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Frozen Hell by John W Campbell Jr. Written in the 30s and never released in it’s full, unedited form until recently. A cutback version saw publication as Who Goes There which was the inspiration for movies The Thing From Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’ve been on a serious early/mid 20th century sci fi kick for some time and I’m a massive fan of The Thing so this should hopefully be right up my street.
Stewart Lee’s new book, March of the Lemmings. A collection of his newspaper columns on Brexit along with an annotated version of the script for his last show, Content Provider.
One of my favourite things that Lee does here (as in previous books) is to include with his online columns a selection of below-the-line comments for each column – often very negative, frequently spectacularly point-missing, and always amusing. It adds an extra dimension to the book to see the deliberately antagonistic relationship with the audience that he sets up, just as in his stand-up.
I really enjoyed Stephen King’s new book The Institute. It’s the first book of his I’ve read that’s been published this century since From a Buick 8. I have to admit, it’s a little jarring seeing him write about things like Uber and Youtube and the Trump Presidency. A Rihanna song even gets a mention.
The book’s about a secret facility where psychic children are tested and exploited for mysterious purposes. The dialogue King writes for the kids is pretty outdated–they says things like “foxy” and “put an egg in your shoe and beat it”–but you know that going in when reading a book about kids written by a 72-year-old man. It’s a little funny though when he picks reference points that are a little more current, like Rihanna’s “Pon de Replay,” which are still a decade or more out of date. But again, that’s to be expected, and, for me at least, it didn’t affect the quality of the book.
The Institute doesn’t have the same urgency or strong relationships between characters as King’s greatest books (The Stand, The Dead Zone, ‘Salem’s Lot, It, the early Dark Tower books) but it’s still a riveting read with well-drawn characters. Reading King’s work is practically a passive experience for me. His writing is so vivid and compelling that reading it is effortless, like watching a movie unfold. The Institute is over 500 pages but I read it in the time it takes me to read a book half that length.
What I found most interesting about the book isn’t the child characters but the adults who imprison them and the shoddy, complacent way in which the adults, who’ve been experimenting on children for decades, run their facility. Although King says the book wasn’t written in response to ICE and CBP’s border camps, it perfectly describes the kind of mindset it takes to tear children away from their parents and imprison them under inhumane, abusive conditions.
Obviously, this can make for a harrowing read. The tone of the book isn’t too depressing, all things considered–the kids cope with a lot of dark humor–but the tests they’re subjected to are often crude and violent, like being held underwater for progressively longer periods of time. The tests do serve a greater purpose, although what that is isn’t revealed for some time. What you do know from the beginning is that the Institute’s doctors and orderlies believe what they’re doing is saving the world. As a portrait of zealotry, this book’s one of the best.
‘Atlas of a Lost World’ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/227860/atlas-of-a-lost-world-by-craig-childs/
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Part personal travelogue and part pre-historic history lesson, it kept my attention for the most part, but it gets a little repetitive in places. There’s only so many camping stories I can read before I need a break, and after a while the theoretical (educated guess work) of Ice Age cultural migration/evolution/extinction becomes too theoretical (big, wild guesses!).
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But there’s lot of information in there and it’s less dry than a text book.
Bruce already reviewed this, but here’s my take on
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Frozen Hell by John W. Campbell Jr.
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First, a bit of background: John Wood Campbell was one of the big names in 1930s science fiction. He abandoned his writing career very early, though, to become editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937, a position he held until his death in 1971, and was probably the most important and influential SF magazine editor of the 20th century.
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One of the last things he wrote was a short story called Who Goes There?, published in 1938. If you have any interest at all in Golden Age SF, you’ve probably read it, as it’s one of the key entries in the genre and has appeared in more collections than I’ve had hot dinners. And even if you have no interest in musty old stories from before you were born, you can be grateful that John Carpenter was interested, as you’ve almost certainly seen The Thing.
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But what’s this got to do with Frozen Hell? I hear you ask.
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A few years ago, novellist and historian Alec Nevala-Lee was researching a biography of John Wood Campbell and discovered references to an unpublished first draft of Who Goes There?, under the title Frozen Hell. After a bit of digging he unearthed the typescript in Campbell’s archived papers, and found that it wasn’t simply an early draft, it was a much longer version with over 50% more material that had been cut from the published story. So after a massively successful kickstarter campaign he published the draft under its original title.
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I’m going to assume you all know either the original story, or you’ve seen The Thing, so I’m not going to rehash it here. The important question for this new volume is, is the new material any good?
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Well, yes and no. The new material is three chapters at the front of the book. And you can see why Campbell’s editor told him to cut them. They describe the Antarctic expedition’s discovery of the frozen alien, and it’s quite a long-winded build up if you just want to get to the horror story plot of men trapped in an ioslated outpost with a deadly monster. But as an example of their genre (and their era), these chapters are golden. If you love the SF of the era, you probably love reading about scientists standing around discussing meteorology and metallurgy and ice floe movements and light refraction, you love the feel of scientific authenticity, and idea that science is a thing of wonder in itself that doesn’t need monsters to make it interesting. These three chapters give you all that, and show you that Campbell was a master of the genre.
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But still, you can see why they were cut. Who Goes There? stands as a masterpiece of tense plotting, and <emFrozen Hell does lose that. But I’m still glad it was found, and that I can now enjoy both versions.
