You can skip them, but I found them interesting.īob Eggleton’s pencil sketches throughout are nice and give the story that feeling that you’re reading it in an old-school pulp-magazine format.Īt the end of the book there’s also a Preview of a sequel currently being written by the publisher of this book, John Gregory Betancourt, provisionally entitled The Things from Another World. As I’ve already said, Alec Nevala-Lee explains a little of the background to his rediscovery of this version, and there’s also an Introduction by Robert Silverberg that gives his opinion on the original, on this version and a degree of context to the work of John W Campbell, the author and magazine editor. To add to this novella-sized book, there are some useful additions.
Frozen Hell is basically a dramatically longer and more detailed version of Who Goes There? The part that we know is in five chapters at the end (with minor changes) with an additional three chapters at the beginning. (It is, at the time of writing this review, over $155 000).
A Kickstarter fund was created in order to get it published, which reached its target of $1000 within a couple of days. Understandably, this unearthing, when announced in October 2018, caused a great deal of excitement. This one disappeared into the archives until rediscovered by Nevala-Lee. It seems that Campbell was aiming at writing the story as a novel, but when it didn’t sell, re-edited it into the shorter form that is much better known today.
The story here is an earlier version, with typographical errors, misspellings and handwritten corrections, of one of the most famous science fiction stories of all time, “Who Goes There?”* – but 45 pages longer.įrozen Hell is an earlier version of the tale. You may not immediately recognise those titles, but long-time readers of sf may know the more famous version. Campbell’s stuff in the Harvard Library whilst researching his own book.Īt the bottom of one box was 112 pages of a manuscript entitled “Frozen Hell” and also “Pandora”. As his Preface to this book explains, Alec Nevala-Lee (author of the recently reviewed biography Astounding) found this in a discovery worthy of the story itself, whilst going through boxes of author and editor John W. This is another recent ‘discovery’ of an earlier version of what is regarded as a science fiction classic. Another oddity from the ‘Can’t Believe it’s True’ Department.
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