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia, similarly points to comets starting to be discovered by telescope (as opposed to the naked eye) following the first such detection by Maria Mitchell in 1835, and the resulting realization that comets were significantly more common than previously thought. The earliest stories tended to depict impacts by comets, though other objects such as asteroids and meteoroids became more common in the 1900s. Dorian Lynskey, in Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, comments that the theme's popularity has varied in waves. One of the periods of increased interest was the 1890s, when doom and gloom in general became more fashionable as part of the broader cultural phenomenon known as fin de siècle. The 1910 appearance of Halley's Comet was followed by the first film depictions of apocalyptic impact events, the first being the Edison Film Company's 1910 short film The Comet and the first feature being the Danish 1916 film Verdens Undergang. The effect of the advent of the atomic bomb on the popularity of fiction about impact events following World War II has variously been posited to have been positive, with the widespread fear of sudden cataclysmic events in the form of nuclear anxiety, and negative, with the emerging expectation that the collective death of humanity would be self-inflicted. In the latter part of the century, the impact theme received successive boosts in popularity with the 1980 publication of the Alvarez hypothesis, which posits that the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was caused by an asteroid impact that created the Chicxulub crater off the coast of Mexico, and with the collision of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994. The latter in particular is credited with inspiring a large number of disaster films and other on-screen portrayals of impact events or threats thereof in the years that followed.
Disaster
Impact events are a common disaster scenario in fiction. Lynskey considers "impact fiction" a distinct subgenre within apocalyptic fiction, one wherein several recurring tropes can be identified, such as the character archetype of the astronomer whose warnings go unheeded—in Lynskey's view, a kind of equivalent of Cassandra in classical mythology. Lynskey writes that the exact nature of the impactor—asteroid, comet, planet, and so on—varies significantly between works, the defining characteristic of the subgenre being the devastating effect of the impact. Science fiction critic Dylan Roth attributes the theme's popularity in part to its simplicity as a plot device, without the need for more elaborate setup; Andrew Sawyer, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, similarly gives impact events as an example of a disaster scenario with no antagonistic will behind it and comments that the science fiction genre largely has a monopoly on such scenarios. Lynskey posits that the impact motif is appealing to storytellers due to a versatility in the types of stories that can be told—whether character-driven drama, black comedy, or pure spectacle. Stableford writes that by the beginning of the new millennium, asteroidal impact events and climate change were the two most popular scenarios in apocalyptic fiction; Lynskey comments that disaster stories after the turn of the millennium, whether about impact events or not, typically have a climate change subtext—comparing it to the influence nuclear weapons had on science fiction following World War II. Lynskey identifies the "impact fiction" subgenre as beginning with Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 short story "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion", deeming it "the first stab at a scientifically plausible impact narrative". In the story, part of the Earth's atmosphere is lost to a comet's tail, followed by the comet nucleus impacting the planet. In Camille Flammarion's 1894 novel Omega: The Last Days of the World, scientists speculate on the various ways a comet impact could lead to humanity's extinction, though the event itself turns out to be survivable; a loose film adaptation by Abel Gance called End of the World was released in 1931. The 1977 novel Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle revolves around a highly destructive impact event and its aftermath; astronomer Andrew Fraknoi describes it as being "among the first of the scientifically reasonable impact stories". In the 1988 novel Land's End by Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl, a comet strike destroys the Earth's ozone layer, rendering the surface of the planet uninhabitable for humanity and forcing a migration beneath the oceans.
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