Doc Savage And The Frozen Hell!

What is Frozen Hell? John W. Campbell is a name well known to science fiction fans as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine (later known as Analog). He is the editor who mentored such sci-fi luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, and Lester Del Rey among many others. He is the guy who in many respects with his tastes and editorial decisions gave us the "Golden Age" of science fiction in the late 30's and early 40's. But Campbell was also a writer of no small reputation and some of his best stories were published under the pseudonym of "Don A.Stuart". More on Frozen Hell after you read this vintage and heavily revised Dojo article from many Moons ago. 

Hannes Bok

I was fishing around in my dangerously overly stuffed garage and stumbled across a box full of vintage Science Fiction Book Club collections. I used to get reams of neat stuff from this venerable source, at one time a ready window to the classics of sci-fi. A lot the books have gone away over time, but I've always kept my "Best of..." collections as a way to maintain access to some of more famous old stories. A few months ago, after finally seeing the most recent "Thing" movie (see here for more), I had the urge to read "Who Goes There?", John W. Campbell's classic story which triggered off some of my favorite sci-fi movie classics, but alas I couldn't find it.

But find it at last I did, and last evening sitting nestled comfortably in my dangerously over-stuffed garage (which I heat and keep a comfortable chair in for just these matters) I read Campbell's classic creepy story for the first time in decades. Needless to say the walk back into the house in the cold darkness was maybe, perhaps a tiny bit more uncomfortable than normal. Great little tale of creeping paranoia this one is.

The tale of an isolated party of Antarctic professional explorers isolated with a dangerous and deadly and recently re-quickened shape-shifting alien from twenty-five million years before and no counting how many miles is a classic scenario, rarely to be matched. If you would like to read it, it turns out it is available online at this very nifty location. Why I didn't stumble across this resource earlier this summer is anyone's guess. But by all means check it out.

From Doc Savage Fantasy Covers

One of the most intriguing things about the story which I've come across in more recent years is the notion that it is a stealth Doc Savage adventure, Doc being in reality the main character "McReady" (played by Kurt Russell in the John Carpenter movie). I was always rather skeptical, but after reading this tale again, notably published by Conde Nast, the company which holds and still guards the Doc Savage copyright, in Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 it makes me wonder.

McReady is very directly described as a giant man of bronze with bronze hair and eyes and his role in the story is perfectly consistent with what a young and somewhat less experienced Doc might've done in that situation. According to the Wold Newton chronology this tale would've happened prior to Doc forming the Fab Five and officially beginning his good works. I'm sure it a mere coincidence, but it's an above average tantalizing one. If it were a Doc story, it might bear the title "The Three-Eyed Goblin" or "The Twenty-Five Million Year Menace".

Richard Powers

And for those who like comics best, here's a link to an adaptation of the story which appeared in Starstream in the late 70's by  Arnold Drake and Jack Abel. Enjoy!

The story has of course been adapted to film. Not once, not twice, but three times. The 1951 flicker The Thing from Another World from director Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby starring Kenneth Tobey and future Gunsmoke lawman James Arness is a classic of "Red Scare" propaganda and is one of the most efficient and compelling movies of its time. I never tire of watching it and have done dozens of times over the decades. John Carpenter's 1982 adaptation The Thing with the aforementioned Kurt Russell as McCready is likely the one most folks think of, and it does a great job of capturing the paranoia of Campbell's original story. Likewise, The Thing from 2011 which gives us some more information about the uncanny aliens who can look like anyone or anything.

And brings us to Frozen Hell. Rather excitingly I learned that an early draft of the story turned up after laying hidden in Campbell's archives for decades. It's a bit longer by forty pages or so. It has been published by Wildside Press under the title of Frozen Hell. Campbell had tried to sell the story under the titles Frozen Hell and Pandora in this more elaborate form. But when it came time to publish it the story was severely shortened to enhance the horror aspects of the yarn. In whatever form I bet "Who Goes There?" is a danged good yarn, one that strikes closer to who we think we are than we like.

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Have No Fear! Doc Savage Is Here!

