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While the film Deep Impact (1998) did much to draw attention to the potential deleterious effects of a comet impact, and Don't Look Up (2021) parodied scientists' difficulties in communicating effectively with the media and public (especially in the face of science denial), these topics have long been drawn upon by authors of scientific romances and early science fiction. For example, Martin Hermann calls comets the 'ultimate agents of apocalypse in late Victorian and Edwardian British fiction' (Hermann 2015: 35). Comet-based fiction of the 1870s was uniquely positioned to take advantage of cultural memories of comets seen earlier in the century, repeated false alarms of comet dangers, and the then current knowledge and admitted uncertainty about these potential cosmic threats. They spawned a literal swarm of works that appeared in the run-up to the return of Halley's comet in 1910 (and beyond).
This article first surveys specific historical comets and influential writings concerning comets through the early Victorian Era, works still widely mentioned in the late 19th century despite their outdated and even outright erroneous science. After demonstrating how both were incorporated into early comet fiction, we move to four works published in English in the 1870s - Edward Spencer's 'The Tale of a Comet' (1870), Camille Flammarion's 'The History of a Comet' (1873), Mark Twain's 'A Curious Pleasure Excursion' (1874), and Jules Verne's Hector Servadac (1877) - as examples of the further evolution of cometary science-based fiction in this decade. Highlighting the persistence of 1870s tropes in comet fiction in the years of anticipation before the return of Halley's comet in 1910 rounds out our analysis, demonstrating that, like the orbit of a comet, what goes around, comes around again in apocalyptic fiction.
Setting the stage
Comets are dusty, icy objects from the outer solar system that often elude notice until they enter the warmth of our vicinity. The ices sublimate into gas, liberating solid material, creating an enlarged atmosphere (perhaps a million km wide), termed a 'coma', around the solid nucleus (itself only a few km wide). As the comet moves sunward, the liberated material is swept back to form often impressive yet gossamer dust and ion/plasma tails stretching up to a hundred million km in a direction opposite the sun. The apparent...