Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
FRONTISPIECE
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE, by Alec Nevala-Lee
INTRODUCTION, by Robert Silverberg
FROZEN HELL, by John W. Campbell, Jr.
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
PREVIEW OF THE SEQUEL
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR.
PREFACE
ALEC NEVALA-LEE
INTRODUCTION
ROBERT SILVERBERG
ARTWORK
BOB EGGLEDON
EDITED BY
JOHN GREGORY BETANCOURT
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2019 by the Estate of John W. Campbell, Jr.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
wildsidepress.com
DEDICATION
For Leslyn, John, and Katea.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Evelyn Kriete, John D. Mason,
Neil Jordan, Christopher Mello, Charles Shanley, and Eric Strauss.
PREFACE, by Alec Nevala-Lee
The greatest science fiction horror story of all time opens with the accidental discovery of a relic that has gone undisturbed for ages. Frozen Hell was unearthed in much the same way, although its reappearance was somewhat less dramatic. Instead of the Antarctic ice, it resided in an offsite storage facility used by Houghton Library at Harvard, and it wasn’t detected through a magnetic anomaly, but through a line in a letter and an obscure catalog entry. It went overlooked for six decades, rather than 20 million years, which was still long enough for it to be forgotten. And instead of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, it lay within a carton of a few dozen manila folders, labeled lightly in pencil, that contained the bulk of the fiction of John W. Campbell, Jr., and Don A. Stuart, who somehow were the same man.
When you glance through the browned typewriter carbons inside the box, you find many titles that only the most dedicated science fiction fan would recognize. Among the manuscripts are drafts of the superscience sagas, such as “Uncertainty” and The Mightiest Machine, that Campbell cranked out in the ’30s under his own name, as well as other works, notably the novel The Moon is Hell, that wouldn’t appear in print until much later. There are also the vastly superior stories that he wrote as Don A. Stuart, including early versions of “Night,” “Dead Knowledge,” and “Forgetfulness,” and a few efforts—“The Bridge of One Crossing,” “The Gods Laugh Twice,” “Silence”—that he never published at all. One precious folder holds a copy of “Beyond the Door,” the only known work of fiction by his remarkable wife Doña.
But two folders—labeled “Frozen Hell” and “Pandora”—stand out from the rest. One contains the first 20 pages of a story in clean typescript, a fair copy that was presumably prepared by Doña, who was a better typist than her husband. The other holds 112 pages of a complete rough draft, with typographical errors and misspellings that suggest that it was typed by Campbell, along with numerous corrections in the author’s hand. A cover page bears the alternative titles “Frozen Hell” or “Pandora,” one typewritten, the other written in small capitals, and a note indicates that the manuscript was meant for Argosy, the leading pulp magazine of its era.
The pages that follow correspond to no published work, although some readers might recognize the character named McReady, as well as the setting on an icy plateau in Antarctica. Reading further, they might start to suspect the truth, especially after encountering the buried spaceship with its horrifying passenger inside. After about forty pages, as familiar lines appear with greater frequency, many would know for sure that this was no ordinary document—and even if they didn’t recognize it from context, its significance would be made clear by a penciled note on the upper corner of the first page of the fair copy: “Version of Who Goes There?”
Frozen Hell is a dramatically longer and more detailed version of one of the most famous science fiction stories ever written, which remains best known among the general public for its cinematic adaptations as The Thing. Its lengthy opening section, which was cut before publication, is more than worthy of the rest—Campbell was still in his twenties, but under the name Don A. Stuart, he was perhaps the most admired pulp science fiction writer of his time. Another folder contains a set of false starts for the same story, with at least five different openings told from various points of view, which reflects the care that Campbell put into its construction. He was feeling his way into it, and although most of his singular career still lay in the future, part of him may have sensed that this was the best story that he would ever write.
Campbell was only twenty-five when he came up with the idea that that evolved into “Who Goes There?” In 1936, he was about to start work as a secretary at Mack Truck in New Jersey, having failed to land the research position that he had wanted after college. He was a popular writer in the pulps, and in a casual conversation with an organic chemist, he became interested in the problem of how to tell whether an alien life form was a plant or an animal. As he explained to his friend Robert Swisher, he proceeded from there to the notion of organisms that “could alter their form, animal to vegetable, or vice versa, as the conditions of their environment momentarily required. This led to the idea of an intelligent animal having this property.”
As Robert Silverberg notes in the introduction that follows, Campbell initially wrote up the premise as a humorous throwaway, “Brain Stealers of Mars,” which he sold for $80 to Mort Weisinger at Thrilling Wonder Stories. Yet he continued to mull over the underlying idea, and after discussing it with Jack Byrne, the editor of Argosy, he reworked it into an ambitious horror story titled Frozen Hell. Decades afterward, he told the author James H. Schmitz that once he figured out the premise, setting, and first scene, the rest was easy, although finding the right opening had been a challenge: “This was where I sweated out things and made false starts.” In the end, however, Byrne passed, and Campbell decided to try it on the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, F. Orlin Tremaine, whom he saw on October 5, 1937.
