Episode 38.6 transcription - John W. Campbell - "Who Goes There?" (1938)

(listen to episode on Spotify)

(music: echoey distorted bird sounds)

John Campbell biography, non-spoiler discussion

JM:

Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts. I'm J.M. here with Nate and Gretchen, and we are talking about Astounding Science Fiction. Now, I would recommend that you listen to our earlier installments. We have been talking about a few stories. We just finished discussing Harry Bates' awesome story, "Alas All Thinking".

Now, though, it's time to move to 1936, where things were pretty much at their lowest point for SF magazines. Wonder was changing hands after going bi-monthly. Amazing had also gone bi-monthly. Astounding was the only one that seemed to be doing relatively well.

Late in 1934, though, Tremaine's co-editor Desmond Hall, who is supposed to have been pretty diligent and responsible for a lot of actual work, left to take on the editorship of  Mademoiselle, a new slick from Street and Smith. Tremaine, of course, hired someone else, but he didn't seem to have the same level of impact. It was mostly the same writers getting accepted, and some had to wait over a year to hear back about their submissions. During this time, the magazine did introduce a few new faces, and published two of Lovecraft's more science fiction-oriented efforts "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow Out of Time".

Jack Williamson, Gallun, Leinster, and Frank Belknap-Long, and others kept writing, and a few who had come to be known well in the magazine later began to appear, like Ross Rocklynne. I'm determined to read a Ross Rocklynne story sometime, because his name is so cool. In fact, he is in our July 1939 issue. And, Eric Frank Russell.

In 1937, the German rocket engineer Willy Ley, a refugee from Germany, started appearing with his non-fiction pieces, and these would continue well into Campbell's era. And in September 1937, Sprague appeared, that is, L. Sprague de Camp, our old friend, for the first time. We also see Clifford D. Simak start appearing after an absence of several years from the field in 1930. And some of these figures we may talk about later on in the podcast, especially do want to do something from Simak at some point.

Nate:

Yeah, I think we had marked down "City" at some point, but I'm not exactly sure.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, I don't know when or where, but we'll do it at some point. 1938 also saw the first appearances in the magazine of L. Ron Hubbard, who had been writing adventure stories for other pulps for some years already. Somebody by the name of Nelson Bond also showed up around this time, more on him in a couple months as well. In 1938, we also saw the debut of Lester Del Rey, real name Ramon Alvarez-del Rey, who would stay with the field for years and become a notable and candy editor and publisher in his own right.

A month later, Tremaine was promoted to assistant editor of the entire Street and Smith publishing empire, and then fired a few months later in a restructuring. Well, someone new was needed, and Campbell was a popular writer among the fans, especially for his Don A. Stuart stories, which were generally his moodier, more atmospheric pieces. He had this, I guess, period of creativity between 1930 and 38, and a lot of it was just, well, we'll talk about it, but he also wrote some humorous pieces.

John Wood Campbell, Jr., was born in 1910 in Newark, New Jersey, and he was an MIT undergraduate or dropout, if you want to be more frank about it, and cranked out a bunch of super science stories in the early 30s. Most of his best stories were published under that Don A. Stuart byline, and mainly the two that are sort of recognized today, "Who Goes There?" and "Twilight", which is about a future machine civilization and how one human glimpses in it. And I guess, again, it's kind of another example of the end of the evolution of humanity and what will become of the earth and all this stuff. Definitely stuff in the air already at this time, 1934-35-ish.

Don A. Stuart was a reference to his first wife, Doña, and he became editor of Astounding at age 27, and hardly wrote any fiction afterwards. But his legacy was only beginning, and certainly his ideas, which he was known to give to his writers, were hugely influential. Campbell seemed to want to direct others from behind the scenes. He had lots of suggestions to hone his writers, and it's almost like he saw them as tools. And the Analytical Laboratory, which was the name of one of the columns in the magazine, was really the entire magazine.

Campbell was given a few months to learn the ropes, and officially took over as editor in the March 1938 issue. He introduced some new features in Times to Come, which was a sneak peek at some of what was to come and later issues. Something that would probably not have been possible in the late Tremaine period, as he was still deciding what would end up in the magazine two days before press time.

Authors who had their stories voted number one in the analytical laboratory got a 25% pay bonus. Here's a quote from Alec Nevala-Lee describing Campbell's tenure.

He says, "Science fiction might have evolved into a viable art form with or without Campbell, but his presence meant that it happened at a crucial time, and his true legacy lies in the specific shape that it took under his watch. Campbell had wanted to be an inventor or scientist, and when he found himself working as an editor instead, he redefined the magazine as a laboratory for ideas, improving the writing, developing talent, and handing out entire plots for stories. America's future, by definition, was unknown, with a rate of change that would only increase. To prepare for this coming acceleration, he turned science fiction from a literature of escapism into a machine for generating analogies, which was why in the 60s he renamed the magazine Analog."

So while he would later develop a reputation for didacticism and tiresome obsessions with particular themes, the man could really appreciate atmosphere, and he did, after all, found Unknown as well, so a place for his writers to exercise some of their weird and creative impulses.

The Golden Age is said to have run from around 1939 to 1950, and this was very specifically the Golden Age of Astounding, it seems, and there certainly was some greatness to found. Some famous science fiction stories definitely made their way through his magazine, including "Nightfall", "Dune", the "Foundation" stories, all the early work of Robert A. Heinlein and the bulk of A. E. Van Vogt's fiction, and so many more.

Described as an imposing man an inch over six feet and big, he was a cigarette holder and was constantly smoking Chesterfields. He wanted to change the magazine and its look. He kept on artist Howard V. Brown, but wanted sober, striking covers, ones that people could purchase openly and not smuggle around in secret, like Stone, with Amazing. His biggest new artist was Hubert Rogers, who started appearing in February 1939 and became a mainstay of the magazine.

He wanted the scientific feature column to be a regular thing. He had previously already contributed a long series himself on the planets of the solar system. During this time, Campbell's main thought with the articles was less about educating people and more about inspiring them for story ideas. He wanted the articles to be radical and innovative. Most of the science articles at this time were contributed by Willy Ley, L. Sprague de Camp, Dr. Robert Richardson, and of course, Campbell also, with his editorials.

He never liked the title Astounding and had wanted to change it pretty early on. He did, however, get "science fiction" added to the cover, which he seemed to have considered a great victory. Like I was saying earlier, it didn't seem like there was a push away from using science fiction magazine titles, and he definitely seems to have wanted to bring that back.

He told his writers to imagine they were writing contemporary stories for a future magazine. The August 1938 issue featured the first appearance of Henry Kuttner in Astounding, and it was also the home of one of the last stories Campbell wrote himself, "Who goes there?" .

I actually have a lot more to say about Campbell himself, but I'm wondering if we should just get right onto the story and kind of talk more about him at the end, because this is really his denoument as a fiction writer. And I don't know, it's kind of, there's a lot that happened later on, and that's to say, I'm not that much of a fan of Campbell the person. We've kind of talked about him before on the podcast, and some ominous things have been said. He had some sort of unfortunate misapprehensions of the world. I would be pretentious enough to say, perhaps, and for somebody who was into encouraging thought and good writing, so he would say, and he definitely had some real blind spots about how he saw the world.

I'm not going to read some of the more unfortunate quotes, but I think after we talk about the story, I will come back to some of that stuff, and we'll talk a bit more about him. But I think I kind of just want to get into the story now and talk about it.

So yes, this was published under the name Don A. Stuart, and not everyone knew right away that these were Campbell stories, but the name was certainly recognized at this point. All those stories were published in Astounding, which he'd taken over as editor. And then I think Street and Smith had a policy against editors actually writing in the magazine or something, or beyond the editorials. So it seems to have also been a good way to get around that, but the story also exists now as "Frozen Hell", which was the original title. And that manuscript wasn't found until 2017 in a storage facility used by Harvard's Houghton Library, which contains all of Campbell's draft materials and manuscripts.

Nate:

Yeah, it's pretty cool. This stuff is still turning up. Yeah, I did a side to side compare with "Frozen Hell" and "Who Goes There?". And it's definitely a pretty significant rewrite from one version to the other. It's not like a case of the "Lest Darkness Falls" revisions or whatever, where it's just like a couple paragraphs taken out or added here and there.

