Frozen Hell

INTRODUCTION, by Robert Silverberg

The novella “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr., is one of the most famous science-fiction horror stories ever written. When it first appeared, in the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, the magazine that the 28-year-old Campbell had been editing for less than a year, it established itself immediately as a classic work. Along with Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Boot-straps,” Lester del Rey’s “Nerves,” and Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall,” it was one of the four anchoring stories of the 1946 anthology Adventures in Time and Space, a book still in print after more than seventy years that is the definitive collection of Golden Age science fiction (most of which came from Campbell’s own magazine.) Campbell’s story finished in first place in the voting when the Science Fiction Writers of America chose the stories for its 1971 Hall of Fame anthology of the greatest science-fiction novellas. It has been filmed three times and in 2014 the World Science Fiction Convention gave it a retroactive Hugo award as the best novella of 1938. I can never forget my own first reading of it, in Adventures in Time and Space, when I was thirteen: it had an overwhelming impact for me and has never failed, in many rereadings over the decades, to generate the same sort of excitement I felt in that first encounter. “Who Goes There” is a masterpiece, the work of a writer in full command of his powers.

Campbell would go on to edit Astounding and its successor Analog Science Fiction for 33 more years, publishing, along the way, the best work of such writers as Heinlein, Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, and many another mighty figure of that formative period in the history of science fiction. He was a mighty figure himself, physically imposing, a big man with a commanding voice, still the dominant editor of the field when I first entered his office, with more than a little trepidation, as a new young writer in 1955. Though he no longer wrote science fiction himself—his editorial responsibilities kept him too busy for that—he was a fountain of ideas, sharing them freely with the authors who visited them (myself included, though I was just a twenty-year-old beginner.)

What I had trouble realizing, as a novice writer standing in the presence of the great John Campbell in 1955, was that there had been a time when Campbell himself was a novice, young, uncertain, struggling to earn a living as a writer. Like me, he had begun writing science fiction in his teens.

And, like me, he had won editorial acceptance right away. The editor who took his first story promptly lost it, though, and since Campbell had no other copy of it, it was lost forever. But a second story, “When the Atoms Failed,” afforded him his professional debut in the January 1930 issue of Amazing Stories. He was nineteen years old. The editor’s introduction declared, “Our new author, who is a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shows marvelous ability at combining science with romance, evolving a piece of fiction of real scientific and literary value.”

Young Campbell followed it swiftly with a string of lengthy stories—“The Black Star Passes,” “Piracy Preferred,” “Islands of Space,” “Invaders from the Infinite,” and others, which established him, while he was still in his early 20s, as the second most popular science-fiction writer of the time, behind only Dr. E.E. Smith, the author of vast and ponderous space epics that Campbell had carefully imitated. By 1934, when his serialized novel “The Mightiest Machine” appeared in Astounding (even then the leading magazine of the field), he was looked upon by readers more highly than even Smith himself.

The problem was that this early success did not translate itself into any sort of financial security. The science-fiction magazines of that early day paid a cent a word at best, and Campbell’s primary market, Amazing Stories, paid on publication, which meant he could wait as long as two years before seeing any return on his work. And, major figure that he was to science-fiction readers, he was not doing well in the mundane world. He had flunked out of M.I.T. in his junior year after three times failing to pass his German course, a required subject. After that embarrassing debacle he enrolled at Duke University, where, after an intensive summer course in German, he finally was able to come away with a degree in 1934. By then he had married, and, unable to earn a real-world living from his writing, he had embarked on a series of undistinguished jobs—car salesman, air-conditioner salesman, and a secretarial job at Mack Trucks, among others—but never managed to keep any of them very long.

His writing career was presenting difficulties, too. F. Orlin Tremaine, the astute editor of Astounding, had begun to think that readers were tiring of the sort of super-science tales that had brought Campbell his early fame, wordy epics in which grim, methodical supermen repeatedly saved the world from menacing aliens by mastering, with the greatest of ease, such things as faster—than-light travel, the fabrication of matter-destroying rays, the release of atomic energy, and the penetration of hyperspace. In 1935 Campbell turned in three lengthy sequels to The Mightiest Machine and Tremaine rejected all three. He had no place else to sell them, since Amazing Stories already was holding a novel of his for which it had not yet paid, and Wonder Stories, the third of the three science-fiction magazines of the day, was in financial trouble and buying very little new material, and the failure of the three novellas left him in harsh financial circumstances.

