Started reading The Chilling by Riley James and found it a pretty decent read. It is interesting that the author acknowledges at the end of the book: “As a child, most of what I knew about Antarctica came from John Carpenter’s The Thing: it’s really cold there (apparently), hey have alien parasites that want to kill you, and everyone’s pretty terrified.”
So I looked into John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror film and found it is based on John W Campbell’s 1938 novella “Who Goes There?”. According to Wikipedia: “In 1973, the story was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the stories representing the ‘most influential, important, and memorable science fiction that has ever been written’.” While I don’t really know anything about either the film or the story (which is kind of embarrassing), I certainly remember the episode “Ice” from the first season of The X-Files, which borrows its premise from the storyline.
Wikipedia also mentions the book Frozen Hell: The Book That Inspired The Thing, which was published in 2019 thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. That book features artwork by Bob Eggleton (awesome), as well as a preface by Alec Nevala-Lee and an introduction by Robert Silverberg (both of which can be viewed as free sample via Amazon). Now, I do know about Robert Silverberg and have a copy of his 1963 story “To See the Invisible Man” (re-published as an ebook in 2021). I wrote about my journey of tracking down this story in a long-winded article titled “From Yevgeny Zamyatin to Shirley Jackson” via Substack. Love the 1986 episode of The Twiilight Zone which is based on Silverberg’s story.
Back to “Who Goes There?”: Apparently the scientists in this story shoot an albatross “to prevent a Thing from infecting it and flying to civilisation”. Interestingly, in The Chilling there is also an albatross, with the protagonist and her colleagues discussing whether it is unlucky to see one while sailing. Turns out it is unlucky “only if ya shoot ’em with a crossbow”, which refers to English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. It is just one of the many little details that makes The Chilling such an interesting read.
(Day 74 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 