JM:

Most of the extra stuff is at the beginning, though, I would say.

Nate:

Yeah, did you read both of them all the way through or?

JM:

I read both of them. Yeah. And I would say by the end, it's pretty much the same. But like,  there's a whole opening section that's not in the one of the big modifications he made is starting out with McReady telling the people in the base about what they saw and what happened. All that is recorded in real time in the original. And there were actually several false starts. The story was also called "Pandora" at one point, and different openings from different points of view that he later abandoned.

He was trying to find the story and he would later tell his protege, Isaac Asimov, when you have trouble with the beginning of the story. That is because you were starting in the wrong place and almost certainly too soon. And then you take out a later point in the story and begin again. And I actually think that's really good advice. And that's actually one of the reasons why people remember Campbell as such a conscientious editor, even if they didn't agree with him on so much, Asimov being, in fact, a key example of that because the two of them were very, very politically opposed.

So the story was rejected from Argosy, which is where he was originally going to submit it. Supposedly this wasn't because of the writing, but because according to editor Jack Byrne, he lacked major characters. And his assistant editor said Campbell should include a woman, but he couldn't seem to figure out a way to make a woman part of a 1930s Antarctic expedition. But his space operas never included women either, so whatever.

As "Frozen Hell", he wrote to his friend Robert Swisher of "Frozen Hell", "I had more fun writing that story than anything else I ever turned out."

And I do think he was right to change it. I think that the story as it was widely known is much tighter. And like, even though you get repeated over and over again in basic writing classes, show don't tell and all that, like, I don't know, sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes it's better to start later and have something recounted by somebody at a later point. It just depends on how it's done, really.

Nate:

It all depends on the pacing and how it's phrased and all of that. And I think the general advice like that is almost like a never one size fits all type thing. It obviously varies on the story.

Gretchen:

Yeah, all depends on context.

Nate:

Sure. And he definitely spent a lot of time thinking about this one. I mean, not only the, I guess, added stuff or revisions to the actual structure of the story, but the scenes that are present in both have a lot of wording changes from sentence to sentence, what I could tell, comparing the two side by side. So yeah, obviously putting a lot of effort into revising and making this is the best possible version of the story that it can be by the time it goes out to publication.

JM:

Yeah, for sure. We'll get into a little bit later, some of the things that might have inspired him. Unfortunately, Campbell is the sort of person where he doesn't make you like him anymore when he talks about his past and his early, his childhood and his, I don't know, it sounds like maybe it was a little rough with his family, but some of the things he says just, I don't know, like, well, we all know what "The Thing" is, we all know what this story became, we all know essentially what "The Thing is." So I'll just say that one of the things he said later on was that he thought maybe the creature was inspired by his own mother.

But in 1936, he had also written a story called "Imitation", published as "Brain Steelers from Mars", actually, in Wonder Stories. And this was supposed to be a humorous story. It's probably not that funny, but there's these two explorers, and they find ultimately adaptive life forms on Mars. And the telepathic regular Martians don't even seem to care. There are shapeshifters in their midst, but the two humans are immensely bothered by this, seeing bad repercussions for Earth should one get loose.

It's kind of interesting. This seems to be on his mind as much as the certain things that were on Bates's mind might have been on his mind. But of course, Argosy passed on it, and he decided to send it to Tremaine for Astounding. And surprise, he got offered the job of editor instead. And Street and Smith lost ten of their magazines around this time. The depression was really hitting them hard, too. And several managers, including Tremaine, got dismissed. And well, somehow they kept Astounding. Surprise to everyone, I'm sure.

So yeah, this is a really famous story. I think everybody knows at least one of the adaptations, and we've all watched at least some of them. So I guess a good place to begin is where were you all first introduced to this essential story?

Nate:

I came to this through the Carpenter film, which has been pretty well regarded as an obvious horror classic. I didn't know it was based on a short story until relatively recently. I always thought the 50s "Thing From Another World" was the original, but it's pretty cool that there's a previous version here in the form of the John Campbell story, because all three of them are, while they do share some things in common, they're all kind of different takes on the basic idea.

JM:

Yeah, my introduction was definitely the Carpenter film, too. I know I was too young to know anything about it when it came out, but apparently it was a bomb, though. It was considered a failure when it came out. It wasn't very well liked, and I don't know how true it is, but I definitely only watched it in the 90s, and it seemed like by then its reputation was going up a little bit. You know, people were appreciating it fairly well, so I don't know. I mean, it's hard to imagine it being that much of a failure, but again, the film industry is just weird. It makes its money back, but it doesn't make the producers a ton of extra money. They consider it time wasted, I guess, and money wasted, so I don't know, like the rest of us liked it, but what do we count, right? I don't know. It's easy to be cynical about that whole industry these days, I'm sure.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, "Blade Runner" was a box-office flop too, and experienced a lot of studio tinkering, and I'm sure there's plenty of other examples out there, films that are now regarded as classics, and were probably always well liked by the community, just did not perform well with mainstream audiences upon their release for whatever reason.

Gretchen:

Yeah, it does seem like a lot of the movies we now consider are the best movies, or films that are also considered cult classics, that didn't perform well, and then caught on eventually, and got more popular as time went on.

Nate:

Yeah, it's kind of funny when things go the other way, too, the huge box-office smashes that are all but forgotten now.

JM:

For sure, yeah, that's kind of an interesting... Sometimes these people think that it's better to have a bright flash in the pan than something that lasts for a long time in people's memories. Even my mom likes this movie, like, we were talking about it the other day, and I don't know, she likes the atmosphere of it, and she likes Kurt Russell, so... She watched the 2011 version, too, which I also did. I don't know, we can talk about that one a little later, because I'm sure none of us were introduced to it with that. Gretchen, you haven't seen that one either, right?

Gretchen:

No, I haven't seen it. And I actually was first introduced to "Thing From Another World" because one of my high school professors during free time just started showing it in class. And even though I had heard about the thing as well, I didn't, at the time, connect the two movies, I didn't know that they were related, and I ended up watching "The Thing" several years later.

I had wanted to watch it for a long time, and every time I tried to watch it, my attempts to do so kept getting thwarted. I would always, like, try to watch it when it was on TV, and I'd miss, like, the first 30 or so minutes. My dad tried to buy me the copy of the 80s, and he got me the 2011 version. And even one time, my friend loaned me her DVD of the 80s "Thing", and it just kept freezing, right, when I started playing it. So it wasn't until, yeah, I think it was probably four years ago that I watched the thing, and, yeah, I think I still lean a little bit more towards that one, even though I do like "Thing From Another World." And I think it was only in the past two, three years that I found out that it was based on a story. For a while, I didn't know that.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, I think I finally saw "The Thing from Another World" in 2009 or something like that for the first time, and I really liked that one. I mean, yeah, the Carpenter film is definitely scarier, and it's got more really horror-filled atmosphere. The older film doesn't have that so much, it's more of a, I don't know, like, survival, kind of how a bunch of strong men can get together and overcome the odds kind of thing. It's got a few other things to it, too. You know, it's got a romance angle that's actually not too bad, kind of enjoyable, almost even. So that's not always the case in some of these 50s genre movies, sci-fi movies and stuff.

Nate:

Yeah, I forget what her character's name is, but she has a couple of good lines. It is interesting the choices that they decide to deviate from the Campbell story, both the 50s and the 80s version, because they kind of go in different directions.

So the films are definitely worth watching with one Another. I watched them both within the same week. I hadn't really seen the 50s version. I don't think all the way through, I mean, I remember watching it at some point, but maybe I only caught like 15 minutes on TV or something like that. I know it was set in the Arctic versus Antarctic, but the fact that it omits some of the main themes of the short story, which are present in the Carpenter version, I just was totally not aware about it. It's more of like a rubber monster suit movie than what Campbell and Carpenter did with the monster.

JM:

Yeah, well, the original intention was to have a shapeshifting monster in the 1951 version. But they decided they were just not able to execute it. And in fact, somebody, I don't know if it was Howard Hawks or the actual director of a movie, his name, I've forgotten. But they were a little bit wary about showing the monster too much in close-up, so they tried not to do that wherever they could. So you don't get too many good glimses of it, which I suppose probably helps to increase the mystery at forevoting of it. You don't have to think about it all the time as a rubber suit monster movie.

