Product Description: Basis of the 1951 cult horror film, The Thing From Another World, Campbell's frightening novelette appeared in ASTOUNDING in early 1938. He had become editor of that magazine five months earlier. A terrifying shape-changing alien at a frozen research station challenges its crew for survival in the most memorable sci-fi story of its decade.
The story's good, but the writing is awful This book contains the 68-page title novella and 7 shorter sci-fi stories.
The good news is that "Who Goes There?" was translated fairly accurately in the John Carpenter-Kurt Russell film (including the characters, the attack on the sled dogs, the hot-wire blood test, and Blair building an escape vehicle out in the shed), so if you liked that, you'll like this.
The bad news is that, while the title story and some of the others have clever sci-fi conceits at their core, the writing is absolutely awful. Wooden dialogue and slow, dull, and clunky exposition with no sense of drama or anticipation. I'd say it was like the writing of a 9th grader, but that would be insulting to 9th graders. The author explains in the introduction that these stories were turned down by all of the sci-fi and fantasy magazines of the day before finally being accepted and published. I'm not surprised.
Get this if you absolutely have to own the story behind "The Thing." Otherwise, don't.
Kindle edition is unreadable
The formatting is wretched--all the paragraphs run together, without any indenting or spacing between. When I contacted the publisher, they gave me a URL where I could read a PDF version of the story online--not download, mind you, but only read while online.
Considering that this is only a novella, the price was pretty exorbitant. When you add to this the fact that it's not even formatted (and is thus virtually unreadable), it is theft. I'll never buy anything from Rosetta again.
Not Free SF Reader A discovery of a lifeform buried in the Antarctic ice causes serious problems for an isolated research team.
If You Liked the movie... You'll Freaking love this book. It has almost all those involved in the movie (except Windows) in the book, plus another twenty characters. And it goes into more detail on why they are there, different people become 'things' than the movie,
In short IT FREAKIN' ROCKS MY SOCKS OFF!
nuff said
Good stuff. John W. Campbell, Who Goes There? (Astounding, 1938)
A story which inspired a generation, and twice changed the face of filmmaking, reprinted in its original form after far too long a time. Who Goes There?" was, of course, the basis for the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, remade more true to form by John Carpenter as simply The Thing in 1982. Both were, arguably, the best work of each director involved, as Campbell's story is arguably his finest moment.
Those who saw the first film and not the second are likely not to recognize much of anything about the story at all. An observation post in Antarctica finds the remnants of a spacecraft, and in attempting to get it out of the ice destroy it accidentally. They also find something with the spaceship, but separate from it: an alien lifeform. They get this out of the ice, bring it, back, and thaw it out for the biologist to study. Bad idea, because as it turns out, the thing is capable of assimilating the forms of creatures it eats. Including humans.
To be brutally honest, Carpenter's revision and expansion of the story jacks the paranoia level up far higher than the original material, and the somewhat predictable ending is a bit too gung-ho. Also, in Campbell's attempts to keep most of that whole eating bit offscreen, he goes over the brink of subtlety into confusion in more than one place, though the problems are relatively quickly rectified. The story itself is well worth reading simply for its archival value as the progenitor of two excellent films, but it will grab ahold and keep you interested even if you already know what's going to happen. *** ½
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
