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 Space, when I was thirteen: it had an overwhelming impact for me and has never failed, in many rereadings over the decades, to generate the same sort of excitement I felt in that first encounter. “Who Goes There” is a masterpiece, the work of a writer in full command of his powers.
Campbell would go on to edit Astounding and its successor Analog Science Fiction for 33 more years, publishing, along the way, the best work of such writers as Heinlein, Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, and many another mighty figure of that formative period in the history of science fiction. He was a mighty figure himself, physically imposing, a big man with a commanding voice, still the dominant editor of the field when I first entered his office, with more than a little trepidation, as a new young writer in 1955. Though he no longer wrote science fiction himself—his editorial responsibilities kept him too busy for that—he was a fountain of ideas, sharing them freely with the authors who visited them (myself included, though I was just a twenty-year-old beginner.)
What I had trouble realizing, as a novice writer standing in the presence of the great John Campbell in 1955, was that there had been a time when Campbell himself was a novice, young, uncertain, struggling to earn a living as a writer. Like me, he had begun writing science fiction in his teens.
And, like me, he had won editorial acceptance right away. The editor who took his first story promptly lost it, though, and since Campbell had no other copy of it, it was lost forever. But a second story, “When the Atoms Failed,” afforded him his professional debut in the January 1930 issue of Amazing Stories. He was nineteen years old. The editor’s introduction declared, “Our new author, who is a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shows marvelous ability at combining science with romance, evolving a piece of fiction of real scientific and literary value.”
Young Campbell followed it swiftly with a string of lengthy stories—“The Black Star Passes,” “Piracy Preferred,” “Islands of Space,” “Invaders from the Infinite,” and others, which established him, while he was still in his early 20s, as the second most popular science-fiction writer of the time, behind only Dr. E.E. Smith, the author of vast and ponderous space epics that Campbell had carefully imitated. By 1934, when his serialized novel “The Mightiest Machine” appeared in Astounding (even then the leading magazine of the field), he was looked upon by readers more highly than even Smith himself.