But I definitely think that the 1951 one is more focused on the characters. I think it's definitely not to say that it's like a rich character study as such, but it's more focused on them and how they deal with the threat in their various ways and how the scientists want to preserve it. I don't know, it's a movie that's been interpreted as being anti-intellectual, which is probably why Isaac Asimov really didn't like it.

Nate:

Yeah, there are some scenes that definitely feel very pro-America, red scare, military over science approach. I think one thing I thought was interesting, I don't know if this is what they're going for here, is the prominence that Anchorage, Alaska and Alaska plays into them getting up there. Alaska wasn't part of the Union yet, it hadn't been made statehood yet.

JM:

Alright, I forgot about that.

Nate:

So the focus on that was kind of interesting.

JM:

I was just thinking like the proximity to being so far up north and I'm sure there's a couple of World War 3 scare movies where the Russians come in to start by invading Alaska or something like that. I mean, people say this movie is anti-communist too, but they tend to throw that label on every 1950s sci-fi movie.

Nate:

Yeah, I specifically put down in my notes "red scare touch at the end", so I think they might be onto something there.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I think that especially since it was such a prominent thing on everyone's mind at the time, I think that it's easy to see how it could bleed through to any sort of media from around that time. Even if it's more subtle than you would expect.

Nate:

Yeah, and there was certainly no shortage of anti-communist type science fiction stories around in the 1950s made into films like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

JM:

That's the thing, right? The creators of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" said that they didn't want to make an anti-communist parable and that's just something somebody read into it and now people think of it as common knowledge. And I don't like, I kind of see what they're getting at, like sometimes I just wonder, because that was in the air so much at the time, if people like kind of lean on that angle too much. Having said that, Campbell wouldn't mind it, that's for sure.

Nate:

No, yeah.

JM:

If anybody was anti-communist, he would.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah. And of course it's got immortal final line, which I butchered during our Spies episode about watching the skies and it's so good, like it's so iconic right then. Then in the film, last time I watched it, I forgot, but in the film, that moment isn't followed by cool, like ominous music, it like goes into this marching kind of music at the end. I don't know, I mean I really like it, but that music at the end is kind of a funny coda on and all, like he's just said this awesome great memorable science fiction line in retrospect and then it's like John Philips Sousa music or something like that. I don't know, it's not him, but it kind of sounds like that, right?

But yeah, I like it and the Carpenter movie, I first watched that in the 90s with my mom, actually. She likes the movie a lot, I guess, and I don't know, but since then I've watched it many times in the last 20 plus years. I don't know, I don't even know how many times I've seen that movie. One time, even in a lounge theater where there was alcohol and just a bunch of people sitting around watching "The Thing" and drinking and like on a big screen, I guess.

Nate:

Showings like that are a lot of fun and it's been a while since I've been to one of those, but yeah, the Carpenter version is great. I mean, we talked about "Planet of the Vampires" last episode and I think Mario Bava is like really the horror master of his time and his career and Carpenter's career kind of overlapped for a very, very small amount of time at the end of Bava's career and at the beginning of Carpenter's career. But I think Carpenter kind of fills the gaps that Bava left as being the horror director of his era. He's definitely not as stylish and flashy as Bava is with the camera work, but he gets some really nice shots, especially in this one, and he's just really diverse in his approach. He never feels like in his classic era, he makes the same film twice. And "The Thing" just has like incredible atmosphere and tension the entire way through. Never mind the incredible creature effects, which are some of the best creature effects I've seen in any film.

JM:

Yeah, they were so realistic and apparently Carpenter, he did some clever, perhaps some could say dickish directing in that he didn't really tell a lot of the people in the production about certain things that were going to be happening later. He didn't show them some of the practical prop effects they'd be working with and he kept the set very cold on purpose.

So that was really funny because last year I was watching that movie with somebody and she pointed out, oh everybody's like well dressed for the Antarctic except for Kurt Russell who's just wearing a leather jacket.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

He's probably cold on that set actually.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

He's like suffering from being a badass, I guess.

Gretchen:

Kurt Russell just has to look cool, you know, that's the requirement.

JM:

Yeah. So I do think the characters in the Carpenter film are fun too. I think it's definitely closer to the story in a lot of ways. In some ways it's not though, like I definitely think that Campbell, I don't know, he was kind of into the heroic stuff as we'll see. When we talk a little bit more about him, when we finish the story, if you guys don't mind me going on about him some more, but he definitely was a man who liked his hero type characters. And so even though he wanted to bring Astounding to different places, he couldn't escape that pulp mindset in a way.

I don't think he thought of it that way, I think of him, he thought of it more as a kind of mythic grandeur and like the strength of great men and through the ages, the power of the great engineer especially who could get things done. And maybe one day run society and I think that was his big thing and I think that definitely shows through in this story.

Gretchen:

And you do get some of the typical kind of pulp language around handsome chiseled men that we saw in some of the earlier stories we were talking about.

JM:

Yeah, he has a more optimistic ending for sure. He's not like a Lovecraft, he may have been influenced by Lovecraft to write this. Apparently he wasn't a fan, but I'm sure he did read "At the Mountains of Madness", it's a story set in the Antarctica where humans discover a cyclopean city of cosmic horror. It's possible that this that was an influence, maybe not though, I mean we've did a whole episode on Antarctic/Arctic stories in which this story could have fit rather well. If we had chosen to put there and there's obviously even before well into into the 19th century, there was plenty of stuff like this. I mean, I'm sure he also was familiar with Poe and "Pym". So I don't know, it's a good place to set a eerie science fiction story for sure.

And yeah, I don't know as for the 2011 film is fine. I think that it really hurts itself by having to link itself to the Carpenter film. I think that if they had just done it so their own thing with it, it would have been so much better. And the thing is like, they apparently wanted it to look more like the Carpenter film and they had created all these awesome, well they thought they were awesome anyway, practical effects for the film. And I don't know, I guess the studio didn't like that or something and they made them replace a lot of it with CGI which looked bad in 2011 and probably still does now. So it's funny that they did that and weren't like, hey man, maybe you should like not try to link yourself to that other film that's a classic because you're going to, even if the film is really good and eventually becomes a cult classic on its own, it's always going to be now compared with that one and especially towards the end, it's like it has to end with the helicopter flying off and I'm shooting at this dog and you're like, oh, that's the same dog, isn't it? Oh wow, and then the movie ends and you're just like, okay. I guess I'll watch the 1982 "Thing" again now so that I know what happens to that poor dog.

The lead character is a woman which is cool and she's kind of playing very Ripley like badass characters, got to fight the alien and I think she does escape in the end and I don't know. One thing I thought was kind of cool is it definitely plays out an angle that we'll talk about later when we summarize the story and I'll bring it out but it's kind of one of the more interesting scientific concepts of the story that not much, a lot less was known about then than is known now and I think it's kind of cool that Campbell kind of even just brought it up if briefly in the story. So I do feel like the people that made the film probably at least read the story as well as watching the Carpenter movie so I don't know, that's cool.

But this is good and I think the fact that it's a horror story definitely works in its favor because it doesn't really harp too much on the things that would become Campbell's obsessions later when he was editor. And I mean he's editor now but you know this was like early days right so he doesn't like I said he doesn't write much after this at all in terms of fiction. He writes a lot of editorials and some popular science stuff but no fiction but the thing is that's one of the things I want to talk about after but I guess we'll start getting into the meat of the story then.

(music: echoey animalistic sounds)

spoiler summary and discussion

JM:

The whole thing takes place in a cramped Antarctic research station tunneled into the surface of the icy realm like a bunker and a whole bunch of men are gathered around a table where a form encased in ice is laid out on the surface.

The purpose of the base is to conduct investigations into magnetism and the South Pole. The complement of the base is 37 men all of whom are gathered in the administration building. Garry is commander, Blair is biologist, Copper is doctor and McReady who I guess is our hero character although in the end he doesn't really do I mean I guess he kind of leads by example sometimes but he doesn't necessarily always come out as the action man but he's described as this tall and broad demigod.

Gretchen:

A man of bronze. 