Having exhausted the possibilities of the high-tech galactic epic on which he had built his fame, Campbell somewhat desperately began to reposition himself as a writer. At Tremaine’s suggestion he began a series of moody, poetic stories of the far future under the pseudonym of “Don A. Stuart”. These, beginning with the haunting, visionary “Twilight” and going on to “Blindness,” “The Machine,” “Night,” and several others, were an immediate success with the readers of Astounding. Seeking to escape from the low—pay world of the science-fiction pulps, Campbell looked toward Argosy, a weekly magazine of general fiction noted for publishing fantastic novels by such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt and paying quite well for them. He tried them with Frozen Hell, a tight, tense novel about a lunar expedition stranded on the Moon, which had not interested Tremaine. But it was written in diary form, a mode not ideally suited to the demands of the magazine readers of the day for fast-paced fiction, and neither Argosy nor any other magazine cared for it. (It finally saw print in 1951, published by a small press under the title of The Moon is Hell.)With the heavy-science epic no longer marketable, and the moody Don A. Stuart stories insufficient to support him by themselves, Campbell needed to find something different to write, and, with the help of a new editor named Mort Weisinger, he undertook a series of potboilers in the comic mode of Stanley G. Weinbaum, an immensely popular writer who had died in 1935 after a brief, spectacular career. Weinbaum was a natural storyteller with a distinctive light touch, and his work had won him a wide following, beginning in 1934 in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories with “A Martian Odyssey,” still often reprinted in anthologies, and continuing until his death eighteen months later. The sales of Wonder Stories were approaching the vanishing point early in 1936, and Gernsback sold it to the aptly named Standard Magazines, a chain of pulps that dealt in simply told action-adventure stories for young readers, which renamed it Thrilling Wonder Stories. Weisinger, a long-time science-fiction fan who was put in charge, was aware that Weinbaum had been the old magazine’s readers’ favorite, and, with Weinbaum no longer available, he called in John Campbell and asked him to write a series of stories in the Weinbaum manner.

Campbell, hard pressed to pay his rent at the time, eagerly complied. The usual Weinbaum plot had involved space explorers who become entangled in some complicated manner with alien beings, and though Campbell’s published work had been anything but lighthearted up until then, he proposed a group of breezy Weinbaumian tales featuring two space travelers named Penton and Blake. The first one Campbell turned in, in the spring of 1936, was “Imitation,” to which Weisinger gave the livelier title of “Brain-Stealers of Mars” when he ran it in the December 1936 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

“Brain-Stealers” begins in a cheerfully Weinbaumian way. Penton and Blake, having caused some trouble on Earth by touching off an atomic explosion in the course of an experiment, jump into a spaceship and take off for Mars. They are puzzled to find what look like Japanese maple trees there, and also weirder-looking plants, weird plants and animals having been a Weinbaum specialty. Before long things get stranger: the Japanese maples change form, becoming something very alien; and then Penton and Blake find themselves surrounded by some twenty duplicate Pentons and Blakes, identical in all respects, including voices, personalities, and memories.

They respond fairly casually at first, Blake shooting one of the extra Pentons with his atomic pistol when it begins to show signs of further physical change, then eliminating some of the others. Then centaur-like creatures show up—Martian natives, quite friendly, who explain telepathically that the shapeshifters are creatures called thushol that have the power of transforming themselves into perfect imitations of other life-forms.

“How do you tell them from the thing they’re imitating?” Penton asks.

“It used to bother us because we couldn’t,” one of the centaurs replies. “But it doesn’t any more.”

“I know—but how do you tell them apart? Do you do it by mind-reading?”

“Oh, no. We don’t try to tell them apart. That way they don’t bother us any more.”

The centaurs are untroubled by the presence of shapeshifters in their midst (“If the imitation is so perfect we can’t tell the difference, what’s the difference?”), but Penton and Blake see real danger in it, and abruptly what had been an amiable Weinbaumian romp takes on a much darker tone. What if some future explorer from Earth inadvertently brings a thushol back from Mars? “If they eat like an amoeba,” Penton says, “God help us. If you maroon one on a desert island, it will turn into a fish, and swim home. If you put it in jail it will turn into a snake and go down the drain pipe. If you dump it in the desert it will turn into a cactus and get along real nice, thank you.” The thushol, he saw, were infinitely adaptive creatures that could conquer and absorb all enemies, and if they somehow managed to get to Earth it would mean the end of the human race.

