Who Goes There?
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| Author | John W. Campbell, Jr |
|---|---|
| Country | United States of America |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Astounding Magazine |
| Released | August 1938 |
| Media type | Magazine |
Who Goes There? is a science fiction novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr. under the pen name Don A. Stuart, published August 1938 in Astounding Stories. In 1973, the story was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the finest science fiction novellas ever written, and published with the other top vote-getters in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.
[edit] Plot summary
A group of Antarctic researchers, isolated from the rest of the world, discover an alien spaceship buried in the ice for 20 million years. They try to thaw the inside of the space craft with thermite, but end up destroying it. They recover a frozen occupant of the ship,which was apparently searching for heat when it froze. They thaw it out. This revives the alien, which turns out to be an extremely dangerous and malevolent being that can assume the shape, memories, and personality of any living thing that it devours. It immediatly becomes the crews physicist, a man named Connant, and with some 90 pounds of its matter left tries to become a husky dog. They kill the alien, as it is becoming the dead dog.
The researchers try to figure out which of them have been replaced by offspring of the alien, which is simply referred to as the Thing, and to destroy them before they can escape and take over the world. Ultimately the researchers realize that even small pieces of the aliens will behave as independent organisms, and use this weakness to test which men have been "converted" by taking blood samples and exposing them to a hot wire. Each man is tested, one at a time, and immediately killed if his blood tries to save itself from the wire. The original Thing has now taken control of a man named Blair, who had a nervous breakdown when they found the creature. Blair has been isolated to a small cabin. They enter the cabin to find Blair in the near completion of an anti-gravity harness. Blair is destroyed just as he completes the anti-gravity harness that would have allowed it to escape the Antarctic. The story ends with the realization that the three other creatures that were inside the destroyed space ship are probabaly still alive, buried under the rubble of the ship.
Click here to read "Who Goes There" by J. W. Campbell
[edit] Movie adaptations
Who Goes There? has been thrice adapted as a motion picture: rather loosely in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, with James Arness as the Thing, in 1973 as the obscure Horror Express, and most famously in 1982 by director John Carpenter as the film The Thing, from a Bill Lancaster screenplay.
