Articles

Adventure
Seeker: The Avatar of Horror – Part II
by
Paul Crowley

(Part
I here)

(In Which The Point, As It Were, Or, In The Usual
Parlance Of Those Unaware Of The Subjunctive, As It Was, Is Eventually,
Though Evidently In A Long-Winded Manner, Attained)

A computer game is planned. An immense
amount of work is accomplished,  a story is devised, an  uncountable  number
of  polygons  are  drawn  in  the ethereal, slightly crazy sphere
of cyberspace,  various employees sleep at odd hours before the  cold
glow of their monitors. Advertising appears, interest is piqued,
previews, then reviews, are written among the various online
gaming magazines, the great American media-cum-meatgrinder machine
rouses itself once more and roars and spins into life. Neat little
boxes with nifty artwork, containing antiseptic, not-quite-square
jewel cases with perfectly round, machine stamped CD’s  flow
out into the nation’s retail outlets. Wallets are opened, cash
and/or credit cards are handed to salespeople, electronic signals,
the economy’s lifeblood, zing and zang and zoom along quantum
pathways into secure spaces where, incredibly, they are, for
the most part, correctly credited to the various actors who have
participated in yet another fulsome demonstration of why the
liberal capitalist West has so utterly triumphed in its centuries-long
battle with the rest of the planet (no, I am not a Republican.
In fact, I am a defiant member of that soon-to-be-extinct-genus, Liberalis
Democratus. That doesn’t mean I can’t admire Adam Smith)
(I am aware that none of you particularly needed to have that
last bit of information shared with you, and I apologize for
injecting myself crudely and shamelessly into this column. I
will try to avoid such lapses in the future) (Unless, of course,
Paul Crowley Fan Clubs spring up all over the known world, in
which case I shall be forced to divulge each and every last speck
of personal information in my possession, along with alluring,
yet demure, photographs).

And what is the object of all this
furious labor, this frantic attention, this fusillade of monetary
fandangos (ah, Spiro, we hardly knew ye!)?

A dinky little computer horror game,
for Christ’s sake!. Yet another messy shoot-‘em-up, packed with
disgusting and vicious enemies the destruction of whom is the
seeming sole object of the game, along with the sort of weaponry
normally thought to be of interest only to inbred, fatigue-wearing
numbskulls who spend all their free time waiting around for the “second” American
Revolution and practicing various doctrinaire  isms directed
against anyone not a bona fide, certificate-of-authenticity White
(such a reassuring color, somehow) Anglo (because they’re
the least objectionable of all those European pansies trying
to tell us how to run our country) Saxon (for some good old Teutonic
manliness)  Male (what’s your problem?). Among this weaponry
are flamethrowers, yes, that’s right, flamethrowers, for
the love of bleeding Jesus, as well as other rather nasty accoutrements
of the ballistic military sort. A dime a dozen game, from the
same school as Doom, that foulest, most despicable and
utterly-without-redeeming-value misapplication of the programmer’s
art, the one that started it all, the Black Book of computer
gaming, in other words, the same old dreary, violent…

Well, you get the point: man opens
door, man sees monster, monster sees man, monster indicates intention
to gobble, gut, decapitate or otherwise inconvenience man, man
shoots monster, ejecta of the monster bodily type spew across
space, man holds smoking barrel of weapon to mouth and coolly
blows out smoke. And then it starts all over again. This is surely
the sort of game geared to appeal to “young people” (by whom
I mean anyone who can’t quite remember who was on whose side
during World War II, or, a bit more kindly, as I once wrote to
our collective Editor/Owner Mr. Sluganski, “the sort of hyena-like
barbarians who would give William Golding a bad fright.”).

Except that  this one is special.

This one has a history.

This one is the scion of a line of distinguished
forebears, who have disturbed and discomfited and distracted
three generations of Americans.

This one is The Thing.

                                      ____________________

Some  background  (all right, all  right, I  hear  all
those offstage groans,

don’t think I’m not taking names
down) for a moment:

Those of you who are familiar with
the first bit of writing that appeared under my byline in this
site (a letter to the editor that Randy Sluganski then ran as
an article, entitled “I Grow Old, I Grow Old…”) already know
that while I am primarily an adventure gamer, I have come to
judge games not so much by overarching labels (adventure, shooter
etc.) as by standards of story, plot development, human interest,
internal integrity and the respect, or lack of it, shown by the
game designers to  the game player. I have, while continuing
as a “pure” adventure gamer for most of the time, played a variety
of games from other niches of the gaming world and, usually,
I have not been disappointed. While I can think of nothing more
boring than simply mowing down an endless succession of enemies,
there are “shooters” (such as Max Payne or Medal Of
Honor: Allied Assault) out there that present the
gamer with a lot more than bang-bang thrills and are in my opinion
just as entitled to the sobriquet “adventure” as any traditional
adventure game. If problem solving is an integral element of
adventure gaming, then these two nominal shooters are every bit
as challenging as any puzzle-laden adventure.