I'll be honest with you all. This month began all about Tarzan of the Apes and before I was finished planning it out it was clear it was going to be all about Doc Savage. And since that turned out to be the case, I thought now is as good a time as any to dedicate this month's posts to James Bama. Bama was the man who made Savage popular all over again in the 1960's. His covers for the Bantam reprints of the vintage pulp adventures of Street and Smith's "Man of Bronze" functioned much like Frank Frazetta's cover work for Tarzan of the Apes and Conan the Barbarian. It took what might've been presented to a new audience as some fussy relics and instead transformed them into intoxicating images of high adventure and super science. James Bama took a man perfectly designed by pulp smiths of the 1930's and super-charged him with a post-modern physique and head like nothing seen before or since. Sometimes I had a hard time reconciling the Doc of the covers with the Doc in the stories, but it didn't make me enjoy those covers any less. 

The detour down Clark Savage lane came about when I got fascinated all over again with the Philip Farmer's Wold-Newton family line. In his robust imagination, Tarzan and  Doc Savage and countless other breathtaking heroes and heroines were all part of a shared universe and in many cases related by blood. And to top it all off Farmer demanded that we understand that these seemingly fictional creations were really versions of dynamic men and women who actually lived. albiet under other names. I want to take another gander at works like Tarzan Alive - A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke and Doc Savage - His Apocalyptic Life again and other works as well such as the Secrets of the Nine series which recently was turned from a trilogy to a tetralogy thanks to Win Scott Eckert. 

That doesn't mean there won't be some Tarzan adventures such as those Dark Horse tales which were given the stamp of approval by Farmer himself in which the Lord of the Jungle matches muscles and wits with the Phantom of the Opera, Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein's Creature. 

But the majority of the weekly posts will be some revised and updated reviews of Marvel's delightful and timely runs of Doc Savage from the 1970's. These comics were my first introduction to Doc save for a few random paperbacks and it's been over a decade since I took a good look at them. DC was kind enough a decade ago to bring out the Marvel stories in some handsome and handy paperback volumes which saves wear and tear on my originals. 

And just as a counter to all this Doc Savage focus I want to wrap up my reviews of Dark Horse's reprints of the venerable Turok Son of Stone. So expect to see installments of "Sundays of Stone" return all through this month. 

 

All that and maybe a bit more even. Hold onto your hat, it's going to get exciting! Thanks you for all the thrills Mr. Bama! 

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Who Goes There?

Hannes Bok

I was fishing around in my dangerously overly-stuffed garage and stumbled across a box full of vintage Science Fiction Book Club collections. I used to get reams of neat stuff from this venerable source, at one time a ready window to the classics of sci-fi. A lot the books have gone away over time, but I've always kept my "Best of..." collections as a way to maintain access to some of more famous old stories. A few months ago, after finally seeing the most recent "Thing" movie (see here for more), I had the urge to read "Who Goes There?", John W. Campbell's classic story which triggered off some of my favorite sci-fi movie classics, but alas I couldn't find it.

But find it at last I did, and last evening sitting nestled comfortably in my dangerously over-stuffed garage (which I heat and keep a comfortable chair in for just these matters) I read Campbell's classic creepy story for the first time in decades. Needless to say the walk back into the house in the cold darkness was maybe, perhaps a tiny bit more uncomfortable than normal. Great little tale of creeping paranoia this one is.

The tale of an isolated party of Antarctic professional explorers isolated with a dangerous and deadly and recently re-quickened shape-shifting alien from twenty-five million years before and no counting how many miles is a classic scenario, rarely to be matched.

If you would like to read it, it turns out it is available online at this very nifty location. Why I didn't stumble across this resource earlier this summer is anyone's guess. But by all means check it out.

From Doc Savage Fantasy Covers

One of the most intriguing things about the story which I've come across in more recent years is the notion that it is a stealth Doc Savage adventure, Doc being in reality the main character "McReady" (played by Kurt Russell in the John Carpenter movie). I was always rather skeptical, but after reading this tale again, notably published by Conde Nast, the company which holds and still guards the Doc Savage copyright, in Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 it makes me wonder.

McReady is very directly described as a giant man of bronze with bronze hair and eyes and his role in the story is perfectly consistent with what a young and somewhat less experienced Doc might've done in that situation. According to the Wold Newton chronology this tale would've happened prior to Doc forming the Fab Five and officially beginning his good works. I'm sure it a mere coincidence, but it's an above average tantalizing one. If it were a Doc story, it might bear the title "The Three-Eyed Goblin" or "The Twenty-Five Million Year Menace".

Richard Powers

And for those who like comics best, here's a link to an adaptation of the story which appeared in Starstream in the late 70's by  Arnold Drake and Jack Abel. Enjoy!