JM:

Yeah, basically, probably Scottish like Campbell but he explains for the benefit of the other men this McReady all of whom have been busy with their work and of course for the readers about the fine in the ice. Having during a polar expedition, a weird magnetic trace was found about 80 miles southwest of camp. It's a large plateau surrounded by mountain ranges. The thing was buried 100 feet beneath the glacier, emitting vast concentrated magnetism over a small area. On the plateau insane high winds blow and the temperature is minus 65 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The thing must have come down 20 million years ago before the Antarctic was wholly glaciated. McReady thinks the climate was probably even more savage than with blankets of snow covering everything. McReady paints a bleak picture of how the creature must have stepped out of the wreckage of the ship and instantly gotten lost in the howling wind and endless snow drift. It froze and was quickly buried and I love this atmospheric part like this is just a really good part of the story. He did such a good thing in changing this. I suppose he could have rewritten it the way he originally had it and made it better. But as it was, it's kind of awkward. I think this is a lot of clumsy exposition and weird awkward sentences at the start and I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an interesting example of the editor doing his own revisions and this kind of things that he would tell his writers all the time to avoid and he's practicing it on himself, trying to make this as good a story as he possibly could.

Gretchen:

I also like the opening of talking about the smell of the base and I think that that's just a really fun kind of part to start on.

JM:

The first line is "the place stank" or something like that. I can picture that. Kind of funny. It almost reminded me of like when we were reading those steam man type stories and like then I read Joe Lansdale's kind of modern take on that that I mentioned in the episode. And one of the things that Joe focuses on is just how uncomfortable and shitty it is to be in this structure like when it's riding around and it's like these people are doing important work but it's it's kind of rough sometimes and it smells bad so...

The men find the ship and a guy called Barclay's axe struck the head of the creature which they unearth and hold back to base. As for the ship, well, they tried to get in. Lock was open a tiny crack and they could see weird tools within. Well, that's exciting, but nothing they had compensated so they decided to set off a thermite bomb to soften the ice. Unfortunately, this reacted with the alloy of the ship and caused a quick intense fire. And the ice all around collapsed and crushed the ship, which was already a burning inferno. And it seemed possibly a few other buried dead aliens, maybe? We never know, but it's a big loss for science, that's for sure.

An intense magnetic field is released by the destroyed ship as though it had been storing it like a battery for 20 million years. All the expedition's electric stuff is useless and they barely make it back. There's a conflict among the men. Blair wants to thaw out the creature to examine it and take specimen slides. Norris, a physicist, certainly doesn't and McReady is haunted by the thing's hideous visage.

Norris is worried about microorganisms. They don't know what alien germs the thing might have carried, which can sometimes lead to dormant in frozen ice for millennia. The creature and self they are assured is completely dead, of course. Norris challenges Blair to unwrap the thing so they can all see it properly and then decide. Someone's going to have to stay up overnight with the thing thawing out nearby. Norris swears the face on the frozen monster had an expression of fury and rage on its face.

Sorry, that was a redundant sentence. So very alien, definitely. And yet, they think they can tell what it was thinking. Norris stridingly admits he has had crazy nightmares about it ever since they found the thing.

Nate:

Yeah, this is one cool element of the story that neither the 50s or 80s film go into is like the psychic remnants the creature and ship are imparting on the crew.

JM:

And this is another element that made me think of Lovecraft.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Especifically "The Call of Cthulhu" and how like all these random people in the world are receiving the thought impressions of the sleeping monster, right? And that it's like pretty terrifying because, you know, they wake up in this subterranean city with all this alien thoughts in their heads and stuff like that. And that is actually something that's a bit more talked about in "Frozen Hell", but I still think that even though it wouldn't have been okay to see more of what that was like, I still think that this is just in general a tighter version. I'm not saying he couldn't have altered "Frozen Hell" to make it better. But anyway, yeah, so. But I did also think that, yeah, that was really cool.

Gretchen:

Yeah, it would have been cool to see it in Carpenters because I think of the dream sequences and like "Prince of Darkness" or something.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Interesting to see that done in "The Thing".

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, so this is where he starts talking about viruses. And that's the kind of the thing that is brought up several times more in the 2011 version where they really go into the autopsy of the creature and try to examine its cell structure and stuff like that and how it replicates the cells of its, I guess, absorbed organisms.

Nate:

Right.

JM:

And that's like another fascinating body horror aspect of it. And I don't know, I don't want to, like, about the nature of the creature itself, like, is it, I don't know, like, it almost kind of makes me think, is it really intelligent, or is it just copying something from other creatures that gives it the appearance of intelligence?

And there's something I'll want to bring up later that I never really noticed about the films, but reading this story again for the second time for this podcast, because I had read it before, but it kind of made me realize something about the creature that it's definitely seems like a weakness that they don't really commentate on, but might be explained by, I don't know, the whole virus concept, maybe a little bit anyway.

So unlike bacteria and some other microorganisms, viruses are technically quite simple, just a protein chain attached to some RNA molecules. And at this point, rabies is brought up, though, also known as hydrophobia and other diseases that are caused by viruses like gangrene. And Blair still thinks, oh, this is nonsense. Although, even he has to admit that he has had some disconcerting dreams. And Blair says the thing is more like a plant than animal. And that's definitely what the impression of the 51 film was. It's kind of a plant monster. I don't know, in the 2011 version, it's all ten squiggly tentacles and, like, yeah.

But while Norris's talk of rabies is alarming, rabies can only infect warm-blooded animals and not, say, fish, which is a much closer ancestor of humanity than a plant. And he argues that the preservation of the creature intact, its race must have long ago expired, and it may be unique in all creation. The thing is finally revealed to the men, Barclay's axe buried in his head. Three mad, hate-filled eyes blazed up with a living fire, bright as fresh spilled blood. From a face ringed with a writhing, loathsome nest of worms, blue mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow. Yeah, hideous monster. 

The hardened, strong men are so unnerved that more than half of them rush for the exit. The bronze god McReady, though, just watches dispassionately. Norris, too, stands his ground from the other side of the table, watching, not the fleeing men, but the hideous creature. Already hates it so much.

Blair, meanwhile, just peels at the ice with a claw hammer. Men talk, and they complain that there's only one really big table, and everything is done on that one table. Kinner the cook thinks it should be for eating on only. Yeah, I'm calling to agree that you shouldn't put the creature on your eating table.

Nate:

No.

JM:

Do your archeological thawing in. Suggestions for getting the creature back to civilization. On thawed are vetoed. Kinner certainly won't have it anywhere near the frozen meat, and they all lament the lack of privacy and living space down here. Once again, Connant, the cosmic ray specialist, complains about having to sit up with the thing, which Blair is musing about, wondering if individual cells will return to life, like those of a fish.

Of course, this is very alarming to Connant, but Blair soothes him, saying only lower forms of life can revive in this way. No chance for a highly organized, intelligent creature. Blair sticks up for the creature, but Connant and Norris make eloquent arguments based on the way it looks, and it being evil, not just because it's different, but because it has a malicious aspect to it. Blair argues relativism.

Connant, though, is now alone in the big room, and Campbell describes the quiet but pervasive sounds all around him, the clocking of a geiger counter, the snoring of the men asleep down the corridor, the coal burning stove, the pressure lamp, and the drip of a thawing ice around the alien. Connant is nervous. He pokes at the thing on the table with tongs. His flesh is now rubbery and somewhat yielding.

I like the way he describes the awareness of the thing's new life. It seems to hypnotize Connant. The three red eyes glare up at him sightlessly. Blair awakes from nightmares, being shaken and yelled at by Connant. The thing escaped while he slept. Dr. Copper, who had sided with Blair all along, now has to admit he was out of his doth. Earthly laws can't apply.

"It's wonder the hellish creature didn't eat me in my sleep", says Connant. Blair suddenly gets a look of fear and starts to say something like, "maybe it did", but changes his mined All the men are awake now and getting their stuff together. And they hear howl from somewhere down the base tunnel. In Dogtown, the dogs are going wild. I like the little names they have for all the places in the camp. It's pretty cute. Big Magnet is what they call the whole thing. Yeah, Dogtown, and I forget what they call the main building. They have a name for that too.

