Who Goes There?

...is the title of a marvelous science fiction novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. It was first published in 1938 under Campbell's pseudonym, Don A. Stuart, in Astounding Stories. In 1973, it was voted, quite justly, into The Science Fiction Hall of Fame by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

For once I cast my lot with the majority. Who Goes There? is, without doubt, one of the finest science fiction stories ever written. All the elements are there. Campbell's story has a fantastic plot, a spine-chilling premise, is scientifically sound, and makes a very pertinent point about human nature.

You've probably never heard of it, though.

What you have heard about are the three movie adaptations they made out of it.

The Thing From Another World, in 1951, starring James Arness...

John Carpenter's 1982 remake of that, called simply The Thing...

And now this, supposedly a prequel.

[Ahem]

I'd like to share some thoughts with you about books, movies, and what gets lost in between.

Adaptation decay (blithely defined here) is what you wind up with after a particular work of fiction has progressed from print to movie to video game to novelization and wherever else along the way. Similar to photocopying a photocopy, the process is a piranha swarm of human input and rewrites and creative vision...which inevitably skeletonizes the source material, and results in something that bears little to no resemblance to the original work.

And that is exactly what's going on here, to my unending disgust. Campbell's immortal work is, once again, going to Hollywood's chopping block to be packaged and marketed to the masses.

This is nothing new. The same thing happened to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot; H.G. Well's War of the Worlds and The Time Machine; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Bram Stoker's Dracula; Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth; and, to an egregious degree, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan. (George of the Jungle anyone?)

The reason I'm squawking now is because I can't stand to see yet another of my favorite sci-fi stories debased in this manner.

Who Goes There? is an excellent work, one that stands on its own. A bunch of American scientists holed up in an Antarctic research base stumble across an alien spacecraft buried in the snow. Their picks and mattocks are inadequate for the task, so they decide to blow the ship open with thermite. They don't realize that the alien craft is made mostly of magnesium; it goes up like flash paper. However, encased in the ice nearby is an alien life form. MacReady, the expedition' s meteorologist, surmises that the ship must've crash-landed in Antarctica millions of years ago, when the continent was just beginning to freeze. "The Thing" somehow survived the crash of its ship, stumbled out of the wreckage, and was immediately frozen solid.

Well, it doesn't stay frozen for long. The team chips the creature out of its ice grave and transports it back to their base. It thaws and awakes. The humans discover the alien in the dog kennel, and the huskies viciously attacking it. As they watch, the alien begins to change, assuming the form of a sled dog it had recently devoured. The men quickly kill it. With increasing paranoia, Blair (the biologist) theorizes that the Thing is able to absorb and imitate any organic creature by reshaping its own cellular structure. The Thing can either devour its victims or infect them like a virus. More than that, the monster can somehow telepathically absorb the target's memories and personality as well, rendering its mimicry absolutely airtight. Realizing the implications of this—that not only dogs, but humans themselves can be infected, and that any member of the team may already be an imitation—Blair has a nervous breakdown and is confined to a maintenance shack.

MacReady and the rest of the team have a gay old time trying to figure out who's who...

I won't spoil the ending, but you'll love it.

How Campbell could've written something so perfect, so suspenseful, so thrilling, so disturbing, and so sinister (particularly in 1938, when the scariest guys around were Nosferatu, Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera) is beyond me. But he did. And his story remains one of the most pivotal, influential and downright horrifying of the genre.

Freddy Krueger doesn't scare me. Jason Voorhees can't faze me. Face-hugging, chest-bursting aliens aren't that bad. Werewolves, vampires and witches just leave me underwhelmed. The Thing is the only creature that's ever truly scared me.

So how did Hollywood portray my ultimate monster?

They turned him into a plant.

Seriously. The plot of the 1951 movie was that an intelligent form of plant life crashed in the Arctic (not the Antarctic) and started sucking the blood out of the researchers stationed there, like some kind of fungoid mosquito. They finally killed it with an electrical discharge.

