The Tommyknockers was influenced by a science-fiction serial which came out before the 1960s .
The writer and critic Kim Newman has cited another influence on the novel , saying that in it King had `` more or less rewritten Quatermass and the Pit , '' Newman , Kim in a 1950s BBC television science-fiction serial involving the excavation of a long-buried alien spacecraft , and the growing influence of the dormant machine on surrounding human beings .
The Tommyknockers