Other then howls and furious barks, they can hear other sounds. Hateful alien snarling. Connant shoots at something and there are strange sounds. Barclay is watching while the other men are scrambling to get various weapons. They see the thing which launches itself at Connant, who swings and acts in defense. The thing gets another blow in the head, but it's quickly up and active.

McReady charges in front of the milling, unfocused men, a blow torch in his hand, scolding a thing, and he shouts for someone to bring in a power cable. He wants to electrocute it, and Campbell stops to explain how the rigging of the power cable is going to work quite meticulously in the middle of this scary scene. But that's cool. 

Nate:

Yeah, gotta appeal to the readership somehow. 

JM:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So much stuff people take for granted now, and it happens so quick in movies and stuff like that, and you're just like, how did they do that? Sometimes I feel like the writers don't even know, right? So I don't know, at least this is part of the mandate of the science fiction at that time. Trying to explain like Gallun was trying to do in his story, although that's a much quieter, less action-oriented story, definitely.

The thing at bay and surrounded by dogs and trapped is so clearly full of hatred for the men. They electrocute it and its death is described horribly. The dogs do the finishing touches. 

So the thing is back on the table now, tarpaulin covering it, all burned up, and it's also not quite the same thing they saw previously. It really does imitate other organisms. Once it got out and found the dogs, it ate the team leader, recognizing it as a creature that could do better at withstanding the frozen hell of the Antarctic. The remains of the thing they found melted and merged into dog flesh. Now they have an even weirder looking, half-alien, half-dog-like thing. And the bits that look like dog contain dog cells, but alien nuclei. 

Blair says that in time, you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference with a microscope. And he wonders if they ever saw the creature's natural form. Given time, it would make itself indistinguishable from anything, become the world's population. But it didn't have the time to digest the dog, and they got to it in time. Blair made absolutely sure the creature is dead, but Blair seems to have gone slightly nuts. He says that he is Pandora, another original title for this story. And he now admits to sabotaging the planes, because if the thing, in fact, was able to imitate any of the men, it could fly out of there to warm safety and millions more humans.

Now, though, they start wondering about infection. And Dr. Copper says that there must be a way to detect an imitation, which still must retain an element of alien biochemistry. And the hysterical, giggling Blair wonders about Connant. "Are you really there?" He asks the physicist. He was, after all, left alone with the thing as it revived.

Norris and McReady have been talking about their dreams. They think, even when it was frozen, it had some limited consciousness. Maybe telepathic, and that's how Norris, of all things, dreamed that it could change its shape. The only way a creature could imitate a man really successfully would be not only to absorb the body, but the mind as well. Then it would think, act, and talk like him when it needed to.

Suddenly, no one wants to be near Connant. They can do blood serum tests, reasons the doctor, to figure out if someone has non-human blood. The idea is to create a reaction. They will use dogs for this. The dogs, injected with enough human blood over a lengthy enough period, will develop an immune reaction. This reaction will only occur with human blood, and I guess their idea is basic biology just can't be fooled. Normally, in proper laboratory work, tests like this are done with rabbits, but none of the bunnies hang out in the Antarctic.

Commander Garry and Dr. Copper himself are going to supply the untainted human blood. Meanwhile, they propose to lock up Blair and Connant, and the doctor thinks Blair will go homicidal.

"Your eyes! I wish you could see your eyes staring", Connant keeps saying.

Now nobody wants to be alone or to have privacy, except maybe for Connant. Blair is sedated and unaware of anything. Clark, the main dog handler, says, maybe if things get really bad, someone really will have to kill everyone. It's Dr. Copper's opinion that if that happens, the last man alive in camp, Big Magnet, won't be a man at all.

Blair seems to have been touched by the thing's telepathy. At first, he was all for preservation and not assuming evil, but he slept next to the frozen thing on their way back to camp, too. He must have picked up a lot of its projected thoughts. The so-called dreams that the others had. They talk about how to tell the world about how everything is okay without revealing anything. If things get bad, they'll fake some kind of natural disaster.

I don't know, this is kind of a fun part. They're talking about all the little tricks they can do to convince everyone, like making some explosion sounds for people to hear over the radio. It's pretty fun. Even a situation that seems increasingly dire, they can find some few moments like that.

Blair's locked up in a storage cache, and he insists on being left alone with only canned, sealed food. There's actually no lock, so some detail is gone into about how they secure the door, with a trap to drop food in. The men are a bit stir-crazy with cabin fever, and it's going to be another five days before they can perform the serum tests. From now on, everyone is in teams of four, with nobody out of sight. And to the surprise of all, even maybe himself, Connant seems clear. He cries like a baby. The creature is dead, and they are all relieved, and they all get out their skis and jubilation and decide to let Blair loose.

But Dr. Copper's happiness is short-lived. The blood solution from the creature precipitates too. Copper, shaken and with tears in his eyes, pronounces the awful truth. Either himself or Commander Garry is one of the creatures. Neither Copper nor Garry can prove they are human, even though of course they both say they know they are.

"Maybe all of them are monsters", Copper goes hysterically. Garry puts McReady in charge, and McReady is brooding a lot, like the bronze god that he is. And the creature is waiting for opportunities to absorb them all in time.

The serum reacts to human blood too. McReady has an idea. The alien got to all the dogs, and the cows too. I'm not quite sure how they figured this out with the serum, but they basically torch all the dogs, except for one. But they all turn it to monsters, so I guess it's okay.

Nate:

It's kind of interesting, the movie, the Carpenter film, looks like it's going to do the whole serum plot, but then they quickly subvert it and turn it into another dramatic plot point, rather than going through all the testing and stuff.

JM:

And they made that scene very tense in the film with the testing though. Kinner the cook says he milked the cows an hour ago, and he runs out screaming while several men are sick.

The thing, the creature always melts down to try and escape. McReady wonders if the best test might be a shot to the heart. It's kind of getting morbid at this point. Kinner is babbling incessant loud prayers and singing hymns, and needs to be put away somewhere. Blair's madness has only intensified. He's sealed up the trap in his door, and they all have solipsistic moments. Everyone's a monster, but me, and of course they can all say that very thing, even the alien.

They decide to spend the night distracting themselves with movies, and while this is happening, Kinner's crazed hymn singing and yelling stops, and McReady goes to investigate with the others in tow. They find that Kinner's been knifed in the throat. Now they have monsters, madmen, and murderers. Oh my. Van Wall thinks the monster wouldn't purposefully decrease its supply of men like that. Blair isn't loose, so the murder could be human.

Just to be sure, McReady goes with Barclay to jab Kinner with the electrocuter, and he turns into a monster as he's burned to a crisp. So McReady goes to the men, like naughty schoolboys, and tells the murderer to confess, and that he did the camp of favor. Clark sheepishly does so, and McReady has something in mind now, and he knows the monsters know it, so every man must be watching his neighbor carefully.

Every part of the creature is a self-sufficient whole, including its blood. McReady thinks that the creatures aren't fighters, they're so used to getting the upper hand, and any part of them will try to escape. They won't like a hot needle, and McReady starts to prick everyone and dip a hot copper wire into the test tube of blood.

McReady, Barclay, and Van Wall are human, and they're about to test Dutton when he transmogrifies. So the men tear him to bits as he's changing, and Barclay burns the remains with his electrocuter, while Van Wall pours acid on the remains.

So they're really going to town on these creatures.

Nate:

Yeah, pretty thorough.

JM:

Yeah. Who don't cooperate, and that's the thing that gets me, is that, like, I guess it's kind of what he's saying too, is that each of them is a selfish organism, they're not, they don't seem to work together at all. If they did, they could just capture all the men and lock them up and absorb them at their leisure.

But they just seem to be out for themselves, which I think is interesting, kind of goes back to what I was wondering about their nature, you know, like, are they really intelligent in the way that we would recognize, because they don't seem to, if they cooperated, they could get the upper hand easily.

Nate:

Right.

JM:

I don't know, that's an interesting thing. On the point of asking Connant to step forward, that man also transmogrifies, of course. So he was probably the first of the absorbed men, as we all suspected.

Barclay and Van Wall finish him off too, and Garry's blood also shrinks from the needle and screams as Garry himself tries futilely to dodge electric death. I don't know, that's some pretty gruesome descriptions, and I like how he's like holding the test tube with a drop of blood at it, and this like tiny scream is coming out of it. Pretty cool.