Puh-leeze.

The 1982 remake was perhaps the most faithful adaptation, but there were still some glaring discrepancies between book and film. In The Thing, a Norwegian research team found the creature first, and got massacred in the most gruesome way possible. The first our heroic American team hears of it is when a couple of half-mad Norwegians burst into their camp in a helicopter, throwing grenades and shooting assault rifles at an innocent(-looking) sled dog.

Things rapidly go downhill from there. MacReady is a helicopter pilot instead of a meteorologist, but he still plays a major role. The Thing is...quite gruesome. Perhaps even more gruesome than he is in Campbell's original story. In fact, the movie was universally panned for its gruesomeness. But I still liked it enough to get it on DVD.

And now the new film is coming out. Like I said, it's supposedly a prequel. It portrays the battle the Norwegian team has with the original creature, before the Americans find it. Although, for some reason, the Norwegian team has some Americans along with 'em. I guess the movie producers just don't believe that an American audience could root for a bunch of Norwegians in an Antarctic research base fighting an alien monster without Mary Elizabeth Winstead riding along as eye-candy.

This is adaptation decay. There wasn't a single Norwegian in Campbell's novella. Hollywood put a Norwegian camp into the story in 1982. Now, in 2011, they're doing a movie whose setting was lifted from another movie. It's a film based entirely on a preceding film. None of Campbell's original characters (except for the monster itself) made it into this 2011 release. It's a film based on a film based on a novella. A photocopy of a photocopy.

A complete piece of crap, in other words.

The movie industry is notorious for this blasphemy. The producers are past masters. They take a perfectly good story, and instead of adapting it faithfully for the silver screen, they choose to adapt it remuneratively. They mutilate, bowdlerize, varnish, cheapen, and over-simplify (all in the name of "mass-market appeal") until we're left with a shoddy,  unintellectual, action-packed, sensationalist, overblown, mutated excuse for a film, devoid of plot, theme, symbolism, statement, or any redeeming feature whatsoever.

I don't know why Hollywood does this. That green stuff called money is probably the reason. Part of me likes to believe so, anyway. But in the blackest shades of night, in my most horrifying nightmares, the eldritch abomination called the Truth rears its ugly head. The producers and screenwriters in Los Angeles probably think Americans like this tripe. It's likely they believe that most Americans couldn't digest the deep thoughts and intellectual horror of John W. Campbell's Who Goes There?, so they dumbed it all down and repackaged it as a cheap horror film (three times!). Tinseltown has become so accustomed to truncating, abridging, censoring, simplifying and regurgitating the best works of fiction that it's become ingrained on the industry's consciousness that Americans like these dull, trite, recycled hack jobs.

Why do studio executives believe this nonsense? I'm not sure. The truth of the matter should be self-evident: that moviegoers prefer a well-shot, well-acted, thoughtfully scripted, original film with practical special effects instead of a CG-filled gore-fest. But then again, human beings have a long history of believing strange things. They believe that aliens seeded the Earth with life. That dinosaurs coexisted side-by-side with human beings. That Dave Mathews can sing.

In short, I believe that the 2011 adaptation of The Thing is yet another hackneyed, money-grubbing, unfaithful and unnecessary waste of digital film; that it should never have been made, or even conceived; and that all discerning and tasteful movie-goers should boycott it with a vengeance.

That's if there are any discerning and tasteful movie-goers left, anyway.

I solemnly swear that if ever I became a successful sci-fi novelist, I will jealously guard the rights to my works. As long as I live, I will never allow Hollywood to get its vile, shameless, mass-marketing hands on them. Because I know what will happen.

The stories, my stories, characters I created lovingly, plot lines I slaved over, villains I kicked around, concepts I nurtured from birth...they will come out of the Gilded Mulcher looking like this:

Nuh-uh. Not happening. No way.