The thing to do, they realize, is to return to Earth immediately. But all about them are duplicate Pentons and Blakes, indistinguishable from the originals. How can each of the authentic Earthmen be certain that no thushol has taken the place of the other one for the return voyage? Some reliable way of determining authenticity is needed; and after a time Penton devises one, an ingenious biological test, quite Weinbaumian in nature, that allows them to identify and destroy all the false Pentons and Blakes in their midst. The world is saved and the story ends with a wry Weinbaumian punchline.

“Brain-Stealers of Mars” was no more than a clever piece of hackwork nicely suited for the undemanding requirements of \Thrilling Wonder Stories. Campbell quickly followed it with further Penton and Blake adventures for Weisinger. But he still yearned to break away from the low-paying science-fiction magazines, and in the spring of 1937, he paid a call on Jack Byrne, the editor of Argosy, who had let it be known that he wanted to publish more science fiction but had no idea where to find it.

Campbell told of his meeting with Byrne in a letter to his best friend, Robert Swisher, a pharmaceutical chemist and avid science-fiction reader who lived in a suburb of Boston: “Byrne was offered a collection of story ideas, including the human mutant one, but he liked best the idea of the Thusol [sic] from ‘Brain-Stealers of Mars’. I told him I’d done it in a humorous vein—comic opera possibilities of course obvious—for Wonder. Would he like it done in a horror vein, with the setting Earth instead of Mars.… He would. Wants 24,000, 35,000, or 44,000 words of it. They pay 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 cents a word for their stuff—34,000 of them sound interesting.… Byrne said he didn’t think the Thusol should be let loose on Earth—inject ’em into a movie colony on location—or on a desert island or something—in a city would be too darned much, and too impersonal. (Think he’s right myself.) The horror angle there is—they might get loose.… I finally decided they get loose in an Antarctic expedition, when one was thawed out of the Antarctic ice.…Starts with the finding of things. Biologist puts frozen beast in the one cabin that’s kept warm all night, so that it can thaw out for dissection; the hut where the meteor observer sits alone all night. Something stirs behind him—he turns.

“The next morning—he finds animal gone. Great curiosity. Meteor man says he didn’t hear a sound all night—wanders off— He’s missing later, but they find a cow in the passage, half molten, and a three-foot image of meteor man growing from it—it runs—they learn the horrible truth.”

Thus was the future classic “Who Goes There?” born. But there was many a step, and a misstep or two, between the initiation of the idea and the final great story.

Campbell set out immediately to write it, working at his usual high speed, and by June, 1937 had done his new story employing the shapeshifting monster theme, setting it on an Antarctic base that he envisioned after reading the account of Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s recent expedition to the south polar regions. He may also have been influenced to some degree by H.P. Lovecraft’s novella “At the Mountains of Madness,” which had been serialized in Astounding in 1936—a powerful tale with an Antarctic setting, although Lovecraft’s style and narrative approach had very little in common with Campbell’s. A third factor that may have enabled Campbell to intensify the impact of his shapeshifter plot was a strange autobiographical one that Campbell revealed many years later: his mother had been one of a pair of identical twins, so much like each other that as a small boy he was unable to tell them apart. The sisters disliked each other and the aunt disliked her nephew, and on occasion he would come home from school to seek comfort from his mother for some mishap that day, only to be coldly rebuffed by a woman who was actually his aunt.

He called the new story Frozen Hell, thus recycling the title of his unsold and apparently unsalable novel of lunar exploration of the year before. His intended market was Argosy, but when Jack Byrne of Argosy called him into the office to discuss the story, it was to tell him of its rejection. As Campbell wrote to his friend Swisher, Byrne had said “‘it’s a good yarn, good idea, good writing. But there aren’t any characters in it. It’s got a bunch of minor characters, but no major characters.’ Quite true—I can see that. Hence, most of the conference revolved about how to bring out characters.” In the 15-minute discussion that followed, Byrne’s associate editor, George Post, suggested that what the story needed was a female character. Campbell was willing to give that a try, but saw no way to make a woman part of a 1930s Antarctic expedition. He went home promising to study the story and find some way to make it acceptable.

Campbell was destined to become one of the most capable editors in the history of science fiction, and I can testify from my own experience of his editorial skills, eighteen years after the time he was working on his Antarctic horror tale, that he had a superb sense of story construction and knew how to guide the author of a not-quite-right work toward a satisfying revision. Those skills must already have been well developed even in 1937, when, after all, he had been writing for the science-fiction magazines for eight years and had published a great many widely admired stories.

