"Who Goes There?"

"Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, Jr., writing as Don A. Stuart, is a well-known story, mainly for the two movie versions made from it. THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, a science fiction thriller produced by Howard Hawks, took the bare bones of the story; the extraterrestrial menace in the ice unfrozen and wreaking havoc on a scientific station, to construct his stripped-down version. In 1982 John Carpenter, working from a script closer to the original story, made THE THING, which asks the paranoid question, "Am I the only one here who is human?" The shivers in that movie weren't just from the ice-bound settings, but from extraordinary special effects of the shape-shifting alien by Rob Bottin.

This is that story's original magazine version from ASTOUNDING STORIES, 1938. To break up the pages of cold gray type, I have spotted in some illustrations from both movie versions, all found on the Internet.

"Who Goes There? By Don A. Stuart (John W. Campbell, Jr.) Copyright © 1938 Street and Smith Publications, Inc.