The Fire Came By: Riddle of the Great Siberian Explosion, 1908 by John Baxter

Author:John Baxter [Baxter, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780860075400
Amazon: 0860075400
Goodreads: 2473785
Published: 2002-08-17T08:13:09+00:00

For his efforts he later received the Order of the Red Star and other honors.

Not content with his career as a technologist, Kazantsev had, long before the war, mastered chess and became an important writer on the game. In 1936 he had also exhibited another side to his multifaceted talent by entering a national competition for science-fiction film scenarios. His Arenida took first prize but, when it was not made into a film, he reworked it as a novel, The Burning Island, which was highly successful in the Soviet Union. After the war, he became a full-time author.

Like most Siberians, Kazantsev was fascinated by the bleak landscape of arctic Russia. To him, however, it represented something more than a mere frontier. He grasped the alien nature of the tundra; Mars, he felt, must look very like this frozen, wind-swept waste. Throughout his arctic travels of the mid-forties - journeys on the survey ship Georgiz Sedov which were to serve as the basis for a series of arctic stories and fantasies - the image of northern Siberia as that part of the earth’s surface most like another planet became stronger in his mind. It was to be a central concept in the evolving controversy over the Tunguska explosion.

The other impetus for new speculation on the blast came from a location less geographically remote than Mars.

In August 1945, when the American atomic bomb burst 1,800 feet above Hiroshima, the world had its first demonstration of the havoc a nuclear blast could inflict on a city. Kazantsev was among the Russian scientists who evaluated the Hiroshima data and visited the city some time after the blast. For him, the journey through its desolation had the eerie quality of a dream dimly remembered: he saw sights that were strangely familiar, phenomena that he had encountered before. Hiroshima in many respects resembled photographs he had seen of the blasted area on the Stony Tunguska where an explosion had occurred in 1908.

The Japanese explosion,’ made up almost entirely of flash and concussion, agreed in many ways with the damage done to the Siberian taiga in 1908 and the evidence of the eyewitnesses. At Hiroshima, only a few hundred yards from the blast center, was a group of trees, charred and stripped of their leaves but still standing upright, like those on the Stony Tunguska. Elsewhere, houses had been flattened just as the giant Siberian larches were toppled. The mushroom cloud, the black rain which fell after the blast - all were similar to what had been seen in Siberia. Every new investigation, including the detection of signs of radiation on the site, supported his theory; no meteorite or comet had caused the 1908 blast. What had exploded there was atomic.

An atom bomb in 1908? The idea at first made little sense. But to Kazantsev, with his fascination with Mars, there was only one credible explanation. An alien space ship, traveling from Mars, had chosen Siberia as a location for its landing or, more likely, plunged there out of control before exploding in the air.

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