Who Goes There?

Published in 1938, John W. Campbell influenced a number of famous science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, but the book, strangely enough, isn’t particularly enjoyable for a couple of reasons:

> It’s a short novella and although the ideas are there the flow is choppy and sometimes difficult to understand as it suddenly jumps to new scenes and concepts.

> It’s not particularly well written and some of the text is jarring to read and needs to be scanned multiple times.

The concept behind the book is terrific though and the reason that various movies have been made and remade (The Thing), involving a botched alien landing millions of years ago that’s then frozen into the ice, followed by egotistical men wanting to be the ‘first’ to thaw it out and make discoveries.

The Thing wreaks havoc after that.

The geographical setting in the middle of frozen nowhere, with men gradually being attacked, replicated and going mad is genuinely scary, but the book is strangely crusty and the movies capture the tension much better.

There’s quite a lot of scientific reasoning and occasionally old-fashioned dialogue, making it feel dated, then jumping into the ever-so-brief action again, this being more a work of science fiction and cosmic horror than outright horror.

I don’t particularly recommend this novella other than maybe as a group read to discover where it started from and to say you’ve read it because it’s strangely sedate and not particularly entertaining.