We know how he went about shaping the Antarctic novel he called Frozen Hell into the masterly novella “Who Goes There?,” because we have the text of Frozen Hell available for comparison today. No one had given much thought to that original version for many years, though when the Swisher-Campbell letters were published in a limited edition in 2011 it was mentioned; but even then the manuscript was believed to be lost. A few years later, though, Alec Nevala-Lee, while doing research for his book Astounding (an account of Campbell’s influence on science fiction, and in particular of his editorial relationships with Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard), came upon a reference in Campbell’s correspondence file to a box of manuscripts that Campbell had deposited in the Harvard University library. Nevala-Lee eventually discovered the forgotten box in Harvard’s Houghton Library, and there within it was the Antarctic version of Frozen Hell, now brought forth at last for 21st-century readers.

Comparing the rediscovered manuscript with the published novella is an instructive lesson in Campbell’s growing mastery of his craft. What is immediately apparent when putting one against the other is that Campbell the future editor must have realized at once that he had opened the story in the wrong place. Frozen Hell starts with the discovery of an alien spaceship buried in the Antarctic ice cap, but, though Campbell tells of it in the crisp, efficient prose that had become his professional hallmark, and describes the south polar setting with a vividness worthy of Admiral Byrd himself (“The northern horizon was barely washed with rose and crimson and green, the southern horizon black mystery sweeping off to the pole.…”), nothing that he tells us in the first three chapters of the original version drives the reader toward the terrifying situation that is the mainspring of the novella’s plot. That situation is foreshadowed, in a heavy-handed way, toward the end of Chapter Three, when McReady, who is as close to a protagonist as the story will have, tells of a nightmare he has had (which recapitulates the story line that Campbell had used in “Brain-Stealers of Mars”). In his dream the Antarctic explorers have brought forth a strange frozen creature from the ice that manifests shapechanging powers. “It could turn into anything, or anybody.… It had a secret, unholy knowledge of life and life-stuff, protoplasm, gained through ages of experiment and thought. That is, it wasn’t bound to any form or size or shape, but could mold its very blood and flesh and smallest cell to not merely imitate but duplicate the blood and flesh and cells of any other thing it chose. And read the thoughts, the habits, the mind of anyone.”

This is, of course, the nightmarish central situation we will ultimately encounter in “Who Goes There?” But laying it out in this blunt way, in flat exposition and in the arm’s-length reality of a retold dream, must have struck Campbell, upon re-reading, as a woefully ineffective way of setting up his plot. There were other flaws in the longer version, too. On page 12 we find a scientist named Norris explaining something to McReady, in two paragraphs of leaden dialogue, that McReady surely already knows. (“To a compass the magnetic South Pole is what the true south pole 1,200 miles away is to the geographer; any direction is due north. There is no horizontal pull, the shortest way north is straight down.…”) And on page 35 the Antarctic explorers accidentally destroy the buried alien spaceship in a clumsy attempt to excavate it, though it would have been much more plausible to leave it in the ice to be recovered by some later, and better-equipped, expedition.

In his revision Campbell solved all these problems simply by cutting the first three chapters, getting rid of the slow opening sequence and the lecture on geomagnetism, and brushing McReady’s dream and the destruction of the spaceship into quick flashbacks where they would be less obtrusive. To set events in motion now he wrote two new paragraphs that constitute one of the most potent story openings in the history of science fiction:

The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combatted the musty smell of sweat-and-snow-drenched furs. The acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air.

Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet, somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their associates—dogs, machines, and cooking—came another taint. It was a queer, neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of industry and life. And it was a life-smell. But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically over the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the unshielded glare of the electric light.

It is all there, from the harsh crackle of that three-word opening sentence through the sensory pressure of the reek of sweat and blubber to the presence of some mysterious alien thing strapped up in a tarpaulin on a table. And from that point on the pace is unrelenting, as horror upon horror is manifested, and, ultimately, the survivors conquer the alien menace a way analogous to the resolution of the similar problem posed in “Brain-Stealers of Mars,” but this time in no way comic.

The final version of the story, now called “Who Goes There?,” is essentially the last five chapters of the eight-chapter Frozen Hell, with only minor revisions. “I had more fun writing that story than I’ve gotten out of any I ever turned out,” he said in a letter to Robert Swisher. Though he must have known that the revised story was far superior to the original, Campbell was un- certain enough about it to show the manuscript to his wife Doña, who frequently served as his first reader. “Doña says I clicked,” he told Swisher jubilantly. He showed it also to his friend Mort Weisinger of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Weisinger was impressed also, though he grumbled about Campbells’ recycling of the plot idea of “Brain-Stealers of Mars,” which he had published. “Mort got peeved,” Campbell reported to Swisher. “Seems he has an idea he bought the idea as well as the story, when he bought ‘Brain-Stealers of Mars’. I disagree. We left with no blows exchanged.”

