Comets in fiction

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Comets are popular subjects for science fiction authors and filmmakers although they are often misrepresented as fiery objects, rather than icy.

[edit] Literature

• Jules Verne's Hector Servadac, Voyages et aventures à travers le Monde Solaire (Off on a Comet, 1877) is a Victorian vision of touring the solar system via a handy comet.
• H. G. Wells' In the Days of the Comet (1905) is an account of how the vapours of a comet's tail cause an instantaneous worldwide utopian society.
• Tove Jansson's Comet in Moominland (1946) depicts the world of the Moomins threatened by a fiery comet.
• The Day of the Triffids (1951) is a novel by John Wyndham in which a meteor shower causes permanent and irreversible blindness in the population and renders them easy prey to giant mobile vegetables.
• Lucifer's Hammer (1977), a novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, is an apocalyptic survival story featuring a comet impact on Earth.
• In Heart of the Comet (1987), a novel by Gregory Benford and David Brin, a multinational team colonizes Halley's Comet, building a habitat within the ice.
• Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2061: Odyssey Three (1988) includes a detailed description of a manned mission to Halley's Comet.
• The Hammer of God (1993) is a novel by Arthur C. Clarke in which an object (Kali) threatens to strike earth appears to be an almost dead comet.
• In Dan Simmons' Hyperion universe, Ouster orbital forest rings make use of captured comets as irrigation devices; the orbital forest receives water and other important supplies from passing 'shepherd' comets.
• In his Revelation Space series, particularly in the novel Redemption Ark (2002), Alastair Reynolds depicts a future human civilization's most advanced society, the Conjoiners, living in the interior of a comet in the very distant Oort Cloud of another star.

[edit] Film and television

• The Paramount/DreamWorks motion picture Deep Impact (1998) tells the story of a comet (Wolf-Biederman) on a collision course with Earth, and focuses primarily on the emotional reactions of those who are affected by the impending disaster.
• In the Friends episode entitled "The One Where They're Up All Night", Ross Geller takes the group on the roof of their apartment to view the Bapstein/King comet.
• The plot of the film Maximum Overdrive involves radiation from the tail of a passing comet, causing every machine on Earth to come to life and become homicidal, although at the end of the film it is hinted that the phenomenon was caused by a UFO.

[edit] Computer and video games

• In the game Shadow The Hedgehog, a special comet holding the game's main enemies (the black arms) is the black comet. It is used to spread a gas across the planet that paralyses any non-black arm so the spawn can eat them.
• In the fictional world of Myth, featured in the Bungie made computer game of the same name, every thousand years the world moves from an age of light, to an age of darkness and vice-versa, brought about by war. Every time this has happened, a great comet has been observed in the sky.
• In the videogame Final Fantasy VII, a green materia can be equipped, allowing a character to cast a spell called Comet.