#234: Frozen Hell
Who Goes There: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
This review was originally posted on Twitter on March 28, 2020
Initial release: January 17, 2019 (based on a manuscript from 1938)
Author: John W. Campbell, Jr.
In 1938, Astounding Stories, one of the three big sci-fi magazines of the era, ran Who Goes There?, a now-legendary novella about paranoia and alien threats in the Antarctic. It was a huge success, influencing the horror scene for decades to come, with John Carpenter’s The Thing — based directly on the novella — being one of the most famous horror movies of all time. But did you know that there was a longer version of the story?
The history behind the book is perhaps more interesting than the book itself. The short version is that when author John W. Campbell submitted an early version of his novella to Astounding, he was offered the job of editor instead. Still wanting to submit the story, he rewrote it, stripping out a lot and ultimately submitting the slimmer, faster version that we’re all familiar with, opening with the classic line “The place stank.” Campbell put the original version in a box somewhere and eventually donated the box to Harvard University, where it was forgotten for decades.
After putting his story in a box, Campbell spent the latter half of his life as editor for Astounding, attaining legendary status for pushing to have science fiction accepted as a “legitimate,” intelligent, mature form of art. In 2017 Alec Nevala-Lee, in hopes of bringing Campbell’s legacy to a modern audience, was writing a biography about him and the golden age of sci-fi. While doing research for the book, Nevala-Lee stumbled upon the existence of that box, and discovered the longer, unpublished manuscript that was the early version of Who Goes There? A Kickstarter campaign to have the book published was successful, and the result is this book.
So how does it compare to the “original,” more well-known version? Well, it’s considerably longer, for starters. Rather than opening in medias res with the characters discussing the frozen, monstrous corpse they found, the opening third of the book tells how they found it. There are some lines later in the novella that appear much earlier in this prelude instead; a few characters are changed around for certain lines, and there’s some additional detail throughout the book that is missing from Who Goes There? — a big one is McReady theorizing Dwight’s motivation for killing Kinner. It’s easy to see why Campbell excised the opening chapters. For starters, it’s a slow opener, a lengthy, detailed adventure romp out on the ice of Antarctica. It isn’t until we start seeing more familiar lines that the plot begins to take a darker turn. And for the sake of a magazine submission it’s perhaps a bit front-heavy, without the quick pacing that got stories sold back then. But certain other details in the more familiar part of the story I think would have been more useful if they had been kept.
Ultimately, I think I like Frozen Hell’s presentation better, as it establishes a few of the main characters a little better where they were just barely sketched out in Who Goes There?. There’s pros and cons to the longer intro, largely dependent on what you want to do with the story. Who Goes There? works because of its brisk pacing, but it’s also all-too-short for the kind of intensity and paranoia that it wants to present. Frozen Hell in turn might drag just a little, but it gives us some necessary detail that makes the story feel less like a weird fever dream. The only thing I dislike is the name, as it’s a reused placeholder title from an earlier story of Campbell’s that would eventually become The Moon is Hell! Who Goes There? is a more evocative, less generic-feeling title.
However you may feel about the relative merits of this long-lost version of a classic horror story, it remains a worthy piece of sci-fi history, and an interesting look at how the editing process can shape the stories we know and love.
