Джон Кэмпбелл - Frozen Hell

Special thanks to Evelyn Kriete, John D. Mason,

Neil Jordan, Christopher Mello, Charles Shanley, and Eric Strauss.

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 interested 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.