Frozen Hell. John W. Campbell Jr.
There is no horizontal pull, the shortest way north is straight down.…”) And on page 35 the Antarctic explorers accidentally destroy the buried alien spaceship in a clumsy attempt to excavate it, though it would have been much more plausible to leave it in the ice to be recovered by some later, and better-equipped, expedition.
In his revision Campbell solved all these problems simply by cutting the first three chapters, getting rid of the slow opening sequence and the lecture on geomagnetism, and brushing McReady’s dream and the destruction of the spaceship into quick flashbacks where they would be less obtrusive. To set events in motion now he wrote two new paragraphs that constitute one of the most potent story openings in the history of science fiction:
The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combatted the musty smell of sweat-and-snow-drenched furs. The acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air.
Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet, somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their associates—dogs, machines, and cooking—came another taint. It was a queer, neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of industry and life. And it was a life-smell. But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically over the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the unshielded glare of the electric light.
It is all there, from the harsh crackle of that three-word opening sentence through the sensory pressure of the reek of sweat and blubber to the presence of some mysterious alien thing strapped up in a tarpaulin on a table. And from that point on the pace is unrelenting, as horror upon horror is manifested, and, ultimately, the survivors conquer the alien menace a way analogous to the resolution of the similar problem posed in “Brain-Stealers of Mars,” but this time in no way comic.
The final version of the story, now called “Who Goes There?,” is essentially the last five chapters of the eight-chapter Frozen Hell, with only minor revisions. “I had more fun writing that story than I’ve gotten out of any I ever turned out,” he said in a letter to Robert Swisher. Though he must have known that the revised story was far superior to the original, Campbell was un- certain enough about it to show the manuscript to his wife Doña, who frequently served as his first reader. “Doña says I clicked,” he told Swisher jubilantly. He showed it also to his friend Mort Weisinger of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Weisinger was impressed also, though he grumbled about Campbells’ recycling of the plot idea of “Brain-Stealers of Mars,” which he had published. “Mort got peeved,” Campbell reported to Swisher. “Seems he has an idea he bought the idea as well as the story, when he bought ‘Brain-Stealers of Mars’. I disagree. We left with no blows exchanged.”
Weisinger did not want the story for Thrilling Wonder Stories—he needed material that adhered more closely to pulp-magazine formulas—and it is not clear whether Campbell submitted it to Argosy, which had suggested he rewrite the longer version in the first place. But late in the summer of 1937 he offered it to F. Orlin Tremaine of Astounding. A strange thing happened, though, while the manuscript was still sitting on Tremaine’s desk. In September, 1937, Street & Smith, the publishers of Astounding, underwent a vast corporate shakeup. Ten of its magazines were discontinued, some high managerial figures were dismissed, and Tremaine was moved up into the post of executive editor of the entire magazine chain, leaving Astounding itself without an editor. And at the beginning of October Tremaine asked Campbell to be his replacement. With astonishing swiftness Campbell found himself the editor of the very magazine to which “Who Goes There?” was currently under submission.
Science-fiction fandom was amazed that Campbell, who was looked upon as a titan among writers, would abandon a brilliant writing career to take on a mere editorial job. From Campbell’s point of view the situation looked quite different. He had depended, since leaving college in 1934, on the uncertain income from three science-fiction magazines that paid, at best, a cent a word for their material. He had held a series of uninteresting mundane jobs, affording satisfaction neither to himself nor to his various employers. Science fiction was central to his life, and the job at Astounding would provide a steady income while allowing him to immerse himself in the field that he loved. And, in fact, this was the last job Campbell ever would have: he would hold it to the end of his days, in 1971.
He could not, however, buy his new novella on his own say-so. As editor he was at that time merely a first reader, and needed Tremaine’s approval for anything he acquired; but “Who Goes There?” presented no problems for Tremaine, and the story was purchased and put into the schedule for publication in an early issue. Campbell would run it not under his own name but with the “Don A. Stuart” pseudonym; but by then the identity of “Stuart” was pretty much an open secret among science-fiction readers.
By the time “Who Goes There?” appeared, in the August 1938 Astounding, Campbell no longer had Orlin Tremaine looking over his shoulder. Tremaine was not comfortable in his new managerial post and Street & Smith was not comfortable with him, and by May, 1938, he was gone, ostensibly by resignation but actually having been dismissed by Street & Smith’s new president, “with the result,” Campbell told Swisher, “that I am now all of Astounding. There isn’t any more. No assistant, no readers, no nobody.” With Tremaine out of the picture Campbell had put the magazine through an extensive makeover, going about it in the dynamic manner that would mark his entire long editorial career.
One of the first things Campbell did was to change the magazine’s name from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science Fiction with the March 1938 issue. He loathed that gaudy adjective “astounding,” but could not then get rid of it; this was the best he could do in 1938. (He finally dumped it in 1960 in favor of Analog Science Fiction, the name it still bears.) The cover format underwent a redesign, and a splendid new cover artist, Hubert Rogers, arrived and created, month after month, visions of the shining future that were in line with Campbell’s own. Campbell had inherited a considerable backlog of stories from Tremaine, which was not a serious problem, since Tremaine had been an excellent editor. But Campbell, a younger man firmly grounded in the twentieth-century, wanted the magazine’s fiction to take a fresher approach, and a change in tone became apparent within a few months. Some of the stories he bought were by long-time Tremaine contributors like Jack Williamson, Nat Schachner, and Raymond Z. Gallun, but, month by month, new names appeared on the contents page—L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, and many others, who under Campbell’s editorial guidance would transform the way science fiction was written forever. It was a radical and memorable metamorphosis, and knowledgeable readers today still look back on the era of Astounding Science Fiction of Campbell’s early years as a golden age.
Of all the Golden Age classics, Campbell’s own “Who Goes There?” has long held a key position, and those of us who have revered that story since our first acquaintance with it owe Alec Nevala-Lee deep gratitude for his excavation of the earlier version of that masterpiece. Not only is Frozen Hell of major interest by the way it shows a great s-f writer gaining total mastery of his craft and the nascent great editor that was the John W. Campbell of 1937 demonstrating why the magazine he would shortly be editing defined the modern era of science fiction, but the original version itself, for all its flaws, is exciting in its own right, providing character development and background detail that Campbell, for the sake of telling a swifter story, eliminated from his final draft. It is, of itself, a treasure. We are lucky to have it.
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