Based on how different the 1982 film is from the earlier film adaptation, 1951's The Thing from Another World, and a few things I'd encountered over the years, I assumed the story had little relation to the film I'd grown to love so much.
After it reveals its powers to the researchers, what follows is a rapid descent into panic, paranoia, and madness as the survivors rush to figure out a test that can prove who is a mimic and who is still human before the Thing finds a way to escape to civilization and conquer all of humanity.ĭespite being a hardcore fan of John Carpenter's The Thing, 1982's film adaptation of the story, I must admit I hadn't read "Who Goes There?" before doing so for the purposes of this review. The spin here, aside from the cool setting (pun intended), is that this alien is capable of mimicking the biology of any living thing it encounters and can read men's minds.
With all of that disclaimed, one of his most significant contributions outside of his editorship of Astounding Science Fiction is the writing of a novella published in 1938 called "Who Goes There?" The story has a relatively simple premise: a frozen alien is discovered beneath the ice of Antarctica and is thawed out at an isolated research station, but it turns out it's still alive and needs to attack the handful of men there in order to survive. He also infuriated many of his protegés-nearly all of whom abandoned him during his last twenty years-by a full-throated embrace of pseudoscience, all but insisting that every writer who worked for him would have to include something about psychic nonsense or extra-sensory perception in their stories. While his contemporary defenders chalked it up to his being a provocateur, the sheer volume of Campbell's upsetting statements on questions of race, especially during the latter half of his career, is proof enough that he held most of the offending views as his own. On top of rejecting African-American authors and stories with "negro" protagonists, he also embraced a lot of unpleasant views regarding the American Civil War and slavery that would absolutely put him at the top of many people's black list today (including my own). On the other hand, he was, by nearly all accounts, a big ol' racist, even by the standards of his day. He is credited with almost single-handedly pulling science-fiction out of the pulpy muck in which he found it and into a more credible realm of literary genre fiction.
On one hand, he was one of the most important science-fiction editors of all time, instrumental in launching the careers of all of the "Big Three" (Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke) as well as numerous others. Campbell, one of the more problematic figures from the Golden Age of Science-Fiction. Before we get started on our discussion of the story that may have launched an entire branch of sci-fi/horror, we need to talk about John W.
0 kommentar(er)
