The Best Tunguska Theories

[Dave Monroe]

The Best Tunguska Theories

A hundred years ago yesterday a comet or an asteroid or a divine wild
pitch crashed into the Tunguska region of central Siberia with a force
1,000 times greater than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. People
hundreds of miles of away felt the blast, and the resulting embers in
the atmosphere illuminated the night sky over London. Very cool, and
very fortunate that practically no form of civilization existed at or
around the epicenter (Indiana Jones would have needed, like, a whole
subzero fridge to survive the blast). But the trouble was that, apart
from charring and stripping the forest trees and otherwise heating up
the joint, the flaming object left no crater. Even if it had, it'd
have entered the cultural consciousness as the early 20th-century
precursor of crop circles and grassy knolls. "Tunguska" has led to all
manner of interesting theories as to what really happened, the lamest
being that aliens did it. Here are a few of the better ones:

1. The Earth Mother awakens. Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day
had it that a North Pole expedition roused some terrestrial geological
entity that, upon being shipped to Siberia, lost its shit and
unleashed Gehenna up top as payback for being moved from the Arctic
tundra.

2. The zap and whoops. ISerbo-Croatian inventor and coil namesake
Nikola Tesla fired a death ray that went to eleven and evidently
worked a lot better than the still-implausible human Xerox machine
David Bowie cobbled together as him in the film The Prestige. Best
captured in the book Callahan's Key by Spider Robinson, who could
argue anything with that name, as far as I'm concerned.

3. The underground cosmic event. The Jackson-Ryan hypothesis: Tunguska
was caused by a teensy subterranean black hole that one day decided to
pucker or burp or whatever. See Larry Niven's The Borderland of Sol
for how that works.

4. The Ruskies and spacetime. In yet another fiction, Chekhov's
Journey, Ian Watson posits that the Soviets invented a time-ship that
they lost a handle on. This enables Anton Chekhov, who must have
sounded like a patient out of Ward 6, to learn of the impending the
cataclysm in 1890, almost two decades before it occurred.

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