So all in all, 14 men have been replaced, including Clark. And they all seem to be dealt with now, but they forgot all about Blair. What's he been up to? What's he doing in there? Better go see.

Of course, he hasn't just been sitting there going crazy, he's been quite active. They shoot down an albatross on the way to Blair's shack, and this time it's probably a good idea and not a terrible mistake.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

If an alien is on the loose now, they don't want it getting away in the shape of an imitated bird. So there's a mysterious blue light coming from the shack and a sound of working on something mechanical. Between the noise from inside and the noise of cutting the cables lashing the door, it's pretty loud, and the thing that was Blair doesn't notice at first. McReady sees it, though.

McReady and Barclay lunge for the door and break it down. And the Blair thing is a sneaky tentacle creature now, with many limbs, the better to work on complex devices with. It has been working on a thing like a knapsack that lifts into the air. It's got itself an anti-gravity jetpack. And it seems to have some kind of weapon, too, but Norris shoots it several times, causing great agony and the spontaneous transformations.

It's quite difficult to kill, and it almost gets Barclay working to absorb his flesh. McReady, though, has the blowtorch ready, and I'm just going to read its death scene.

"The huge blowtorch McReady had brought coughed solemnly. Abruptly it rumbled disapproval throatily. Then it laughed gurglingly and thrust out a blue-white, three-foot tongue. The thing on the floor shrieked, flailed out blindly with tentacles that writhed and withered in the bubbling wrath of the blowtorch. It crawled and turned on the floor, it shrieked and hobbled madly, but always McReady held the blowtorch on the face, the dead eyes burning and bubbling uselessly. Frantically the thing crawled and howled.

"A tentacle sprouted a savage talon—and crisped in the flame. Steadily McReady moved with a planned, grim campaign. Helpless, maddened, the thing retreated from the grunting torch, the caressing, licking tongue. For a moment it rebelled, squalling in inhuman hatred at the touch of the icy snow. Then it fell back before the charring breath of the torch, the stench of its flesh bathing it. Hopelessly it retreated—on and on across the antarctic snow. The bitter wind swept over it, twisting the torch-tongue; vainly it flopped, a trail of oily, stinking smoke bubbling away from it—"

I don't know about you guys, but after this point I felt kind of sorry for it.

The creature had been busy building things, not just this fancy cool jetpack that I guess human science now has, but something with lots of tubes and crystalline parts and another weird thing on the table. Norris thinks that one of the devices generates atomic power, separating neutrons from heavy water.

Since the monster could melt down, they couldn't have really kept him locked in, so he was free to roam the camp and get as many supplies as he needed. It's really hot in the shack. The creatures like seem to be around 120 Fahrenheit, and they got there just in time.

Barclay tests out the anti-gravity belt that has fun floating around for a bit, talking about how the thing almost had them completely fooled. Almost escaped, but how lucky they were to get there in time. Now the planet and the solar system is safe. The men boast a bit about their ingenuity and skill. I guess it's well deserved, and that's how the story ends.

Yeah, pretty classic horror story for a reason, I think. This one's been anthologized all over the place. I think it's probably one of the most... Well, I don't know. I mean, it's Campbell's name is not as well known as many of his protegees, but I think a lot of people know this story, although I'm still surprised to this day when I hear that people don't know that the 1982 film is based on a short story, and I guess it just goes to show that, yeah, it is a cult classic. Though it may have not satisfied some of the executives in its day, and maybe it could have done better, it certainly lived on in the consciousness of at least horror fans and even casual horror fans everywhere.

Nate:

Yeah, certainly universally recognized as one of the best horror films ever made, and I think I do prefer it to the Campbell story. I like the bleak ending of it a little more, and just the tension and atmosphere in the Carpenter film is really awesome, though. Campbell does do a pretty good job here too, I have to say. This is definitely a lot of fun, and it's certainly one of the better ones that we've read for this time around. There's some pretty awesome scenes both in terms of the tension with the human characters and some of the creature gore scenes with the monster and what it eats and how it gets blown up and all that stuff. Yeah, definitely an enjoyable one.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I think that it does do a good job of getting the tension rising, and I think I am a little biased towards the film just because I am more familiar with it, and again, I like the bleaker ending as well, and I was surprised when I read the story that it had a much more cheerful ending than that. So yeah, I enjoyed the story though, and even as standing alone from the adaptations of it, I think it's a really good work.

JM:

Yeah, so as well as this, of course, there's also to further add confusion. The novelization of the film is its own thing. Yet another sci-fi, big significant sci-fi film, novelized by Alan Dean Foster, who's pretty much the king of all film and TV genre novelizations, I guess at least in sci-fi and fantasy, pretty much could find his name everywhere. Star Trek, Star Wars, Transformers, Alien, I think, The Thing.

Nate:

Right.

JM:

Everywhere. And this guy has basically made a career out of doing this, although he has written other stuff as well. So it's not like he's just the tie-in guy, but he's certainly not an incredible amount of them. I don't know, apparently the novelization of the film is quite good by people who, I mean, I don't know. If I just randomly came across it and just decided to start reading it, I probably would read it. I don't mind novelizations of films sometimes. It's nice to get a different perspective on the story that I normally wouldn't have, especially. So I don't know, I don't mind.

Gretchen:

And occasionally, the novelizations do add some more insight with the characters. And there can be some fun extra moments in certain ones that are done well, I think.

JM:

Yeah, definitely. I think there's a comic as well. So yeah, this story has been adapted all over the place, probably more so than almost anything we've done on the podcast, except for "Frankenstein" and maybe "The Time Machine" and a couple other things, pretty much.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely a good story to base adaptations off of. It is kind of neat that the 50s and 80s both do different things with it. And while I think the Carpenter one is closer to the story in terms of tone and plot, it also makes some very significant changes to the story. And with the psychic stuff, both the adaptations leave some stuff out that is in the story. So yeah, all kind of different perspectives on the same base.

JM:

So I think that people who like the film should read this. If you really like the story and it's one of your favorite movies and you haven't read this yet, go ahead and read it. And if you haven't seen the film, yeah, there's nothing you could do worse than starting with this. As well, I think.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

It is the original source.

(music: echoey windy omnious ambiance)

John Campbell's legacy on science fiction

JM:

So I do want to talk a little bit more about Campbell to close off our episode, and then I guess we'll talk about what we're doing next time. But his first appearance in the magazine as Don A. Stuart was "Twilight" in November 1934, the month before "Old Faithful". And it was a moody atmospheric piece, which I sort of described earlier, and it ended up in the first Science Fiction Hall of Fame volume, which is a really thick volume that has, I think I talked about it in one of the earlier installments.

This story, "Who Goes There?", ended up in the second volume, which tend to focus on larger works, longer, slightly longer works anyway. He'd been submitting works for a few years too Amazing, and they were quite popular there. For some rivaling the wild, rambling space operas of E. E. Doc Smith. And there was still some backlog when he first came in.

According to Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines curator Marshall Tim, the Astounding readership was more interested in intellectual puzzles and quandaries than political issues. Though some authors did go in for commentary a bit. But it seems for a while that Wonder Stories, Gernsback's new magazine, was actually a little more accepting of that.

But under Campbell's influence later, things could certainly get quite political, of course. It could go, sometimes, in my opinion anyway, a bit too far the wrong way. Some effort was put into courting good Popular Science-type articles too, though, and some of which could get a little weird. And this actually had started with Tremaine, who wanted to promote discussion. Among the articles, of course, there was Willy Lee, but there was also Charles Ford, the famous English weird science guy. And some of these people, like Ley, for example, distanced themselves from Campbell later on.

But Campbell himself would take the ferry in from Orange, New Jersey every day to the ramshackle Street and Smith office building in New York City on 7th Avenue. The office was on a level mostly used for storage, reached by an ancient rope-pulled elevator. The Astounding office was just two small rooms next to the Doc Savage office.

