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Cover of Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell

Who Goes There?

John W. Campbell1938Classic science fictionCosmic horror

A scientific expedition at the South Pole digs out something that has been frozen for centuries and carries it back into the camp.

About

Who Goes There? is a science fiction horror novella by the American writer John W. Campbell, published under the pen name Don A. Stuart.

It first appeared in the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and was later issued as a book by Shasta Publishers, and it has been read ever since as the story that made the shape-changing alien a standard problem in the genre. The camp is small, the weather keeps everyone inside, and the creature's advantage is that it does not only copy a man's face but his behaviour and his memories, so the ordinary business of trusting a colleague becomes the thing that gets people killed. Campbell writes the discovery slowly: the specimen thaws, the dogs react to something, the men start counting who is present, and the question in the title turns from a joke into a procedure. The story was adapted for film twice, first as The Thing from Another World in 1951 and then as John Carpenter's The Thing in 1982, and a longer manuscript version, titled Frozen Hell, was published in 2019.

Campbell was the editor of Astounding from 1937 until his death, and the novella is one of the few pieces of fiction he published under his own direction.

Book details

Author
John W. Campbell
First published
1938
Series
No series listed
Subgenre
Classic science fiction, Cosmic horror
Primary genre
Sci-Fi, Horror
Tags
No tags for this book.

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