Welcome to Litsy!

I loved this. A super short story, the basis of John Carpenter‘s The Thing! A movie that still haunts me. It‘s nice to see a movie‘s origin story 😉

And. I met my GoodReads challenge for 2024 😆

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2:2 Campbell was a racist who, as a sci fi magazine editor, turned down a Samuel R. Delany story due to the Black protagonist. I'm reminded of the Star Trek DS9 episodes in which Captain Sisko thinks he's a 1950s sci fi writer whose editor won't print his "Deep Space 9" story unless he removes the unacceptably Black station commander.
His prejudice was condemned by Asimov, and Philip K. Dick considered him a Nazi. His work reads differently now.

1:2 The stories in this collection are pretty solid, from the sci-fi horror of the title story and the currently topical horror of Dead Knowledge, through the maguffin-based gadget stories, to the far-future tales about the Heat Death of the universe. The tone runs from an optimistically plucky "Good Ole American Grit Will Overcome", to a decidedly pessimistic "What's the Point?", even if that end is untold billions of years in the future. 4?

This was the 1000th book on my tbr mountain, but temporarily occupies the limbo place between "to read" and "read" that is "currently reading".
The title story is famously the inspiration for the films "The Thing from Another World" & "The Thing". Campbell's novella is full of claustrophobic paranoia & sci-fi horror.
There's an albatross which could have carried some nice literary symbolism, but Campbell avoided that, for some reason: too obvious?