Campbell would be there for years, till his death in 1971. There was so much paper that even in the late 30s there was a ban on smoking in the office. Torture for John Campbell. He did it anyway and hid the astrays when anyone from Street and Smith came by. From the outset, Campbell had the help of Doña, his first wife, who was also his first reader and gives some notes for writers, and also Catherine Tarrant, known as Kay, who would remain an assistant at Astounding for decades. She was called a secretary, but she pretty much handled all the administration work. Kay is the one who had a reputation for removing profanities and such from the magazine. Apparently she really didn't like that.

But Campbell was quite an attentive editor. Unsalvageable submissions got printed non-descript slip. Well, anything that he thought had potential got very personal notes from John, explaining how they could be revised. Astounding had great distribution, which helped get it out there more than some of the others. But there were something like 12 American science fiction pulps going for a while there in the late 30s. There would be even more 10 years later.

Campbell would describe his relationship with his publishers as laissez-faire. It was his magazine to play with so long as it made money, and he ensured that it did. And brought to fame many writers like Asimov, Heinlein, Hubbard, van Vogt, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert. All of them had other outlets as well. And Astounding was where many kind of got their start and grew as writers. Campbell believed that development in the physical sciences would lead to more metaphysical and non-physical ones too, hence all the parapsychology stuff that he got into.

But according to British physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Bedford, who had some chats with Campbell in the 60s, he didn't think he really understood complex ideas of physics too well. On the other hand, some of his writers complained that he just babbled nonsense of them in the form of a lecture, and they never understood a word. And Heinlein was one of these. Campbell demanded more from his writers though, and he told them, "I want reactions, not mere actions, even if your protagonist is a robot. Human readers need human reactions from it."

At the same time though, he said, "give me a creature that is not a man, but thinks as well as a man." And he had other requirements. There still had to be some hard scientific basis somewhere, and he thought technically-minded people were the best, and had the best chance of getting their stories published. They also were represented, to his mind, the bulk of the readership. And they even did a survey on this, and the results showed increasingly that the readership was skewing in that direction. And they did two, in fact, two surveys to figure out what kind of readers they had, one in 1949 and another in 1958. And they also noticed around this time that the average income of the audience was increasing above the national average due to their technical expertise, Campbell was sure.

And like I was saying earlier, he also wanted heroes, and he was really big on those, especially lone, misunderstood people with powers of intellect or the paranormal that set them apart. Kind of like, I guess, the other Campbell in a way, the other famous Joe Campbell, but he wanted remarkable men doing remarkable things, and it was inspiring, however many of the early writers would agree, even people like Raymond Gallun, who had reservations about it.

So despite his reactionary tendencies, there did seem to be a kind of balance sought in what was published, at least in the beginning, and this may have started to change by the 1950s as Campbell grew increasingly intolerant and cantankerous and firmly right-wing.

Starting in the late 30s, his favorite topic would be nuclear physics, and there was lots of discussion around stuff like this, but a lot of it was banned during the war, much to the protest of Campbell and company. It's really funny that this happened to me, because a lot of this stuff was known by people who had studied science, but the boffins were so afraid that something would leak out that when a science fiction writer started theorizing about how an atomic fission reaction could happen, they actually had the FBI visit the office and he was like, oh, you're going to ban, now we can't talk about this stuff. According to somebody like Campbell, everybody should know this stuff. This should be common knowledge. So it's kind of interesting that it was happening this way.

And of course, he also started Unknown, which we talked about a lot during the "Lest Darkness Fall" magazine, which was perfect for writers like Hubbard, who tended to get pretty weird and nonsensical with this science fiction, but possibly the closest to Campbell's vision, what he wanted was Robert A. Heinlein, and they remained friends till the early 1950s, when Heinlein, along with so many others, just got annoyed and drifted away from it.

But it was like the engineers had taken over the joint, and there's lots of critiques in the magazine around this time of both corporate and political institutions, democracy itself. The engineers, even more than the scientists, know how to get things done. That was the principle.

For a while, Willy Ley epitomized this in Campbell's mind. He had experience with German rocket society, and a real distrust of bureaucracy, dislike for Nazis, and Ley and Campbell would fall out completely over dianetics. And there's definitely a pattern here. So in the 50s, especially, there was a lot of dianetics, quote, nonfiction stuff in the magazine. And it's pretty excruciating to read nowadays.

Why was he obsessed with this stuff? Well, I guess to really get into that, we can talk a little bit about his background and the fact that he had a lot of, I guess, concerns about his childhood and things he couldn't remember. And the whole idea of dianetics is to try and unearth this kind of stuff through hypnotism and, I guess, like, uncover, I don't know, past lives and stuff like that.

But we can't really sugarcoat also that Campbell was a raging racist, and it's pretty ugly to see, especially as things kind of started to get more sort of heated in the 1960s. And I guess by this time, you know, he's kind of getting into his especially cantankerous phase, and a lot of his obsessions are starting to really affect his judgment. And he likes to talk a lot about the world and seeing different cultural points of view and so on, but he can't seem to wrap his head around certain key truths.

And there's so many anecdotes in the Nevala-Lee "Astounding" book with quotes from him and bits of correspondence and so on that are just unpleasant to read, especially later on. And I'm not going to quote any of them, but if you want to know more about this stuff, you can read that. And although I suppose some might say, oh, it's biased, I mean, people acknowledged this at that time. It's not like this is new thing, or people are like, oh, my God, he is such a racist. That's terrible. People at the time knew about this, and they talked about it, and Campbell had many who were not fans of him for various reasons, not just that. I mean, that was certainly a factor for some.

And of course, there's the famous anecdote of Samuel Delaney, who had submitted "Nova" to Astounding, and Campbell's like, wow, this kid can really write. But I'm not sure that my magazine, that is the audience of my magazine, is ready to accept a story with a black protagonist. So sorry.

He had this falsely encouraging demeanor about him. I don't know. It's just like, yeah, I mean, maybe he would have gotten some nasty letters, but somebody has to take the step, right? And he missed a chance there to just go ahead and do it, and prove that that kind of thing wasn't really an obstacle for him, and yet he couldn't bring himself to do it. And that's certainly something that obviously stuck in Samuel Delaney's craw quite a bit.

There were other things like his attitude about himself being very of a kind of misunderstood, high IQ genius type person. Isaac Asimov kind of thought this way too, but I think the difference between them was that Asimov was actually closer to the kind of person that Campbell wanted to be, right?

But he was also, I mean, the man had his faults too, which I don't know, we could get into one day when we cover one of his stories, but he was a lot more open-minded about a lot of things. So, but he was also a very smart person with worked as a professor of chemistry and stuff like that, and had a lot of knowledge about things, whereas Campbell sometimes just seemed to go off the deep end, and he was into a lot of bizarre stuff, like weird inventions and so on, not just dianetics, but like all kinds of weird stuff.

But yeah, I mean, although he had other detractors too, like C.M. Kornbluth openly disrespected him in public, and Gallun talks about the gatherings of the authors at the New York restaurant, and how they like to roast him, Manly Wade Wellman especially. He said that he liked to bust in on it when he was trying to work, and Gallun said when asked to clarify his complaints, "since Campbell was known as a conscientious editor who gave thoughtful rejection letters, oh yeah, he did, but they were hard to understand. He was quite the opposite of Orlan Tremaine, who wrote brief letters which were clear. As far as I'm concerned, Tremaine was a lot easier to work with, because Campbell would write a long letter with plenty of discussion, but he still wouldn't buy the story."

Later on, perhaps some of this stuff would become more clear. John Campbell was pushing his particular things, and he wanted his authors to fall into line, and he liked the messianic streak of Paul Atreides in "Dune". Not the world building, or the cautionary tale against charismatic leaders, he didn't publish "Dune Messiah", as it disappointed him, not really adhering to his vision of what he thought Paul was.

