Comets in fiction
[4]: 106, 130 Comets have thus continued to play their traditional role as omens in modern works of fiction, particularly fantasy such as E. R. Eddison's 1922 novel The Worm Ouroboros and the 1998 novel A Clash of Kings in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.
[4]: 135 [5] Comets play three major roles in science fiction: as places to land on and explore, potential menaces to life on Earth, and resources to exploit.
[4]: 119 [5] An early science fiction example is Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 short story "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion", wherein part of the Earth's atmosphere is lost to a comet, with catastrophic results.
[1][2][4]: 114 [6] Throughout the 1800s, the threat of impact events appeared in works ranging from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s c. 1833 poem "The Comet" to Chauncey Thomas [Wikidata]'s 1891 utopian novel The Crystal Button; Or Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-Ninth Century.
[12] 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.
[2][16] Ray Bradbury's 1968 radio play Leviathan 99 adapts the story of Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick to space, with a comet standing in for the chased whale.
[6] Such cometary water is used for terraforming Mars in Frederik Pohl's 1992 novel Mining the Oort;[1][3][6][12][17] Pohl had earlier touched upon the comet mining theme in the 1980 novel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (part of his Heechee series), where intelligent aliens systematically harvest the CHON elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen) necessary for life from comets.
[1][3] A spaceship that intercepts comets in the Oort cloud and steers them towards the inner Solar System for further processing appears in Alastair Reynolds's 2005 novel Pushing Ice.
[1][4]: 124–125 [5][6][12] The terraforming concept is combined with the impact motif in the 1984 novel Double Planet by Marcus Chown and John Gribbin, where a comet heading for Earth is diverted to instead strike the Moon and thus create a rudimentary lunar atmosphere,[1][2][3][12][18] and the 1989 anime film Venus Wars, where a comet strike on Venus makes for a thinner atmosphere and a higher level of humidity, providing the necessary conditions for further terraforming of the planet.
[4]: 134 Stephen Baxter's 1993 short story "The Sun-People" features an exotic cometary lifeform that incorporates liquid helium into its biology in the remote reaches of the Kuiper belt.
[3] In Arthur C. Clarke's 1975 novel Imperial Earth, a character speculates that comets may be the remains of deceased exotic lifeforms, while Ken MacLeod's 2000 short story "The Oort Crowd" suggests that they are in fact deities.
