An unbearable violet flame leaped suddenly in the skies, shrieking a thousand feet in the air. A rain of black metal separated from a solid clump to spread in a long, stretching line that reached down and down in masses to the waiting earth. It settled at the base of a giant rock, finally, as a second long rain of metal reached down and down.

I started reading this book in late October, as it starts with a a science fiction/horror novella suitable for Hallowe'en. I liked the the solution that the men came up with for identifying which people and animals were actually clones of the monster. It was much cleverer than the solution in the 1950s film adaptation "The Thing From Another Planet", which was changed to something much easier to understand. I'm going to try to see the 1980s version "The Thing", as that is supposed to be a very good film.

I enjoyed all the stories in this book except "Blindness" which was a bit too physics heavy for me, but my favourites were "Who Goes There?", "Frictional Losses" and "Elimination". ( )

A largely decent set of short stories which is let down by the original story The Thing was based on-one of the worst short stories I think I've ever read. There are however some real gems in here otherwise and I think without the titular story, this would be an incredible compilation ( )

The stories in this collection are pretty solid, from the sci-fi horror of the title story and the currently topical horror of Dead Knowledge, through the maguffin-based gadget stories, to the far-future tales about the Heat Death of the universe. The tone runs from an optimistically plucky "Good Ole American Grit Will Overcome", to a decidedly pessimistic "What's the Point?", even if that end is untold billions of years in the future.

I like to do a bit of reading about authors, and looked up Campbell on Wikipedia, where I was disappointed to be reminded that he was the editor of the sci-fi magazine who rejected A [author:Samuel R. Delany|49111] story with a Black protagonist because he considered that his readers wouldn't accept a Black character. From which, I suddenly understand that all the characters I've just read about are, without any statement as such, White. There is just one outright racist view expressed in the book, not out of keeping for the time and audience for which it was written, but jarring and shocking to see on the page now.

Reading of other writers' (including [author:Isaac Asimov|16667]) condemnation of Campbell's racist and right-wing views reminded me of a note by [author:Philip K. Dick|4764] for his story The Golden Man in [book:The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 3: The Father-Thing|165913], in which he spoke of an editor who insisted that stories submitted on the subject of mutants would only be accepted if they were presented as superior to the common run of people, and ready to shepherd the "inferior" races into a utopian paradise. Sure enough, this editor turns out to be Campbell, by whom PKD refused to be constrained and sold his stories elsewhere, feeling unable to work with Campbell's supremacist views, which PKD explicitly compares to Nazi ideology.

Does it matter after all the years which have passed, and with Campbell's own passing? I think so. I'm put in mind of the Star Trek DS9 episodes in which Captain Sisko believes himself to be a 1950s sci-fi writer whose latest story, "Deep Space 9", is rejected by his editor because the captain of the space station is Black. Those episodes, surely inspired by Campbell and Delany, graphically illustrate the evil of systemic racism, of which Campbell was, as an influential editor, a significant part, and which system of oppression we clearly see continues today.

This understanding of Campbell's character and beliefs casts a different light on his stories of alien invaders determined to wipe out humanity (by which we now know he means Whites), of shapeshifting infiltrators able to pass as human instead of the sub-human beings they 'really' are, so that they can overrun us, and that "just one" instance of undisguised racism can be recognised as the tip of a most unpleasant iceberg.

Otherwise, pretty solid sci-fi. ( )

As a self-confessed fan of— no, wait. Hang on a second.

Hello everyone, my name is Lee, and I'm a science fiction fan. There, now I've got that out of the way I can crack on.

As a self-confessed fan of science fiction, you might expect me to be au fait with John W. Campbell. While most of the world was busy killing each other in World War Two, the science fiction genre was busy reinventing itself. The period from the late 1930s until the late 1940s is knows as “The Golden Age of Science Fiction”. Gone were the pulp era tales of derring do amongst the stars. In their place was big, hard, space opera. The likes of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury came into their own during this period. A world in desperate need of stories about a better one found just such a place in the libertarian futures described monthly in publications like Astounding Stories.

Astounding Stories, now Analog Science Fiction and Fact, is the longest running science fiction magazine of them all. Back in the days when new authors rose to prominence mostly through short stories published in genre magazines, Astounding Stories was the magazine that chose to give people like Asimov et al. a chance, and thus shaped the genre into what it is today. And the editor who oversaw the magazine during this significant period? Why, it was John W. Campbell.

Genre magazines don't have the popular appeal they once did, and while I've vaguely heard of Analog I couldn't tell you a great deal about it. I certainly wasn't aware until I started reading Who Goes There? that there had been this single All-Father figure who had supervised the rise of half the great names in twentieth century science fiction. Alas, Campbell's relative obscurity compared to some of his protégés seems to stem from two simple facts: for one, as he aged he became ever more vocally right-wing in his politics and open to pseudo-science, something that alienated many of his friends in the traditionally liberal and sceptical science fiction community. The second fact is that while he was a prolific writer of well received short stories for magazines in the 1930s, he never seemed to write that big break out novel that pushes authors out of the magazine stands and onto the bookshelves.

Seven of Campbell's best short stories are to be found in this collection, including his most famous work, the eponymous Who Goes There? Almost predictably, it's his most famous work because it has a popular film adaptation: John Carpenter's 1982 horror classic The Thing. That's one of my favourite horror films, and yet I had no idea it was based on a short story, much less one from the 1930s. The gist of the story is that a remote research station in Antarctica discovers a crashed alien ship with one frozen alien on the side. They assume the alien is dead but it is soon revealed to not only be alive but able to assume the shape and memories of any living thing. Suddenly everyone on the base is a suspect, and it becomes a race to determine who has been replaced by their alien doppelgänger and quash the alien threat before it Takes Over The World.

