Asteroids in fiction
It received successive boosts in popularity following the end of World War II (possibly as a result of nuclear anxiety), the 1980 publication of the Alvarez hypothesis about the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the 1994 impact of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 on Jupiter.
[4][5] When German astronomer Heinrich Olbers discovered a second asteroid—Pallas—in the same orbit in 1802, he theorized that these objects were remnants of a planet predicted by the Titius–Bode law to exist between Mars and Jupiter that had somehow been destroyed.
[5][8] An early science fiction work that mentions this explanation for the origin of the asteroids is Robert Cromie's 1895 novel The Crack of Doom, which describes the release of energy stored in atomic nuclei a few thousand years ago as the culprit.
[15] Robert A. Heinlein's 1948 novel Space Cadet thus states that the fifth planet was destroyed as a result of nuclear war, and in Ray Bradbury's 1948 short story "Asleep in Armageddon" (a.k.a.
[3][5][16] Several works of the 1950s reused the idea to warn of the dangers of nuclear weapons, including Lord Dunsany's 1954 Joseph Jorkens short story "The Gods of Clay" and James Blish's 1957 novel The Frozen Year (a.k.a.
[3][5][20] In Raymond Z. Gallun's 1950 short story "A Step Farther Out", valuables from the destroyed civilization are recovered,[18] and in Harry Harrison's 1969 novel Plague Ship, an ancient virus is found in the asteroid remnants.
[21] Paul Preuss's 1985 short story "Small Bodies", where fossils are found on an asteroid, is a late example of the destroyed planet theme;[16][22] it has otherwise largely been relegated to deliberately retro works such as the 1989 tabletop role-playing game Space: 1889.
[3] In Isaac Asimov's 1939 short story "Marooned off Vesta", a group of astronauts run into this danger,[3][5][16] and in Williamson's 1949 novel Seetee Shock, a region of space is virtually impassable for this reason.
[20] A densely packed extrasolar asteroid field in the Alpha Centauri system also appears in the 1981 episode "The Golden Man" of the television series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
[23] Piers Anthony's 1984 novel Mercenary goes so far in its adaptation of the 1241 Mongol invasion of Hungary to the asteroid belt that it treats space as two-dimensional and constrains movement accordingly.
[3][5][16][17] John Varley's 1974–1986 Eight Worlds series transposes this motif from the asteroid belt to the remote Oort cloud at the outer edge of the Solar System.
[3] Kim Stanley Robinson's 2012 novel 2312, by contrast, depicts asteroids adapted for human habitation as an integrated part of a thoroughly colonized Solar System.
[4][20] In Fred Hoyle's 1967 short story "Element 79", large quantities of asteroidal gold disrupt the global economy,[22] a topic earlier broached by French science fiction author Jules Verne's posthumously-published 1908 novel The Chase of the Golden Meteor.
[5][42] In Walter Kateley's 1930 short story "The World of a Hundred Men", a record of an inhabited asteroid's history leading up to its collision with Earth is found underneath Meteor Crater in Arizona.
[4][5][17] Additional boosts to the theme's popularity came in 1980 with the publication of the Alvarez hypothesis, which states 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,[4][17][46] and in 1994 with the collision of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter.
[17][47] 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—be they by asteroids or other objects such as comets—in the years that followed.
[4] Altering asteroid trajectories, besides being a means to avert impact events as in Roger MacBride Allen's 1988 novel Farside Cannon, also appears in fiction as a way to cause them.
[3][4][17] Impact events are occasionally weaponized; Earth is targeted with asteroids in this manner by aliens as a form of interplanetary warfare in Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers, Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1985 novel Footfall, and David Feintuch's 1996 novel Fisherman's Hope.
[3][5][17][20] A human redirects asteroids from the distant Oort cloud towards Earth in an act of attempted mass murder in Don Bingle's 2002 short story "Patience", and an asteroid is set on a collision course with one of the moons of Neptune to create an additional planetary ring in Alastair Reynolds's 2012 short story "Vainglory",[22] while another human-caused—but this time unintentional—impact event appears in Stephen Baxter's 1997 novel Titan.
