Who Goes There?
John W. Campbell Jr.
Author's Republic
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens, Canids, Classics, Cross-Genre, Shapeshifters, Wilderness Tales
****
Description
An expedition to the South Pole stumbles across an incredible discovery: an alien vessel, locked in ice for millions of years, complete with a single alien body. When one scientist insists on thawing the corpse for study, disaster ensues - leaving the expedition members trapped in their icy outpost, unsure who among them is still human.
Review
This classic novella has formed the basis for more than one movie (and innumerable knockoffs in various media). It does have a certain pulp mentality around the edges, relics of when it was written: the alien is another one of those extraterrestrial life forms that evidently evolved vast intelligence and starfaring capability for the sole purpose of being a monster, down to a countenance that human instinct immediately identifies as irredeemably horrendous (and which only the biologist dismisses as mere human prejudice against the unknown, even as he dismisses the risk of potential revival or pathogen contamination from thawing the presumed body). It also, like much science fiction of its time, likes to wander into infodumps about the science end of the "science fiction". (And it's probably best not to look closely at the cook character...) Despite that, it remains a chillingly horrific and memorable tale of claustrophobic paranoia and a monster capable of hiding in plain sight, successfully evoking the fear and seeming futility of fighting a vastly advanced enemy that can even read thoughts as it perfectly mimics its prey. (I will admit I wasn't too enamored of the audiobook narrator on the version I listened to, though.)