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The original story was short. I’m not sure what in words, but in this book it’s 54 pages. The full story here is expanded to 94 pages. The book includes an interesting preface by Alec Nevala-Lee, detailing how he found the draft, and a long introduction by Robert Silverberg, who of course knew Campbell, putting the work into historical context and analysing the changes to the story. You might think all that is useless padding to make the book thick enough to print, but personally I love that kind of stuff. There are also a few full-page illustrations, and while I’m not so excited about those they do help evoke the magazines of the period (which always accompanied the story with black-and-white illustrations).
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So overall, I’m really happy with the package and would highly recommend it to anyone. Though, to be honest, if you’ve never read Who Goes There?, you should really read that first. It ought to be required reading for anyone who likes SF. It’s a considered classic for a reason.
I’ve been reading The Vinyl Detective series (4 books so far). A nice romp through London and surrounding areas with interesting characters and pretty good mysteries. The first book was the best, because you are getting to know the protagonist and the rest of the cast, but they do become old friends that are fun to return to in the later books.
As the Christmas holidays begin, I have started reading Krampus: The Yule Lord, written and illustrated by Brom. All those demons and bloodshed should put me in the right mood for the week!! 
John Fowles The Collector. It was recommended to me, so I bought it to read on an upcoming train journey. I thought I would read just the first page, to see what the writing was like. Then I read the next page. Then the next page.
Now I need another book for my train journey 
Seriously, it’s that kind of book.
Is it like, “Once more unto the trench, dear boys, once more.”
I wonder how many potentially great writers got lost along the way for want of A Room of One’s Own.
I’m reading A Room of One’s Own now. It’s strange, I know it’s supposed to be a great feminist essay, but her main argument seems to be that the main necessity for a great writer is to have lots of money
I wonder how many potentially great writers got lost along the way for want of A Room of One’s Own.
I’m reading A Room of One’s Own now. It’s strange, I know it’s supposed to be a great feminist essay, but her main argument seems to be that the main necessity for a great writer is to have lots of money
She’s wrong.
Everyone knows to be a great writer you have to suffer for your art and live in a lofty garret with broken windows in Paris having nowt but a bucket of absinthe and 60 Gauloises per day for sustenance with only a pet pigeon for company.
But then again you’d need money to get to Paris in the first place and to feed the pigeon.
Oh, she’s right!
Also, I have never seen a baby pigeon.
I wonder how many potentially great writers got lost along the way for want of A Room of One’s Own.
I’m reading A Room of One’s Own now. It’s strange, I know it’s supposed to be a great feminist essay, but her main argument seems to be that the main necessity for a great writer is to have lots of money
She’s wrong.
Everyone knows to be a great writer you have to suffer for your art and live in a lofty garret with broken windows in Paris having nowt but a bucket of absinthe and 60 Gauloises per day for sustenance with only a pet pigeon for company.
But then again you’d need money to get to Paris in the first place and to feed the pigeon.
Oh, she’s right!
Also, I have never seen a baby pigeon.
Don’t forget about the side trip to Prague so you can really discover yourself.
I’ve been reading Raymond Chandler’s Killer In The Rain recently. It’s the last of the Marlowe books (though is actually a collection of short stories featuring proto-Marlowes, the plots of which were recycled into some of the novels). It’s been quite interesting mostly, some of the stories feeling like nice, cut-down alternatives to bits of the novels (the equivalent of omnibus edits of Doctor Who serials).
Unfortunately, I’ve reached the end of the book and it turns out it’s missing 20 odd pages, ending in the middle of a sentence. Pretty annoying to begin with, even more so because all my copies are matching editions, now OOP and replaced with different designs on the same ISBN, and I bought this two years ago (along with the two or three other ones I hadn’t read then, to finish the set) to beat the change over in design. So I can’t get a refund or replacement. 
Here’s a general question:
I’m chaotic good (surprise!). You?
Nope, it is a season Ticket. they are printed on thin cardboard like paper. i don’t have mine with me but here is a picture of a similar ticket.
Cool. I used to work for the media department at the university I attended. One of the first things someone had me laminate was hockey tickets (on heat paper). I was horrified when they came out the other end completely black. I had no way of knowing at the time. I did have a lot of laminated posters back then.
Read The Player of Games, one of the earliest Culture novels by Iain Banks. It is very good, as always. The plot is that the Contact division convinces the probably best game-player of the Culture to head to an Empire inside of which many things – prestige, career progress, finally even the position of Emperor – are built on the proficiency in a specific strategic game that is a representation of the structure and way of life of this Empire. It’s supposed to be both a diplomatic thing and a bit of an experiment in how well an outside might do in this Empire’s game, as Contact is at a bit of a loss as to how to deal with it – it is the dominant ruling power in its part of the galaxy, and exerts its power brutally, but while it poses no danger to the culture, going to war with it would mean considerable loss of life on all sides.
Apart from showing the protagonist’s slow progress in the game and the court intrigue world he has been put into – and in which forces inside the Empire are of course trying to remove him from the game – the novel explores the differences of the Culture’s society built on freedom, individualism and anarchy and the Empire’s built on dominance, collectivism and hierarchy. This is all mirrored in the game itself, and the game passages are fun to read even if I was never quite able to imagine the game itself.
It’s a fun read, a pretty slim novel and a good representatin of the Culture books in general. Highly recommended.