Weisinger did not want the story for Thrilling Wonder Stories—he needed material that adhered more closely to pulp-magazine formulas—and it is not clear whether Campbell submitted it to Argosy, which had suggested he rewrite the longer version in the first place. But late in the summer of 1937 he offered it to F. Orlin Tremaine of Astounding. A strange thing happened, though, while the manuscript was still sitting on Tremaine’s desk. In September, 1937, Street & Smith, the publishers of Astounding, underwent a vast corporate shakeup. Ten of its magazines were discontinued, some high managerial figures were dismissed, and Tremaine was moved up into the post of executive editor of the entire magazine chain, leaving Astounding itself without an editor. And at the beginning of October Tremaine asked Campbell to be his replacement. With astonishing swiftness Campbell found himself the editor of the very magazine to which “Who Goes There?” was currently under submission.

Science-fiction fandom was amazed that Campbell, who was looked upon as a titan among writers, would abandon a brilliant writing career to take on a mere editorial job. From Campbell’s point of view the situation looked quite different. He had depended, since leaving college in 1934, on the uncertain income from three science-fiction magazines that paid, at best, a cent a word for their material. He had held a series of uninteresting mundane jobs, affording satisfaction neither to himself nor to his various employers. Science fiction was central to his life, and the job at Astounding would provide a steady income while allowing him to immerse himself in the field that he loved. And, in fact, this was the last job Campbell ever would have: he would hold it to the end of his days, in 1971.

He could not, however, buy his new novella on his own say-so. As editor he was at that time merely a first reader, and needed Tremaine’s approval for anything he acquired; but “Who Goes There?” presented no problems for Tremaine, and the story was purchased and put into the schedule for publication in an early issue. Campbell would run it not under his own name but with the “Don A. Stuart” pseudonym; but by then the identity of “Stuart” was pretty much an open secret among science-fiction readers.

By the time “Who Goes There?” appeared, in the August 1938 Astounding, Campbell no longer had Orlin Tremaine looking over his shoulder. Tremaine was not comfortable in his new managerial post and Street & Smith was not comfortable with him, and by May, 1938, he was gone, ostensibly by resignation but actually having been dismissed by Street & Smith’s new president, “with the result,” Campbell told Swisher, “that I am now all of Astounding. There isn’t any more. No assistant, no readers, no nobody.” With Tremaine out of the picture Campbell had put the magazine through an extensive makeover, going about it in the dynamic manner that would mark his entire long editorial career.

One of the first things Campbell did was to change the magazine’s name from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science Fiction with the March 1938 issue. He loathed that gaudy adjective “astounding,” but could not then get rid of it; this was the best he could do in 1938. (He finally dumped it in 1960 in favor of Analog Science Fiction, the name it still bears.) The cover format underwent a redesign, and a splendid new cover artist, Hubert Rogers, arrived and created, month after month, visions of the shining future that were in line with Campbell’s own. Campbell had inherited a considerable backlog of stories from Tremaine, which was not a serious problem, since Tremaine had been an excellent editor. But Campbell, a younger man firmly grounded in the twentieth-century, wanted the magazine’s fiction to take a fresher approach, and a change in tone became apparent within a few months. Some of the stories he bought were by long-time Tremaine contributors like Jack Williamson, Nat Schachner, and Raymond Z. Gallun, but, month by month, new names appeared on the contents page—L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, and many others, who under Campbell’s editorial guidance would transform the way science fiction was written forever. It was a radical and memorable metamorphosis, and knowledgeable readers today still look back on the era of Astounding Science Fiction of Campbell’s early years as a golden age.

Of all the Golden Age classics, Campbell’s own “Who Goes There?” has long held a key position, and those of us who have revered that story since our first acquaintance with it owe Alec Nevala-Lee deep gratitude for his excavation of the earlier version of that masterpiece. Not only is Frozen Hell of major interest by the way it shows a great s-f writer gaining total mastery of his craft and the nascent great editor that was the John W. Campbell of 1937 demonstrating why the magazine he would shortly be editing defined the modern era of science fiction, but the original version itself, for all its flaws, is exciting in its own right, providing character development and background detail that Campbell, for the sake of telling a swifter story, eliminated from his final draft. It is, of itself, a treasure. We are lucky to have it.