"Who Goes There?" is a danged good yarn, one that strikes closer to who we think we are than we like.

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Things That Go Bump!

I finally got hold of a copy of The Thing, the 2011 movie prequel to The Thing by John Carpenter. Carpenter's 1982 movie starring Kurt Russell tells the horrifying tale of a gang of isolated scientists confronting the shape-changing menace of an alien invader which has escaped from a neighboring Norwegian science station. The 2011 movie tells us the story of that Norwegian station and how the creature came to escape to raise such a ruckus all those years ago.

It's a pretty reasonable effort all things considered. Among those elements is the fact that the movie strives diligently to be true to the Carpenter effort, so much so that I think that really retards the way in which this movie can develop. We know how it ends to no small extent, like any prequel and so it becomes for much of the movie an exercise in how the film dovetails into its proper place alongside the earlier effort. It does that job wonderfully, but as a scary flick it falls just a tad short, because most of the scares are pretty predictable. That's fine by me, because as a fan of any "Thing" movie, I'm watching it as part of a larger piece, and not as a fresh moviegoer, hence the relative failure of the movie financially because frankly there aren't that many of us John Carpenter fans left I suspect, at least not enough to constitute a mass audience.

Like the Carpenter effort to some extent this movie is a revision and updating of the film The Thing From Another World from 1951, one of the seminal sci-fi movies of that decade, of any decade. If I'm shoved to name a favorite movie, this one usually gets the nod. I find its economical storytelling breathtaking and the character development is concise and powerfully effective. I consider the movie to an ode to the American Dream, the ideal of different kinds of folks mingling to successfully work together for the greater good. This movie like all the subsequent flicks, has the core dilemma of people isolated and forced to deal with dangerous circumstances on their own. It's a surefire scenario.  The alien/monster is a hoot in classic thorn-fingered 50's fashion, and overall effect of the movie is exquisite.

That said, this latest effort is really more like the classic Howard Hawks effort in plot structure than it is the Carpenter movie. In this one we get to see the discovery of the alien in the ice, we get to see the space ship that brought it, and we get to see it escape the ice and terrorize a group of scientists, mostly male but having a tiny contingent of two women. The pacing is remarkably similar to the 1951 classic though the effects are an echo of the 1982 flick. 

All "Thing" movies of course are adaptations of "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, a haunting tale, his most famous by a large margin. I need to fish out my copy of the story and give it another reading, it's been quite a while.

Overall I have to give a thumbs up to this latest "Thing" movie. It was entertaining and while the filmmakers seem overwhelming deferential to John Carpenter, they actual end up making a movie that is a decent adaptation of Campbell's story and a lively update of the Hawks movie.

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At The Mountains Of Madness At Last!

This short novel by H.P. Lovecraft has been on my must-read-eventually table for years, but for whatever combination of reasons (distractions and forgetfulness) I never got around to actually reading it. I've dabbled in Lovecraft my whole life, reading and re-reading "The Call of C'Thulhu", "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Colour Out of Space" many times as well as other classic Lovecraft short stories. But I've never read some of his longer works. I'm rectifying that oversight this summer.


Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in three parts in 1936. Lovecraft (according S.T.Joshi) regarded it as his favorite work. It begins in wonderful Lovecraft fashion as a report in vivid detail of an expedition to Antarctica which after some reality-establishing labor, finds a vast range of mountains which are taller and more vast than then discovered on Earth. And inside a cave at the foot of these mountains they uncover strange seemingly preserved new life forms. What evolves from there is vintage Lovecraft. I won't spoil any of the twists, but Lovecraft's ability to describe the weird and make the reader feel that weirdness in the depths of their being is well on display in this tour of this outpost of "The Old Ones".

Then I dug out "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" by Clark Ashton Smith, a story which likely was inspired by Lovecraft's original, just as Lovecraft's story was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.


The soul-chilling Antarctic setting of this story is assumed to have also inspired John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" the inspiration for RKO's The Thing from Another World which itself inspired John Carpenter's bleaker version many years later. I'll have to dig out that classic and give it another reading, and perhaps bring home that "Thing" movie they made last year and finally watch it. Lovecraft's influence on fantasy is difficult to overstate.

On yet another note, my recent Wold Newton reading suggests that McReady from Campbell's original story is highly suggestive of Kenneth Robeson's Doc Savage. That's a curious connection I'd like to examine first hand.

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