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juushikaTitle: Who Goes There?
Author: John W. Campbell Jr.
Published: Wildside Press, 2022 (1938)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 40
Total Page Count: 537,090
Text Number: 1967
Read Because: these boys are cold but it's fiction now (pop culture depictions of the Antarctic came up in "Placing Women in the Antarctic Literary Landscape" by Elizabeth Leane), ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This make the adaptation look like a masterwork, scaling back the technobabble, landing on iconic images, preserving the important thrust of the plot. But I still enjoyed this! Campbell's prose is delightfully overwritten, for better ("No thing made by intelligent beings can tangle with the dead immensity of a planet’s natural forces and survive.") and worse (the flamethrower scene); dialog is no exception. And yet, the premise endures, and the bombast suits the Antarctic, the social tensions, the terror of the unknown, of contagion. Unique to the original story is that until threatened with harm, the thing passes as, it entirely is whatever it's shaped itself to be; scarier than the uncanny is the total conviction of a man the moment before he turns out to be a monster. Let Golden Age SF try too hard, okay? It's more fun than obnoxious.
Author: John W. Campbell Jr.
Published: Wildside Press, 2022 (1938)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 40
Total Page Count: 537,090
Text Number: 1967
Read Because: these boys are cold but it's fiction now (pop culture depictions of the Antarctic came up in "Placing Women in the Antarctic Literary Landscape" by Elizabeth Leane), ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This make the adaptation look like a masterwork, scaling back the technobabble, landing on iconic images, preserving the important thrust of the plot. But I still enjoyed this! Campbell's prose is delightfully overwritten, for better ("No thing made by intelligent beings can tangle with the dead immensity of a planet’s natural forces and survive.") and worse (the flamethrower scene); dialog is no exception. And yet, the premise endures, and the bombast suits the Antarctic, the social tensions, the terror of the unknown, of contagion. Unique to the original story is that until threatened with harm, the thing passes as, it entirely is whatever it's shaped itself to be; scarier than the uncanny is the total conviction of a man the moment before he turns out to be a monster. Let Golden Age SF try too hard, okay? It's more fun than obnoxious.
