Book Review: John Campbell - Frozen Hell

I vividly remember reading "Who Goes There?" as a child, in a sci-fi short story compilation I checked out from the library whose name I can't recall. I've completely forgotten the other stories, which were of the kind that fellow sci-fi veteran Robert Silverberg fondly but firmly sums up in the Introduction here as "wordy epics in which grim, methodical supermen repeatedly saved the world from menacing aliens by mastering, with the greatest of ease, such things as faster-than-light travel, the fabrication of matter-destroying rays, the release of atomic energy, and the penetration of hyperspace." Campbell's story about an Antarctic expedition's struggle against a shapeshifting alien was incredibly different - intensely-paced, relentless, eerie, and genuinely frightening to young me. It was a great bridge for me between more "literary" short stories like Jack London's "To Build a Fire" and other fantasy horror like H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which coincidentally was also published in serial form in the same Astounding magazine about 2 years before "Who Goes There?", which Campbell of course went on to become the phenomenal editor of.

This extended version, based on a manuscript recently discovered in a Harvard archive, adds 3 intro chapters and a few thousand words of additional verbiage throughout. Campbell was wise to cut the extra material, which is overly didactic and not strictly necessary to the plot. The Preface has a good discussion of the importance of firm editing; as newly-minted editor Campbell would advise Asimov years later, "When you have difficulty with the beginning of the story, that is because you are starting in the wrong place, and almost certainly too soon. Pick out a later point in the story and begin again" However, interestingly I didn't find that the extra baggage diluted the power of the story much for me, although perhaps that was because it still had the force of memory behind it. It's still the immensely influential Ur-sci-fi-horror work that inspired John Carpenter, Ridley Scott, Cris Carter, and so many more, and if you had never read the short story I don't think the impact would be much lessened. At the end there is a preview of a "faithful sequel" set in the present day written by John Betancourt, who helped compile this project. I wish that Peter Watts' wonderful tribute "The Things", which retells "Who Goes There?" from the alien's perspective, had been included, but otherwise this is a delight to read, and Betancourt has done the world a real service by raising this 80 year old story out of the ice of obscurity back to the land of the living. May it continue to spread its tentacles of influence!