But I think maybe we'll save the rest, and I do want to talk a little bit more about him, but we are coming back to Astounding in the future, and that's probably a good time to bring up some of the other things that I wanted to bring up. We're kind of crapping on him here, but I do have this other anecdote that I did want to share from Charles Hornig, and it's kind of his story of his experiences with Campbell. Charles Hornig, who was the editor of Wonder Stories, recalls many years later. And Hornig seems like a pretty nice guy, kind of, I don't know, he feels like the readership made fun of him a lot. He was a little bit like, he was a really young and inexperienced kid when he took over as assistant editor, and people like to say he had no talent, and Hornig is kind of one of those classic cases of, instead of at least outwardly showing he was hurt by it, you just kind of go along with it, and then, yes, here's me, untalented Chuck, and he's kind of funny, he's in that "Conversations" book from the 80s as well, along with Gallun, so he's basically asked to share all his anecdotes about feelings with people in the science fiction community, but he says: 

"One day about 1934, Campbell walked into my office, he'd not joined Astounding yet, and was just a writer, and he brought with him a great pile of short stories, which he told me I could publish, but he said, 'I have to have a cent word for them.' Now, this was double our going rate, so I said, well, I'll have to talk to Gernsback about that, because he doesn't generally pay that much, and Campbell said, 'well, you let me know, if you pay a cent a word, you can have them.' I read them immediately, and none of them was any good. Evidently, he was trying to pawn off on me stuff he'd written as a child or a young man, things he'd had in a drawer for 10 or 15 years that no one else would buy. Probably he thought, 'what does this kid know about anything? He'll be glad to publish anything by John W. Campbell.' But I just couldn't do it. I passed them on to Gernsback and told him, I'm sorry, but I don't think any of these are worth publishing, and anyway, he wants a cent a word. Gernsback agreed, so I called Campbell and I rejected them. After that, I never got along with Campbell. At a convention, he would purposefully snub me. Campbell was a great one for hating people. Then again, I was inferior to him. I didn't know science properly, and I couldn't write for Astounding, so I wasn't worth much in his eyes. But I humbled myself once enough to ask Campbell for a job. Years after I'd left Wonder Stories, I tried again to get back into science fiction. So I wrote to him asking for a job at Astounding when he was then editing. And he replied, asking me to come in and see him. I went, and he told me personally, no, I think he only wanted to see me crawl."

So yeah, I mean, this guy was a dick, plain and simple. Although it doesn't really show through in the story we read tonight, I think during his time in the magazine as its figurehead and prime mover, it really does start to show a lot. I think maybe another reason why the 40s is called the Golden Age is that there wasn't that much of his lecturing and editorializing compared to what they saw in the 50s and onwards. And I think that's also no coincidence to explain why increasingly magazines like Galaxy and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction started to really gain precedence in the field over Astounding at that time.

But Astounding actually survived, and still survives to this day in a way, is of course called Analog Science Fact and Science Fiction, and it's won many, many Hugo Awards and other awards. Starting in 1972, Ben Bova took over, and then in 1978 had another really long editorship for somebody else whose name I actually don't remember and unfortunately didn't write down, but he was pretty much editor till like the early, sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s even.

And yeah, the magazine is kind of considered the main sort of flagship of the harder end of science fiction at this point. And things certainly did change when Bova took over. In 1977 they published a special women's issue, which I don't think any of the magazines had really done for that time, although they certainly did feature women in some level of quantities depending on I guess how receptive the editors were and how much they were actually inspired to write for these science fiction magazines, which Campbell certainly considered a boys club, even though he was certainly willing to publish some women writers and in the July 1939 issue, which we'll be talking about at length in a couple months, there is a story by C.L. Moore and another by Amelia Reynolds Long, so I think that's going to be really exciting, but we're not going to do that one just yet.

Before we get there, we are actually going to talk a little bit more about fandom. Nate, was there anything you wanted to say to introduce that concept and what we're going to be mostly looking at?

Nate:

Yeah, so I guess these three episodes we're doing, the one we did tonight focusing on the early days of Astounding, the next one we're doing and the one after that, which is going to be a deeper look more into Astounding, is kind of trying to chronicle the rise of the Golden Age and the establishments of not only the literary traditions and how the magazines operated, but also how the readers and the fan community functioned as the idea of fandom, what we now know today as a science fiction community, really started to spring up in the late 1920s, early 1930s with conventions and the science fiction clubs and fanzines that popped up around that time.

Since we are a literature podcast first and foremost, we're going to be taking a look at a number of very short pieces from some of the fanzines that popped up in the 1930s. So it's probably going to be a looser episode than our normal episodes. These are going to be typically much shorter pieces, though some of them are by established authors. So in particular, we're going to be looking at Clark Ashton Smith's "The Primal City", which was published in Fantasy Fan in November of 1934. Ralph Milne Farley's "The Rexsmell", which was published in Fantasy Magazine number 32 in July of 1935. James Blish's "Pursuit Into Nowhere, adopted from the Annals of Space Patrol", published in his own zine Planeteer number 3 from January of 1936. Sam Moskowitz's "Why Doesn't Our Ship Move" from Helios number 1 in June 1937. And we're also going to be taking a look at some of the early Star Trek fandom from the 1960s, where fan fiction comes into play in the fanzines there.

We might get into more of that in a later episode with TV tie-ins and stuff like that, and the effects that Star Trek had on the science fiction community, both in terms of bringing a whole new group of people into the fandom, as well as its effects on the literature through fan fiction and how that became really popular during that time. Kind of setting the bounds, though a lot of it will be focused on this 1930s time period when the Golden Age gets going.

So in addition to those stories, we're probably going to be pulling reviews, editorials, and things like that from the fanzines, which I think will be a lot fun to take a look at, so we get to hear the same complaints that we hear nowadays of, oh, "I wish it was like it was 20 years ago, the stories just aren't as good anymore," you know, that kind of stuff. Hopefully we can find some reviews of people trashing works that are now considered classics or likewise praising works that are now not considered classics.

I think Abraham Merritt's name comes up in a lot of these fanzine issues as people's personal favorites, so I'm sure there's going to be a lot of authors that we've talked about or covered on the podcast that come up in these a lot, as well as the editors of these fanzines are going to be people that have lifelong careers in science fiction in the case of people like James Blish becoming well-acclaimed science fiction authors in their own right and not just like industry behind the scenes type people.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

Chrononauts itself is likewise a fan publication, so we're kind of tracing our own roots back to this time period. I don't think there were too many fan radio shows in the 1930s, but who knows, we never know what we're going to find until we take a look into it.

 But you could read all these fanzines easily online. There is a absolutely fantastic website which has literally tens of thousands of science fiction fanzines posted for you to read. So if you go to fanac.org, you will find a massive, massive archive of fanzines dating back to the 1930s, including all the issues that we've mentioned here for stuff that we're going to be covering next time. So yeah, we're going to be digging into a lot of that stuff next time. I think it's going to be a really fun episode, again, a bit different than some of the stuff that we normally do, but quite significant in its own way.

JM:

Yeah. And I think nowadays, you know, how it all connects together is quite interesting. You mentioned James Blish earlier, and of course, yes, he did get his start as a writer and in the science fiction fan community as well before there was a Star Trek. But when Star Trek became a thing, he ended up doing a lot of the novelizations and writing one of, if not the first actual published Star Trek novel.

So, and I'm pretty sure that most people who get into science fiction today or, well, not even today, but maybe in the last 30 years especially, have really made an entrance due to the fandom angle one way or another. I mean, yeah, it might be because they got into a TV show or something like that, but then they wanted to find out more about the show and figure out if there were people they could talk to about it and so on. And from there, they might have discovered other outlets of science fiction, including, well, some of the magazines that still existed in the 90s and 2000s, like Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and Analog and so on.

And Doctor Who fandom was sort of something that I got into for a little while there when I was younger, and although I never really connected too much with Star Trek fans as a whole, I definitely do consider myself somewhat of a Star Trek fan. We are going to be looking at that kind of stuff later on too, in more detail. So, some interesting things coming up on Chrononauts.

Well, well, I'm detecting a musky smell in the air. It's either a beautiful woman or an alien masquerading as an invisible two-dimensional alligator. So, I think I better go and hide somewhere before either one of them finds me, because they can be pretty dangerous. Alright, we have been Chrononauts, and we hope you enjoyed this episode. We will be back next month.

Bibliography:

Ashley, Mike - "The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp magazines From the Beginning to 1950" (2001)

Bleiler, Everett - "Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years" (1998)

Davin, Eric Leif - "Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations With the Founders of Science Fiction Hardcover" (1999)

Silverberg, Robert and Nevala-Lee, Alec - "Frozen Hell: Introduction and Foreword" (2019)

Tymn, Marshall B. and Ashley, Mike (eds.) - "Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction magazines" (1985)