HALLOWEEN SPECIAL III: Lovecraft, The Tunguska Event and The Colour Out of Space.

Tunguska forest (Photograph taken by Evgeny Krinov near the Hushmo river, 1929).

“And by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place.”

“The Colour Out of Space” is a short story written by  H. P. Lovecraft in 1927.  The story is set in the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts, where an unnamed narrator investigates a local area known as the “blasted heath”. Ammi Pierce, a local man, relates him the tragic story of a man named Nahum Gardner and how his life crumbled when a great rock fell out of the sky onto his farm. Within the meteorite there was a coloured globule impossible to describe that infected Gardner’s family, and spread across the property, killing all living things. It’s the first of Lovecraft’s major tales that combines horror and science fiction. The key question of the story of course is the meteorite. Although “the coloured globule” inside the meteorite has mutagenic properties we cannot define their nature. But as Lovecraft stated once, the things we fear most are those that we are unable to picture.

H.P. Lovecraft’s love for astronomy is well known. As an amateur astronomer, Lovecraft attended several lectures from leading astronomers and physicists of his time. In 1906 he wrote a letter to the Scientific American on the subject of  finding planets in the solar system beyond Neptune. Around this time he began to write two astronomy columns for the Pawtuket Valley Gleaner and the Providence Tribune. He also wrote a treatise, A Brief Course in Astronomy – Descriptive, Practical, and Observational; for Beginners and General Readers. In several of his astronomical articles he describes meteors as  “the only celestial bodies which may be actually touched by human hands”.

“The Colour Out of Space” was published nineteen year after the Tunguska Event. On the morning of June 30, 1908, eyewitnesses reported a large fireball crossing the sky above Tunguska in Siberia. The object entered Earth’s atmosphere traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour and released the energy equal to 185 Hiroshima bombs. The night skies glowed and the resulting seismic shockwave was registered with sensitive barometers as far away as England. In 1921, Leonid Kulik, the chief curator for the meteorite collection of the St. Petersburg museum led an expedition to Tunguska, but failed in the attempt to reach the area of the blast. Later, in 1927, a new expedition, again led by Kulik, discovered the huge area of leveled forest that marked the place of the Tunguska “meteorite” fall. At the time, Kulik mistook shallow depressions called thermokarst holes for many meteorites craters. However, he didn’t find remnants of the meteorite, and continued to explore the area until World War II. In the early 1930s, British astronomer Francis Whipple suggested that the Tunguska Event was caused by the core of a small comet, while Vladimir Vernadsky, suggested the cause was a lump of cosmic matter. (Rubtsov, 2009). More than a century later the cause of the Tunguska Event remains a mystery.

The cover of “The Colour Out of Space” by Frank R. Paul, Amazing Stories, September 1927.

The enigmatic nature of the Tunguska Event inspired several fictional works. In the novel “Extinction Event”, a spin-off book for the science fiction series Primeval, the Tunguska event opened a gargantuan anomaly that periodically opens every few decades. The anomaly is linked to the late Cretaceous, just before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The Tunguska Event was also included in two episodes of The X-Files (“Tunguska” and “Terma”). The show suggested that the incident was caused by an asteroid impact. In the plot, Fox Mulder and Alex Krycek traveled to the site of the impact, and discovered a military installation where Russian scientists study the black oil found inside the rock, which contained a microbial form of alien life capable of possessing a human body. In the episode “Piper Maru”, the same alien organism infected Krycek.

After 107 years, the Tunguska Event is still a mystery. Recently it was suggested that the Lake Cheko, a 300-m-wide lake situated a few kilometres from the assumed epicentre of the 1908 Tunguska event, is an impact crater, but several lines of observational evidence contradict the hypothesis.

 

References:

Lovecraft, Howard P. (1927). “The Colour Out of Space”.

Joshi, S. T. (2001). A dreamer and a visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in his time. Liverpool University Press, 302.

Rubtsov, V. (2009): The Tunguska Mystery. Springer-Publisher: 318