We will not revisit the entire substance
of my previous letter/article here, but it is safe to say that
my interests often lead me, when I am not looking forward to
getting my hands on such as Syberia or Dark Fall or
the next Ragnar Tornquist work of genius, to games which fall
somewhere outside my normal area of interest.

The publication in 2002 of Universal
Interactive’s The Thing, a single-CD game, was preceded
by a national television advertising campaign and a whole lot
of excited interest on my part, because of the story’s engaging
history and because I am an enthusiast of the two films which
preceded the present computer game. Many of you will have at
least a passing acquaintance with these films (more on them later).
But (if I may be permitted to quote Yoda), “There is…another.” And
that “another” is the one that started it all, an intriguing
story that appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction in
August 1938.

Now, August 1938 was an interesting
time to be living in, especially if you happened to be, say  a
German Jew, or an Ethiopian, or a Spanish Republican, and it
was going to get a lot more interesting in about a month’s time
for certain Czechoslovakians. A number of significant events
were taking place during this 1938 summer: Europe was in something
of an uproar over the clever manipulations of a regional dictator
who had played his cards quite nicely up to that point (sound
familiar?), and the sleeping giant (as the great and tragic Yamamoto
was to characterize the United States after his nominal victory
at Pearl Harbor) had yet to rouse itself from its dreary slumber
despite the efforts of its chief executive to steer it into meaningful
engagement with the rest of the planet. At the same time, in
that exotic land, formerly Anatolia or Asia Minor, now Turkey,
one of the great soldier-statesman of the early 20^th century
was dying of cirrhosis. Born Mustafa Kemal, he was by now known
as “Ataturk”; he had forcibly marched his people, heirs of the
vanished Ottoman Empire, dazed and disrupted by their disastrous
participation in the Great War, into the modern secular era,
and he was, as the historian Lord Kinross has remarked, separated
from the other dictators of his age by two major contradistinctions:
he presided over the retraction rather than the expansion of
an empire and he took care to put into place a political system
which would survive his own passing. Meanwhile, the Poles were
arguing with the aforementioned regional dictator over, among
other things, the disposition of the “corridor” which ran north
to the “free” city of Danzig, and diplomats were scrambling to
foment a solution to this crisis because no one could possibly
desire to return to the trench-horrors of the Great War. At the
same time, the leader of the workers’ paradise to the east (no
slouch himself in the regional dictator department) was getting
ready to sign what he thought was going to be The Deal Of The
Century with the first regional dictator in about a year, and
boy, was he ever going to be surprised in, oh, June of
1941! A few, a very few men in the West (an American president,
an out-of-power, disrespected Tory politician, an irritating,
but well read and brilliant French lieutenant-colonel who would
later become president of his country and who was attempting,
without success, to alert his military and political superiors
to the new German tactical doctrine of the armored  spearhead,
soon to become famous as the main component of “blitzkrieg”)
were cognizant of what was to come, but they were hampered by
the understandable inability of the interwar generations in their
respective lands to countenance the revival of even the rumor
of war. Preparations were busily underway in New York for the
projected opening in the spring of 1939 of a World’s Fair which
would preach to its attendees of international comity and the
march of progress (exemplified, memorably, by a “talking” robot)
before being rudely interrupted by the collision of empires which
would earn itself the history-book label World War II.

Along with these events drawing ever
so inexorably to their conclusion was a phenomenon, hardly noticeable
among the great and grand doings that preoccupied most people,
which was laying the groundwork for the growth of a truly American
literary expression. Although the genesis of this expression
could be argued to have occurred in Old Europe rather than the
United States, a group of American authors was in the process
of taking over the existing European tradition and making it
their own. The names formerly associated with this speculative
and adventurous tradition, names of British provenance like Verne
and Welles, would eventually give way before names like Clarke,
Asimov and Heinlein, names of differing European backgrounds,
it is true, but names which nevertheless sprang from the melting
pot continent on the other side of the ocean.

This nascent craft of American science
fiction (intertwined with fantasy and horror) was finding its
outlet in a growing number of small  magazines devoted to its
product that, along with comic books, were fast becoming the
exclusive literature of interest among boys (and some girls)
of just about any age. Although much of what was written before,
and would be written after, August 1938 was hardly memorable,
it was providing an exciting, one could say a living laboratory,
out of which would come the better material of later years.

