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Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 52-56

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
Hell Ship • novelette by Arthur J. Burks ∗
Jason Comes Home • short story by A. Macfadyen, Jr. ∗
Resilient Planet • short story by Nelson Tremaine [as by Warner Van Lorne] ∗
“Who Goes There?” • novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Don A. Stuart] ∗∗∗+
The Terrible Sense • short story by Thomas Calvert McClary [as by Calvin Peregoy] ∗∗
Asteroid Pirates • short story by Royal W. Heckman ∗∗
Eviction by Isotherm • short story by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗
The Disinherited • short story by Henry Kuttner ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by H. W. Wesso
Interior artwork • by H. W. Wesso (x7), C. R. Thomson, Jack Binder, uncredited (Coughlin, Flatos, and Orban) (x5)
Food for the First Planet • essay by Thomas Calvert McClary
“Power” • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: June 1938
In Times to Come
Orbits, Take-Offs and Landings • essay by Willy Ley
Science Discussions and Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

This issue is best known for John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes Here?, later seen as a pretty good SF movie in the early 1980s, The Thing.² The fiction leads off, however, with a bigger name—Arthur J. Burks, and his Hell Ship. This is the first of his ‘Josh McNab’ series (and my heart later sank when I discovered this is the first of four stories that appeared in Astounding).

McNab is the chief engineer of a tramp steamer—sorry, spaceship—called the Arachne. In among the thrust bearings, girders and scent of oil, we learn that McNab is a fifty year old widower (his wife Mary died in childbirth) and, in case you didn’t guess it from his name, he is Scottish:

“Ye’re the purrtiest thing,” said Josh, looking the Arachne over from the rim of the slip, his gray eyes glistening with pride. “Purtier than the bonniest lassie that ever coom oot o’ Scutland, save one! If only I had the money to own ye!”  p. 8

We also find out that the Arachne is going to Mars with a cracked rotor shaft (the parsimonious ship owner Caperton wants to delay the repair):

“An’ there be scuts that say the Scotch are teet!” [McNab] muttered. His Scotch dialect was broad enough to cut with a knife when he was aroused, or talking to himself.
If repairs were to be made in the slip, Caperton had to pay union wages plus time and a half for overtime. If they were made enroute—sailors had to do it, and they received no extra pay. Then, it was “for the safety of the ship”, and plain duty. Moreover they had to do it [to get] home again. “An’ weel yon Caperton kens it!” muttered Josh McNab.  p. 7

This sets up (spoiler) the obvious arc of the story, which is the deterioration of the rotor shaft to the point that McNab disobeys the Captain’s orders and stops the ship en route to effect a repair. This causes a period of zero gee, much to the consternation of the passengers.

Padding all this out is a lot of malarkey about McNab’s neice Mary (the same name as his dead wife) who is travelling with the ship to Mars, and who flirts shamelessly with McNab (much to his embarrassment). Mary, however, is involved in a love triangle with one of the young sailor-spacemen on board, which later leads to McNab consoling her about her romantic misfortunes (one of the many unintentionally hilarious scenes in the story):

Then, when things were pretty bad for Mary, by the looks of her, and she stood on a landing with McNab, in the Tunnel abeam of the belt promenade: “Murrry,” he said softly, dropping his calloused hand over hers—which took a lot of courage for Josh McNab, “is yon laddie worth it?”
“To me, Josh, yes.”
She swayed, and would have fallen, and Josh had an inspiration.
“Tell me, Murrry, the noo, aboot the ship. Answers micht help a wee bit ye ken—”
She understood instantly, and turned her head toward him for a moment, without relaxing her grip on the rail.
She did, however, lean her body a bit away from the cylindrical pit of the rotor. “Top and main thrust bearings, Josh,” she said, “are oil pad flotation surfaces, with 22 square feet area, operating with an oil pressure of 350 pounds per square inch. The metal of the bearing-plates is cadmium bronze. The main rotor ball-caps are chome-moly-vanadium steel; the shaft itself a 30” chrome-moly heat-treated alloy—”
The Arachne, after all, was one of her passions, and her own words did a lot to help her back to herself.
“The hull plates are of magnesiumberyl— Thanks, Josh. I needed that, I guess. I’ll try my best to stop being silly. If he doesn’t care, I’m foolish to bother, even though it hurts inside. But you wouldn’t know, Josh—”
“Her name was Murrry, too, lang an’ lang ago,” said McNab slowly.
“Oh, Josh, I didn’t think—”
“So mony folk, Murrry, dinna think at all! But dinna ye fret—”  p. 14