I don't say this often, and it pains me to do so, but I think the film version is better. The big problem when adapting a novel into a movie has always been that the character's thoughts, usually a crucial aspect of the writing, simply don't fit on the screen. Half the writing is instantly lost taking with it character and plot developments, jokes, suspense, and so on and so forth. Here, though, that works to the film's advantage. If an omniscient narrator told us the character's thoughts then we'd instantly know which ones were and weren't secretly aliens. The film doesn't have to worry about this. Campbell's approach is to write in a minimalist style, essentially recording the character's dialogue and gestures, and that's about it. And you don't realise how much you'll miss all the other aspects of writing until they're not there.

The other six stories in the collection don't have this issue to deal with, and I enjoyed them all a great deal more. Despite coming from the 1930s the science discussed in them is surprisingly mature, with atomic energy, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the heat death of the Universe all being used as background plot points. There's also a nice balance between showing the fallibility of scientists and showing the ability of science as a whole to help people. This hope for science is often contrasted with a level of pessimism, be it with the few characters in the story or on a species-wide scale — this poignantly comes to a head in the last two stories, Twilight and its sequel Night, that describe a trip to the far future where humanity has lost its curiosity, and the unforeseen consequences of an attempt to reinstill it.

This collection is ultimately a nice little insight into its time. Science was finally being understood at its most fundamental level leading to hope for our future, yet there were economic woes on one side of the Atlantic and political woes on the other. World War Two was rapidly approaching and after that the world had to look forward to decades of a new kind of war and a new kind of weapon, with total annihilation of the enemy finally a tenable and terrifying possibility. Given all that, I suppose being stuck in the Antarctic with a shape-shifting alien doesn't look so bad after all. ( )

As a self-confessed fan of— no, wait. Hang on a second.

Hello everyone, my name is Lee, and I'm a science fiction fan. There, now I've got that out of the way I can crack on.

As a self-confessed fan of science fiction, you might expect me to be au fait with John W. Campbell. While most of the world was busy killing each other in World War Two, the science fiction genre was busy reinventing itself. The period from the late 1930s until the late 1940s is knows as “The Golden Age of Science Fiction”. Gone were the pulp era tales of derring do amongst the stars. In their place was big, hard, space opera. The likes of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury came into their own during this period. A world in desperate need of stories about a better one found just such a place in the libertarian futures described monthly in publications like Astounding Stories.

Astounding Stories, now Analog Science Fiction and Fact, is the longest running science fiction magazine of them all. Back in the days when new authors rose to prominence mostly through short stories published in genre magazines, Astounding Stories was the magazine that chose to give people like Asimov et al. a chance, and thus shaped the genre into what it is today. And the editor who oversaw the magazine during this significant period? Why, it was John W. Campbell.

Genre magazines don't have the popular appeal they once did, and while I've vaguely heard of Analog I couldn't tell you a great deal about it. I certainly wasn't aware until I started reading Who Goes There? that there had been this single All-Father figure who had supervised the rise of half the great names in twentieth century science fiction. Alas, Campbell's relative obscurity compared to some of his protégés seems to stem from two simple facts: for one, as he aged he became ever more vocally right-wing in his politics and open to pseudo-science, something that alienated many of his friends in the traditionally liberal and sceptical science fiction community. The second fact is that while he was a prolific writer of well received short stories for magazines in the 1930s, he never seemed to write that big break out novel that pushes authors out of the magazine stands and onto the bookshelves.

Seven of Campbell's best short stories are to be found in this collection, including his most famous work, the eponymous Who Goes There? Almost predictably, it's his most famous work because it has a popular film adaptation: John Carpenter's 1982 horror classic The Thing. That's one of my favourite horror films, and yet I had no idea it was based on a short story, much less one from the 1930s. The gist of the story is that a remote research station in Antarctica discovers a crashed alien ship with one frozen alien on the side. They assume the alien is dead but it is soon revealed to not only be alive but able to assume the shape and memories of any living thing. Suddenly everyone on the base is a suspect, and it becomes a race to determine who has been replaced by their alien doppelgänger and quash the alien threat before it Takes Over The World.

I don't say this often, and it pains me to do so, but I think the film version is better. The big problem when adapting a novel into a movie has always been that the character's thoughts, usually a crucial aspect of the writing, simply don't fit on the screen. Half the writing is instantly lost taking with it character and plot developments, jokes, suspense, and so on and so forth. Here, though, that works to the film's advantage. If an omniscient narrator told us the character's thoughts then we'd instantly know which ones were and weren't secretly aliens. The film doesn't have to worry about this. Campbell's approach is to write in a minimalist style, essentially recording the character's dialogue and gestures, and that's about it. And you don't realise how much you'll miss all the other aspects of writing until they're not there.

The other six stories in the collection don't have this issue to deal with, and I enjoyed them all a great deal more. Despite coming from the 1930s the science discussed in them is surprisingly mature, with atomic energy, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the heat death of the Universe all being used as background plot points. There's also a nice balance between showing the fallibility of scientists and showing the ability of science as a whole to help people. This hope for science is often contrasted with a level of pessimism, be it with the few characters in the story or on a species-wide scale — this poignantly comes to a head in the last two stories, Twilight and its sequel Night, that describe a trip to the far future where humanity has lost its curiosity, and the unforeseen consequences of an attempt to reinstill it.

This collection is ultimately a nice little insight into its time. Science was finally being understood at its most fundamental level leading to hope for our future, yet there were economic woes on one side of the Atlantic and political woes on the other. World War Two was rapidly approaching and after that the world had to look forward to decades of a new kind of war and a new kind of weapon, with total annihilation of the enemy finally a tenable and terrifying possibility. Given all that, I suppose being stuck in the Antarctic with a shape-shifting alien doesn't look so bad after all. ( )