One of the most interesting of the
new crop of sci-fi/fantasy/horror writers of the 1930’s was a
man named John W. Campbell, Jr., who had pursued a science track
in college even as he was selling his first science fiction story,
at the age of 19, in 1930. Campbell went on to write for the
rest of the decade under his own name and under a nom de plume (Don
A. Stuart), eventually becoming the editor of Astounding Stories (renamed Astounding
Science Fiction and in later years called Analog Science
Fact/Fiction), staying in that job until his death in 1971.

Campbell  could  not  be  called  a  great  stylist  by  any  stretch  of  the

imagination (to call much of his
work turgid and graceless would be a kindness in my view), but
he was one of a handful of writers who, by dint of the range
and power of their ideas,  pulled science fiction up from the
depths of the gooey-thing-that-eats-you-all-up-and-sprouts-ugly-tentacles-to-boot
genre in which it was usually imprisoned  and paved the way for
the hard, science based fiction that became a staple of the latter
half of the century recently ended and that enriched not only
popular fiction, but the popular cinema as well. We are as indebted
to Campbell as to anyone else for film masterworks such as 1979’s Alien,
directed by the now famous (by virtue of such films as Thelma And
Louise and Gladiator) Ridley Scott, which combined
stunning “hard” science fiction ambience (those wonderful interstellar
cargo ship sets) with pure, unadulterated horror (of the gooey-thing-that-eats-you-all-up-etc.
variety, it must be said), overlain with a masterful Hitchcock-in-space
tautness that would have made The Master himself (remember that
creepy sci-fi/horror amalgam, The Birds?) proud.

One of Campbell’s last fictive efforts
was a fifty-or-so page story, or novella, entitled Who Goes
There?, published in (just in case you forgot while wading
through all this mishegas) the August 1938 Astounding
Science Fiction, of which he was by now the editor.
While set firmly within the precincts of the Earth (albeit in
a remote American science research station in the Antarctic),
the story contained elements of space-opera (alien ship complete
with indisposed alien visitor) along with a mounting dose of
horror as, one by one, the men at the station were overwhelmed
by the thing that had been unleashed in their midst and battled
not only this adversary but their own fears and suspicions of
each other. This adversary was known by no appellation other
than thing, rendering it not only impersonal but wholly
unapproachable, as opposed to some other, later examples of fictional
extraterrestrial biota we are all familiar with (did somebody
say Steven Spielberg?). The story, while not particularly brilliant
in its purely literary complements, exhibited a sophisticated
understanding of the dilemmas of leadership and crisis management
in difficult circumstances, along with a whopping good conceit,  the
scariness  of  which  depended as much  on what wasn’t seen as
what was.

Now, I’m not one of those crit-lit
types who take inordinate pleasure in analyzing fiction and poetry
to death in an abstruse and wholly incomprehensible manner of
interest only to colleagues in academe. However, Who Goes
There?, since it is the fons et origo of our present
subject, deserves a bit of a look. So let us take some time to
more closely examine this nearly forgotten story, this avatar
of horror, which was to spawn three additional uniquely original  iterations
during the more than half-century which followed its initial
publication.

                                      ____________________

I have already referred to Campbell’s
less than mellifluous writing style, but buried here and about
in the fifty pages of the story are indications of a finer than
usual hand at work. Consider the two opening paragraphs, which
start with an abrupt, harsh, compact statement of disagreeable
fact and then open up into an almost lush description of the
smell of a room, ending with a disturbing sight:

The place stank. A queer, mingled
stench that only the ice-buried cabins

of an Antarctic camp know, compounded
of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted
seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combated the musty smell
of sweat-and-snow-drenched furs. The acrid odor of burnt cooking
fat, and  the animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs,

diluted by time, hung in the air.

Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted
sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet,
somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their associates – dogs,
machines, and cooking – came another taint. It was a queer,
neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien
among the smells of industry and life. And it was a life-smell.
But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin
on the table, dripping slowly, methodically onto the heavy
planks, dank and gaunt under the shielded glare of the electric
light.

We are, without having had any time
to adjust, immediately in the presence of something unknown,
and disturbing. An economy of words has informed us that we have
looked into a special, isolated and troubled place, a place we
can infer is already unbalanced before any action, human or otherwise,
has commenced. Here is a brief moment, later, in that same room:

He paused for a moment, the deep,
steady voice giving way to the drone of wind overhead and the
uneasy, malicious gurgling in the pipe of the galley stove.

A signal of what is coming has been
given – the very object which contributes to the survival of
the humans inhabiting this base, a galley stove, is portrayed
in none too reassuring terms. In other words, what has been safe
and sure will no longer be so.

Fast upon this image, a description
of the Antarctic environment:

Drift – a drift-wind was sweeping
by overhead. Right now the snow picked up by the mumbling wind
fled in level, blinding lanes across the face of the buried
camp. If a man stepped out of the tunnels that connected each
of the camp buildings beneath the surface, he’d be lost in
ten paces. Out there, the slim, black finger of the radio mast
lifted three hundred feet into the air, and at its peak was
the clear night sky. A sky of thin, whining wind rushing steadily
from beyond to another beyond under the licking, curling mantle
of the aurora. And off north, the horizon flamed with queer,
angry colors of the midnight twilight. That was Spring three
hundred feet above Antarctica.

