Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell

Another stroll down memory lane.  In the early '70s, Channel 7 used to screen a weekly horror movie double bill in a program called Creature Features.  I was quite the addict and never missed it.  Looking back on those days, the movie I best remember was The Thing from Another World (1951), an adaptation of Who Goes There? Not that it was a great movie.  Few of those cheap '50s films were very good.  Still, despite its cinematic shortcomings, it scared the willies out of me.  Those were the days.

So, my interest was piqued when I stumbled across a copy of the original short story by John W. Campbell.  I was pleasantly surprised.

A group of researchers in the Antarctic discover an alien spaceship frozen in the ice and, nearby, the preserved body of an alien.  They are inattentive when they thaw the body of the alien, and the thing escapes inside their base.  The group realise the fate of the entire planet is in the balance when they come to understand the alien's prodigious biological and mental abilities: most notably, it is a shape-shifting mimic par excellence.  Now they must confront the fact that at least one of them may be the alien.  But who, and how many?

Campbell has given us an exciting psychological drama in a few short pages.  The characters don't know who to trust, and neither does the reader.  Experiments need to be devised and conducted in order to tell friend from foe. Campbell builds the tension into several climaxes before the denouement in the final two chapters.  Given the shortness of the story, it is surprising how much has been packed into it.  This more than makes up for the slight clunkiness of the prose style.  Still, Campbell was writing pulp fiction in the 1930s, and there probably wasn't the time or the money for too much polishing.

Overall, Who Goes There? is an exciting and suspenseful story, and I am glad I read it.