John W. Campbell's Who Goes There The Thing (1982)
John W. Campbell, Jr.'s novella Who Goes There? was first published in Astounding Stories in August 1938 under the pen name Don A. Stuart. It is one of the foundational texts of American science-fiction horror — the H.P. Lovecraft mode applied to a research-station premise — and it has been adapted three times for film: Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks's The Thing from Another World (1951), John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), and Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s prequel The Thing (2011). Carpenter's 1982 version is the most faithful of the three to Campbell's central premise. (wikipedia)
Campbell as editor and writer
John Wood Campbell, Jr. (1910–1971) was the editor of Astounding Stories (later Analog Science Fiction and Fact) from 1937 until his death, and the editor most responsible for the shape of mid-century American science fiction. Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, and Lester del Rey all published their early breakthrough work under Campbell's editorial direction; the period from 1938 through the mid-1950s is generally referred to in genre history as the "Campbell era" or the "Golden Age" of science fiction.
Campbell was also a working writer. Most of his fiction was published before 1939, when he largely stopped writing to focus on editing; Who Goes There? is his most-remembered single work as a writer. The novella was published in Astounding in August 1938, with cover art by Howard V. Brown.
The premise the 1951 film abandoned
Campbell's novella opens at a small American Antarctic research station — Big Magnet — that has just recovered an alien spacecraft and a frozen alien body from the ice. The body is thawed for examination. It is not dead. The organism it contains is a shape-shifter that perfectly imitates any organism it consumes. The remainder of the novella is a paranoid containment story: the men at the station have to determine which of them have been imitated, with limited tools and no way to call out for help. Several test sequences — including a serum-and-blood test — are run; the camp arrives at a final test that exploits the organism's cellular self-preservation reflex.
The Hawks/Nyby 1951 adaptation abandoned this premise almost entirely. The 1951 film kept the Antarctic setting (relocated to the Arctic), the embedded research station, and a single line of dialogue that called the threat a "thing"; it discarded the shape-shifting, the cellular imitation, the paranoid-containment structure, and the serum test. The 1951 Thing is a single bipedal vegetable monster played by James Arness. See The Hawks-Nyby Original (1951) for the full account of the 1951 adaptation's choices.
"The 1951 film is a great film, but it is not Campbell's story. Campbell's story is the one nobody had ever filmed. That is the one I wanted to film." — John Carpenter, Cinefantastique (1982)
What Lancaster preserved
Bill Lancaster's 1981 screenplay restored the novella's central engine — the shape-shifting organism, the cellular imitation, the paranoid containment, the test sequence — while making the structural changes that suited a feature film. The principal Lancaster additions are: the malamute as the entry vector (in Campbell, the alien is recovered from the ice rather than introduced as an animal); the deferred reveal of the kennel transformation (Campbell's novella exposes the shape-shifting in the first chapter); the dynamite-and-detonator midpoint (Campbell's camp does not have a comparable lone-operator pivot); and the open ending (Campbell's novella ends with a clear human victory).
The blood-test sequence in beats 32–34 is Lancaster's, but the conceptual move — that the Thing's cellular self-preservation reflex can be exploited as a verification tool — is Campbell's. Campbell's novella runs a serum-blood test in its third act; Lancaster's hot-needle test is a more visceral cinematic version of the same idea.
"Campbell wrote the test. I cinematized it. The novella has a quieter, more chemical version. The film needed a hot needle and a leap and a torch. But the principle is Campbell's principle." — Bill Lancaster, Cinefantastique (1982)
The 1948 anthology and the 2018 long version
The novella was widely anthologized in the 1948 Adventures in Time and Space (Campbell, Healy, McComas), the foundational anthology of mid-century American science fiction. A longer original draft of the story — under the working title Frozen Hell — was rediscovered in Campbell's papers at Harvard in 2018 and published by Wildside Press in 2019. The Frozen Hell draft includes an extended opening section, set on the alien spacecraft before its discovery, that the published 1938 novella omitted. The 2019 publication has been treated by Campbell scholars as the more complete text of the story.
"The Frozen Hell version is the story Campbell wrote first. The published novella is the version his editor cut. The cut is mostly the alien-perspective opening section, which is the most Lovecraftian part of the text. The 1982 film does not draw on the cut material — neither Campbell nor Carpenter ever saw it — but it is consistent with the film's tone in a striking way." — John Betancourt (publisher of Wildside Press, on the Frozen Hell rediscovery), Wildside Press (2019)
Campbell's reputation
Campbell's editorial legacy is foundational to American science fiction; his political and social views, which became increasingly reactionary in the 1950s and 1960s, have been the subject of substantial reconsideration in genre history since the 2010s. The Hugo Awards' Astounding Award for Best New Writer was renamed in 2020 to remove Campbell's name; the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel was discontinued in 2019. The novella Who Goes There? is generally treated separately from these reputational questions.