After all the excitement is over, Mary eventually gets her man.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous review,³ Burks and L. Ron Hubbard were foisted on Campbell by the Street & Smith management to introduce “people” into the stories. What a pity that what he got were these ludicrous stereotypes and their mundane concerns.

Jason Comes Home by A. Macfadyen, Jr. begins with Jason paddling a canoe in the wilds when he comes upon an area covered in slime. In the midst of this are alien skeletons and a spacecraft. He goes inside the vessel, and after flicking a couple of switches is soon accelerating through space.
The rest of the first part of the story tells of how Jason manages to decipher the alien crew’s books, and manages to get control of the craft. He then goes to the aliens’ home planet and finds out that the slime has destroyed them. During this visit his craft becomes infected too (his pet squirrel’s bones liquefy) and he retreats to a safe area to develop an ionising weapon to kill the slime.
Afterwards Jason returns to Earth to find that it has destroyed civilisation there too, and he once more uses his weapon. A few human survivors appear at the very end.
This has better prose than most stories from this period but it’s a creaky, old-style tale with numerous mini-science dumps, and not very good.

Resilient Planet by Nelson Tremaine starts with a spaceman with a drive malfunction⁴ heading out of the solar system. When he stumbles upon a world he lands there and meets a rubbery looking man:

He stayed on the road as the car came to a halt. The creepy sensation returned. When the door opened a resilient man jumped out! He actually bounced when he landed! His legs shortened, then gradually extended to raise his body back to normal position. A simple robe was his only clothing.
Bob could hardly believe the creature was alive. He appeared more like the image of a man that a child would mold in putty. But he seemed intelligent, and certainly the machine represented the work of a well-developed brain.  p. 50

The rest of it is mostly description of this rubbery man’s world and travelling society (they move from city to city to avoid full sunlight). Later, the spaceman sees another human who is, when he finally tracks her down, a young woman (for some unexplained plot reason the aliens have kept them apart). As the man has previously discovered that shouting causes the aliens to fall  unconscious, he makes a lot of noise and they escape. The aliens eventually repent and help the couple leave the planet.
This reads like an amateur writer’s story, and I wonder if it was accepted because Nelson Tremaine was F. Orlin Tremaine’s (Campbell’s boss’s) brother. (Conversely, it isn’t much worse than some of the other stuff here.)

“Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.⁵ opens at an Antarctic research station with the crew standing around the tarpaulined body of a frozen alien. One of the main characters, McReady, tells the men that they discovered it at a crashed spaceship near a magnetic anomaly they were investigating. During the process of digging the alien out of the ice they accidentally destroyed the ship.

After this atmospheric but data-dump start the men then discuss whether it is safe to defrost the creature and examine it. The camp physicist, Norris, is vehemently opposed, and his warning telegraphs the arc of the story:

“How the hell can these birds tell what they are voting on? They haven’t seen those three red eyes, and that blue hair like crawling worms. Crawling— damn, it’s crawling there in the ice right now!
“Nothing Earth ever spawned had the unutterable sublimation of devastating wrath that thing let loose in its face when it looked around his frozen desolation twenty million years ago. Mad? It was mad clear through—searing, blistering mad!
“Hell, I’ve had bad dreams ever since I looked at those three red eyes. Nightmares. Dreaming the thing thawed out and came to life—that it wasn’t dead, or even wholly unconscious all those twenty million years, but just slowed, waiting—waiting. You’ll dream, too, while that damned thing that Earth wouldn’t own is dripping, dripping in the Cosmos House tonight.
“And, Connant,” Norris whipped toward the cosmic ray specialist, “won’t you have fun sitting up all night in the quiet. Wind whining above—and that thing dripping—” He stopped for a moment, and looked round.
“I know. That’s not science. But this is, it’s psychology. You’ll have nightmares for a year to come. Every night since I looked at that thing I’ve had ’em. That’s why I hate it—sure I do—and don’t want it around. Put it back where it came from and let it freeze for another twenty million years. I had some swell nightmares—that it wasn’t made like we are—which is obvious—but of a different kind of flesh that it can really control. That it can change its shape, and look like a man— and wait to kill and eat—
“That’s not a logical argument. I know it isn’t. The thing isn’t Earthlogic anyway.”  p. 66-67

After some more discussion the men agree to have Connant babysit the alien’s body overnight, but it isn’t long before he falls asleep and the body goes missing. Then everything kicks off when the Thing is found in the huskies’ enclosure, and the men head there with ice-axes, .45s, and flamethrowers:

Connant stopped at the bend in the corridor. His breath hissed suddenly through his throat. “Great God—”
The revolver exploded thunderously; three numbing, palpable waves of sound crashed through the confined corridors. Two more. The revolver dropped to the hard-packed snow of the trail, and Barclay saw the ice-ax shift into defensive position. Connant’s powerful body blocked his vision, but beyond he heard something mewing, and, insanely, chuckling. The dogs were quieter; there was a deadly seriousness in their low snarls. Taloned feet scratched at hard-packed snow, broken chains were clinking and tangling.
Connant shifted abruptly, and Barclay could see what lay beyond. For a second he stood frozen, then his breath went out in a gusty curse. The Thing launched itself at Connant, the powerful arms of the man swung the ice-ax flatside first at what might have been a head. It scrunched horribly, and the tattered flesh, ripped by a half-dozen savage huskies, leapt to its feet again. The red eyes blazed with an unearthly hatred, an unearthly, unkillable vitality.  p. 73

I love that “mewing and insanely chucking” description.
Even though they finally manage to kill the Thing they note that it has changed shape during the fight to become part-dog. This ability of the alien to change itself down to the cellular level drives the rest of the narrative, as the men no longer know who is human and who is a Thing . . . .
There are a couple of later scenes that rise above the well done paranoia and claustrophobia: one of these is (spoiler) when the men have their blood tested (the theory is that a Thing’s blood will want to “live”); and the other is when McReady and Barclay go to see Blair, who has been isolated in another part of the camp. This last part provides an SFnal finish to the story (in contrast to the movie) when they discover the Thing has built a blue-light emitting atomic reactor to power an anti-gravity device it intends to use to escape.
The best parts of this story are very good but the story as a whole is rather uneven, with some parts that don’t really work (e.g., I didn’t understand the explanation for the failure of the serum samples before they attempted the blood test). A greater problem (and one that I wouldn’t have been able to articulate until I saw it discussed elsewhere) is that the characterisation and point of view is all over the place. If the men were more clearly drawn, and the story told from McReady’s point of view (rather than the semi-omniscient one used), it would be a much smoother and more effective piece. Overall you get the feeling of a story that needs another draft—but, for all that, it is well worth reading.

The Terrible Sense by Thomas Calvert McClary starts with a deaf man getting a hearing transplant from a bat (the biological details are not explained). Once you get past this daft premise (just as with McClary’s recent serial Three Thousand Years) the first part is a pretty good account of his developing bat-abilities as he carries out his day to day job as a bookkeeper:

He did not notice it, but he no longer turned to see who was approaching. He knew long before he was fully conscious of their footsteps or voices. He was sitting on one side of a partition with Will Flanagan at noon one day when Will said idly, “I wonder exactly what Marie Stevens is doing at one minute to twelve?”
“Combing her hair,” Theodore said. He was not guessing. She might just as well have been powdering or rouging. But he knew she was combing her hair.
Will looked around the partition and said, “Jeepers!” He gave Clews a peculiar look.
The other bookkeepers began making a lot of remarks like that to Clews. As long as they asked about somebody in the room, or standing in a draft blowing into the room, Clews usually knew the answer. A week later they framed him. They had Marie Stevens sit absolutely quiet behind a filing case. They led up to the idea and asked Clews.
Clews’ mind went blank with concentration. He had not discovered how he knew things yet. He had not even discovered he was being kidded. After a second he said seriously, “She’s trying to be quiet. But she’s chewing gum.”
The committee ran to investigate. She was. They did not notice that the effort of absolute control made her breathe a little harder.  p. 102

This story rather loses its engrossing Weird Tales vibe when he changes career to become a successful blindfolded boxer! Worth reading for the middle section perhaps.

Asteroid Pirates by Royal W. Heckman starts intriguingly with a reporter who lands outside a restaurant and then turns his anti-gravity suit off:

Few people were about. All Earthlings, Fennel noted. He was a little surprised at not seeing any balloon-headed, skeleton men from Mars. Or those infernal Venusians! This part of New York was extremely popular with the inhabitants of Earth’s neighboring planets. Especially after midnight.
Greg was hungry. The new Interplanetary Restaurant was just around the corner. It was a dandy place to pick up news items for his ten-minute column in the New York Radio Star. He made the turn.
A rotund Venusian rolled swiftly toward him. Fennel jumped aside. The Venusian rolled to the outer edge of the walk and went swiftly on his way. The small, round head stuck out from the center of one side like a black hub cap. Greg cursed.
They ought to put a speed limit on those living pinwheels! Of course, with their stubby legs and spherical bodies, the Venusians found it difficult to waddle along a crowded street. But when they lay down and rolled, twenty miles an hour was low gear to them!  p. 113

Fennel then goes into the restaurant and meets an acquaintance who, after some chit-chat, tells him about a nefarious Venusian plot to turn the asteroid belt into a planet. This leads to Fennel’s kidnap (he now knows too much), along with three Saturnian apes, and their trip out to the Belt. There (spoiler) the action kicks off, and the apes prove more than a match for their captors.
This is the usual pulp nonsense, but it is reasonably entertaining, and I suspect it would be enjoyed by Doc Smith fans among others.

Eviction by Isotherm by Malcolm Jameson is an early geoengineering/weather war story set during a future ten year armistice between warring American and Eurasian superpowers. The Americans prime two volcanoes in the Panama Canal area as a defensive measure.
When the Eurasians eventually break the armistice and attack, America explodes the volcanoes and supercharge the eruptions by pumping seawater through underground tunnels. The airborne ash and the diverted Gulf Stream plunge Europe into an Ice Age.
This is dull and characterless for the most part, and I’m not convinced that America would escape so lightly—but this has a spectacular and interesting ending. Awful title.

The Disinherited marks Henry Kuttner ’s first appearance in the magazine—but he wouldn’t return  under his own name until 1943.⁶
The story starts with the protagonist, Carver, finishing his shift in an underground radium mine; he is a Helot, and they are ruled over by the Lords in this future Earth. Carver returns home to Morna, his mate, who tells him that a spaceship going to Mars has turned back for some reason. After discussing their reproductive status (she is determined not to have a child who will be a slave), Carver takes food to his blind father. The latter is hiding in the country to avoid a euthanasia order.
When Carver returns to see his father the next day, he arrives as soldiers discover and kill him. Carver launches a suicidal attack on them, but is saved when a Martian superman arrives and puts a force field around them both. We then get a lecture about the Cosmic Watcher who has sent the Martian to take electrical power away from humanity so that they can get back on the “right path”.
The story is a jumble of almost completely random elements, but it’s more smoothly written than some work I’ve seen from Kuttner and, despite the massive deus ex machina, an okay read I guess.

The Cover for this issue is an average looking piece by H. W. Wesso, but he produces better Interior artwork, especially for the Campbell story. There is also identifiable work inside by Thomson and Binder, but the remainder (for the Tremaine, McClary, Jameson, and Kuttner stories) are uncredited (although Coughlin, Flatos, and Orban are also listed on the contents page).

