Frozen Hell. John W. Campbell Jr.
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.
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