At the meeting, Campbell was offered the editorship of Astounding instead. It was an unforeseen development that would change his life forever—but he didn’t forget Frozen Hell. His own magazine was the obvious place for it, but Tremaine still retained editorial control. In January 1938, Campbell revised the story with input from Tremaine and Frank Blackwell, the editor-in-chief of the publishing firm Street & Smith. This was evidently when the original opening was cut, as Campbell implied to Swisher: “I rewrote the first third of Frozen Hell, and have hopes Tremaine will take it.” “Who Goes There?” finally appeared in the August 1938 issue, credited to Don A. Stuart, and the full draft of Frozen Hell was quietly put away.
Eight decades later, the manuscript unexpectedly resurfaced. In 2017, I was working on the biography Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. In the course of my research, I had to review thousands of pages of correspondence, and I found a letter that had been sent to Campbell on March 2, 1966 by Howard L. Applegate, the administrator of manuscripts at Syracuse University. The library was building a science fiction collection that would ultimately include the papers of such figures as Hugo Gernsback, Forrest J Ackerman, and Frederik Pohl, and Applegate wrote to ask if Campbell would be interes
ted in contributing his archive.
Campbell responded on March 16 to politely decline: “Sorry…but the Harvard Library got all the old manuscripts I had about eight years ago! Since I stopped writing stories when I became editor of Astounding-Analog, I haven’t produced any manuscripts since 1938.… So…sorry, but any scholarly would-be biographers are going to have a tough time finding any useful documentation on me! I just didn’t keep the records!” Since I was currently engaged in writing just such a biography, I read this passage with unusual interest—and Campbell’s belief about the lack of primary sources turned out to be fortunately off the mark.
But I was even more intrigued by the reference to Harvard. At that point, I had been working on the book for over a year, and I had never heard of any such archive. Long afterward, I noticed a passing mention in a letter that Campbell wrote to Swisher, who had been storing many of the editor’s drafts, on October 7, 1957: “The manuscripts, Bob, will be taken up to Harvard on our next trip. Harvard’s started a science fiction collection, and is definitely interested in it as a development of American culture. They’re collecting books, magazines, manuscripts, etc.” But I didn’t see this until later, and as far as I knew, no other scholar had ever referred to these papers.
When I checked the online catalog of the Harvard Library system, I found them—but I had to look closely. A search for Campbell’s name generated numerous results, but it was only after scrolling to the fourth page, past dozens of marginally relevant listings, that I saw the entry that I wanted: “John Wood Campbell compositions, ca. 1935-1939 and undated.” After I contacted the library, I received a list of the folders inside, one of which was labeled “Frozen Hell.” I knew from Campbell’s correspondence that this was the working title of “Who Goes There?,” and I immediately wanted a closer look. Since I was unable to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts in person, I hired a research assistant to copy the manuscripts and send me the scanned images.
As soon as I received the copies on my end, “Frozen Hell” was the first file that I examined. At that point, I was hoping to find little more than a draft of “Who Goes There?” with a few variations from the published text. When I realized how much had been cut, I was amazed—and to the best of my knowledge, no one else alive ever knew that the story had been reworked so completely. (Going back over Campbell’s correspondence, I did find a reference to Doña typing up the draft, “40,000 words of it,” but it was easy to overlook.) I reached out to Campbell’s daughter, Leslyn Randazzo, and she pointed me to John Betancourt, who handled the rights for the estate. The result is the book that you hold in your hands.
Over the last year, I’ve occasionally wondered whether Campbell would have wanted this version to be read. He personally edited Frozen Hell for publication, and the decision to cut the story to emphasize the horror element was unquestionably sound. Campbell had agonized over the opening, and he advised another young writer years later: “Asimov, when you have trouble with the beginning of the story, that is because you are starting in the wrong place, and almost certainly too soon. Pick out a later point in the story and begin again.” He had ruthlessly cut the openings of several of his own stories, including “Night” and “Dead Knowledge,” and “Who Goes There?” certainly didn’t suffer from the change.
But he also appears to have liked the original draft. He told Swisher that it gave him “more fun” than anything else he had ever written, and he cut the beginning only after consulting with Blackwell and Tremaine. The quality of the excised material is on much the same level as the rest, and both versions have their merits. “Who Goes There?” is darker and more focused, but there’s something very effective—and oddly modern—in how Frozen Hell abruptly shifts genres from adventure to horror. It drastically alters the tone and effect of the overall story, and the result is worth reading as more than just a curiosity.
Finally, the obvious care that Campbell took to preserve this manuscript—and all of his discarded openings—implies that he thought that it was worth saving. Campbell was a man of tremendous ambition, and he might have had mixed feelings at the idea that his most famous work would be one that he wrote in his twenties. Yet he undoubtedly wanted to be remembered after his death, and I think that he would be gratified by the excitement over Frozen Hell. Every version of this story is about a discovery that would have been better left unmade, as reflected in the third title, “Pandora,” that its author seems to have considered for it. But I suspect that Campbell would be pleased that this particular box was found and opened.
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 b
y 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.
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