# Talk:Impact events in fiction

The 1984 blockbuster "Ghostbusters" mentions the Tunguska Event. Should that be included here? 68.41.225.115 (talk) 17:50, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

If it's just a brief mention in the film (which it is) and it isn't covered in sources on the overarching topic—Impact events in fiction—then no, it should not be included. TompaDompa (talk) 18:01, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

@TompaDompa and I had a 3RR back-and-forth this morning, with me adding a non-Tunguska example (Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile and the Nördlinger Ries) and them reverting it with: The cited source is not a source on the overarching topic—impact events in fiction—but a source on the example. MOS:POPCULT explains what kind of sources should be used for articles like this.
I must confess I'm confused. My edit isn't an example of "In popular culture" and "Cultural references" material being added to a factual article, this is specifically an article about popular culture references to impact events. POPCULT would apply to an "In popular culture" section in the article Tunguska event, clearly, but this article is supposed to be about fictional works that reference or discuss impact events.
At the moment, this article has a single paragraph about the core concept and a single-paragraph summary of fictional references to a single particularly well-known impact event (Tunguska), effectively duplicating Tunguska event in fiction, which was rewritten in April 2024 by @TompaDompa, based on their (very good) work on this article, itself based on their (excellent) work on Asteroids in fiction. This article lacks any reference to other impact events and both this article and Tunguska event in fiction have a history that mainly contains @TompaDompa reverting other editors' changes to the articles, which feels a little like OWNership, intentionally or otherwise.
For my part, I believe the reliance on POPCULT here is mistaken, as it is intended for pop-culture sections of general articles; I would suggest WP:LISTCRITERIA is the more appropriate guideline and, as such, I think it would be useful to consider what inclusion criteria are most appropriate and how this article can best be expanded so that it can better describe the representation of non-Tunguska events in speculative fiction more widely.
(As this article has almost exclusively been edited by @TompaDompa, so is unlikely to be on many watchlists, I'm also going to ping WikiProjects Film, Literature, Novels, Science Fiction and Television to encourage wider participation in the discussion.) — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 18:09, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

This is not a list article but a prose article, so WP:LISTCRITERIA is not applicable. Likewise Mars in fiction, Venus in fiction, and Sun in fiction—all WP:Featured articles—do not have any list criteria, nor should we want them (or indeed this article) to. The reference to MOS:POPCULT is appropriate as it is (A) intended to cover both Topic X#In fiction sections and Topic X in fiction articles, hence why the "What to do" section says A well-crafted article or section on a topic’s cultural representation should be based on reliable sources that address the topic broadly. and (B) largely a restatement of the WP:Core content policy of WP:PROPORTION (which says that articles should treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject.–"on the subject" is key) in the particular context of cultural depictions. There are more than a dozen sources listed in the "Further reading" section that can be used to expand the article—I've been putting off doing so for some time to focus on other things, but I suppose I'll get to it. TompaDompa (talk) 18:52, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
That's helpful, thank you — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 19:13, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
As someone coming in from WP:Novels with no background on the topic, TompaDompa's explanation here matches my understanding of how to approach articles like this, especially the idea of WP:PROPORTION. The impact event is presumably very important to Saga of Pliocene Exile, so any source on Saga of Pliocene Exile will mention it, but if the Saga is not very important to the overall scholarship on impact events in fiction, those broad articles may make no mention of it. (It's similar conceptually to adaptations -- sources about any adaptation of Dracula will mention the novel, but sources about the novel will mention very few adaptations.) Hence, we start with the broad articles and mirror their focus. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 22:36, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
I'll add for clarity that the topic of this article is not "real-world impact events, as depicted in fiction", but "the general concept of impact events, as depicted in fiction". TompaDompa (talk) 19:07, 9 September 2025 (UTC) Missed the operative word the first time around. TompaDompa (talk) 21:25, 13 September 2025 (UTC)
I had assumed as much but good to know — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 19:13, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

We have two different sources that make directly contradictory statements about the effect the atomic bomb had on the depiction of impact events in fiction:

[I]n the 1950s, the prevalence of asteroid disaster stories started to grow. The birth of this sci-fi trope parallelled an especially tumultuous time in America, as the Cold War raged and the threat of nuclear warfare was at an all-time high following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. At this time in the U.S., schoolchildren regularly performed "duck-and-cover" drills where they would dive under their desks and cover their heads, practicing what they would do in case of a nuclear bomb being dropped. Asteroid impacts, like nuclear weapon attacks, pose an immediate and catastrophic risk to vast areas, so it's no surprise that this trope worked its way into popular culture at this time in history.
Impact fiction receded after World War Two, for the obvious reason that the atom bomb permanently altered the course of apocalyptic fiction. In her 1965 essay The Imagination of Disaster, which does not even mention comets or asteroids, Susan Sontag attributes the power of post-war science fiction to the knowledge that "collective incineration and extinction… could come at any time, virtually without warning". For most post-war writers, the cause of global annihilation would not be a freak intruder from outer space but the greed, malice and stupidity of mankind itself.
So that's one source that says that impact events became more common in fiction as a result of the atomic bomb and another that says that they became less common. Of the two, I believe the former is a higher-quality source for this particular content and context, but I don't think the disparity is so great as to justify using one source while discounting the other. I think the best option we have at the moment is to leave this out of the article altogether, at least until further sources clarifying the issue emerge. TompaDompa (talk) 16:54, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

I'll note for the record that I have adjusted my assessment of the relative quality of the sources in this context: while space.com is a better outlet than the BBC for this kind of thing, Dorian Lynskey—author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, with two entire chapters dedicated to stories about impact events—seems like a more-than-decent author to consult on the topic. I have also added a sentence noting that sources differ on this particular point. TompaDompa (talk) 20:13, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

... that impact events (pictured) have appeared in fiction since the 1830s?

ALT1: ... that fiction about impact events (pictured) may be character-driven dramas, black comedies, or pure spectacle? Source: "Impact fiction is flexible enough to accommodate multiple genres, from grave character study to black comedy to old-fashioned disaster movie."
ALT2: ... that fiction about impact events (pictured) typically focuses more on the societal ramifications than on the science? Source: "Interestingly, over more than a century, the 'comet as destroyer' theme has focused not so much on the science as on the societal impact (if you’ll forgive the pun) of a comet-caused disaster."
ALT3: ... that fiction about impact events (pictured) has had periodic waves of increased popularity since the nineteenth century? Source: "Impact fiction has been with us for almost two hundred years but, like a comet, it tends to disappear for decades before looping back around."
Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Inner space (science fiction) & Template:Did you know nominations/Balonem do bieguna
Comment: I am open to rephrasing the hooks or coming up with additional ones if none of these strike the reviewer's fancy.

TompaDompa (talk) 19:23, 27 October 2025 (UTC).

 Approved: article is long enough, recently improved to GA, and generally in good shape. QPQs are done. Hooks are fully cited and I think all would pass muster: personally, I find ALT0 and ALT2 the most interesting, and wonder whether it might be interesting to say that Edgar Allen Poe wrote what was probably the first one. Picture is PD and I see no other concerns regarding copyvio, plagiarism etc. Nice work. UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:53, 29 October 2025 (UTC)