Frozen Hell. John W. Campbell Jr.

      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