We have just  been  given  a  precise  tone  poem  about
what  life is like,

from the vantage of nose and skin
and eyes, for the men resident in this particular part of the
planet. Except for a tendency to overuse the word “queer”, this
is pretty good stuff for a horror story. It is, sad to say, not
the accomplishment of the author to write like this throughout
the novella, but he has given us a bit of rough poetry, both
to draw us closer to the situation of his protagonists and to
set the mood for what is to come.

After our introduction to the exotic
venue of an ice-floored camp in Antarctica (not to mention one
with an additional,  nervous-making , last minute guest), Who
Goes There? follows a fairly conventional scenario. Something has
been discovered. Amid  the natural tendency of scientists to
examine their discovery, a lone voice is raised in Cassandran
dissent, and overruled. Events go on in a fairly normal, if pregnant,
vein for 15 pages, until all hell, briefly, breaks loose. The
ensuing 37 pages evolve, by turns, into a struggle to first contain,
then desperately defeat, certain catastrophe. An ingenious solution,
which may or may not spell deliverance,  presents itself, but
complications abound; it is only by an inspired leap of intuition
that a possible scheme of salvation is arrived at. The scheme
is put into effect, amid hope and dread; a denouement is reached.

Scattered throughout the novella
are the briefest of thumbnail portraits, of men named McReady,
Garry, Blair, Copper, Connant, Clark, Benning, Norris, Dumont,
Van Wall. We never learn the first names of these men, who begin
to realize that they are engaged, besieged as they are amid an
ice-bound vault at the bottom of the world, in a struggle not
merely for their own survival, but for that of the entire human
race. It is a deft touch, this lack of given names, and it mimics
the habits of military and scientific men used to long term,
isolated cohabitation with each other during specified missions,
in this case a mission to study magnetic effects at the  South
pole. The constant addressing of each other by last names lends
a certain crisp distance to the relations between these men,
a shadow of formality between their persons, which ironically
accentuates the sudden need that they share, at this treacherous
moment, to stay together, to support one another. It is this
very need, of support and back-watching, that is most problematical
however, for it is the peculiar talent of their chance, alien
guest to be able to absorb, and imitate, any life form it encounters
on the Earth. Abruptly, they have been transformed from a group
which casually cooperates with one another in the performance
of both their various duties and the sheer cussed difficulty
of living amicably with strangers, into a group of terrified
potential victims, watching each other with suspicion and unable
to spend a single moment without the dreadful feeling that they
are about to be overcome by an alien horror in the form of the
man sitting or standing a few feet away. (We will encounter this
disturbing atmosphere again in our later avatars, most memorably
when we are compelled not only to view, but to live within
this field of dread, in the Universal Interactive computer game The
Thing, but that, as they say, is a subject for later.)

The paranoid mise-en-scene with
which we are confronted flows from very primal, universal human
fears. The object of all this terror is a creature which, without
any particular care or scruple about what it is doing, acting
out of its own Darwinian imperatives, the result, presumably,
of as long an evolutionary process on its home world as that
of the human beings it is stalking,  casually deprives its victims
of any individual character, emotion, personality or Emersonian “mind
on fire” quality which denotes them as unique. Having done so,
it hides in plain sight, in the form of a formerly trusted colleague,
until chance events provide it with the opportunity to strike
again. The fear of losing one’s personality, one’s “soul”, so
intimately connected with the universal human fear of death (as
fear of oblivion) is here elementally played as a bad dream in
which one knows the horror is coming but can do nothing to stop
it. The men at the isolated station face not only death, but
death-in-life.

All of this is accomplished with
very little overt violence; it is the waiting, the watching,
the psychological dislocations of terror and paranoia, that provide
the bulk of the fear factor in this novella. The greatest battle
in the entire history of humanity is taking place in this lonely
scientific outpost, and no one, anywhere, may ever know it, until
it is too late. And when it is too late, there will be
no one left to mourn the death of the race or to record the valiant
and desperate efforts that were made, in extremis, on
its behalf. The ultimate loneliness, of unsung heroism, has descended
upon this cold, dark corner of icy waste.

We will leave Who Goes There? for
now, having sketched enough of its dimensions to limn its basic
design without revealing its outcome. As the nearly last major
fictional effort of a writer who changed the face of American
science fiction, it deserves our attention, our respect and our
reengagement; history of a sort was made in the writing of  this
tale, and it is toward the next phase of that history that our
attentions now turn.

____________________

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