Food for the First Planet by Thomas Calvert McClary is a short article (although it seems longer) about growing food on other planets. Not only is the discussion of growing crops on Mars based on completely out of date science, some other details sound incorrect or speculative:

We have such a laboratory to study the little matter of the human lung’s reaction to carbon-monoxide gas at altitudes above 14,000 feet.  p. 45

I assume this is meant to be “carbon dioxide”—carbon monoxide will kill you, regardless of altitude.

After the scientist comes the miner, the soldier of fortune. But soldiers of fortune are notoriously moody and strictly speaking, highly unbalanced.  p. 47

Based on a survey of how many mercenaries?
That said, I did find this interesting snippet (I couldn’t corroborate it, but I did find an interesting book by Hubbard⁷):

Efforts to combat the tsetse problem were made by Wynant Davis Hubbard. While the fly slaughtered domestic animals after each rain, and there appeared no way to control or exterminate the fly, the wild life of the area lived immune. Hubbard started crossing wild animals with domestic stock. He crossed Herefords with the savage Rhodesian wild buffalo, and Polands with the bush pig.
He tamed elephant, lions, the forty-pound Rhodesian cat. Only the local cat could defend itself against the wild animals of the district. Rhodesian mice and rats destroy more crops than all the locusts put together.
Bit by bit, he was successful. His cattle herds were tractable and began to produce high quality beef and milk. Cross-bred pigs began to show signs of heavy pork. Pet lions and tamed wild dogs acted as watch dogs—and learned to leave domestic stock alone. The tsetse came and as usual killed off the innoculated domestic cattle—but the cross-bred cattle maintained the immunity of their wild forebears.  p. 43

“Power” by John W. Campbell, Jr. starts with a discussion of what the word power means before segueing to what a “better” story is. This is a particularly inelegant, possibly confusing, and certainly unnecessary way of introducing an extended Analytical Laboratory and Reader Survey (just get to the point!)

In Times to Come states that the next issue will mark five years of Street & Smith management⁸ before introducing a mixture of forthcoming stories by writers old and new. Campbell ends by talking about a new serial from L. Ron Hubbard, The Tramp (not what you would describe as a typical SF title).
The Analytical Laboratory: June 1938 was discussed in the review of that issue.⁹ See the image above for the extra information that Campbell seeks from his readers this time around.

Orbits, Take-Offs and Landings by Willy Ley is mostly about Hohmann orbits (the curved paths that spacecraft take to get from one planet to another).
At the end of the essay Ley identifies the best place for a spaceport (a place that combines the best rotational speed of the Earth, the highest elevation, etc.):

Strangely enough, there is actually a mountain in existence that fulfils most of the conditions for an ideal spaceport. It is Mt. Kenya in Central Africa, situated directly at the equator, more than three miles high, and surrounded by territory that would present no unsurmountable difficulties for the construction of several large airports. Since Mt. Kenya has generally gentle slopes, it would not even be difficult to build railways all the way from the airports near its foot to a possible spaceport on its top.
It would be strange if the first spaceships would take advantage of these opportunities and ascend from Mt. Kenya—the most modern product of civilization being launched from the very heart of the least civilized continent!  p. 133

Science Discussions and Brass Tacks has a couple of Science Discussions letters before the Brass Tacks section. The first of the former is a puff piece from Arthur J. Burks for his story in this issue, part of which is a description of the magnetic force drive that powers the Arachne.

The Brass Tacks letters are mostly lists of likes and dislikes with comments that are, in places, delightfully unrestrained—such as this from Bob (Wilson) Tucker of Bloomington, Illinois:

May I politely suggest that James Avery of Skowhegan, Maine, commence walking east and not hesitate when he reaches the shore?  p. 155

(Avery was complaining about other letter writers, apparently.)
Or this from John Chapman of Minneapolis, who thought the June issue was otherwise splendid:

The new serial [Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time] is nothing but tripe. He must have written it while striking a match.  p. 157

Other correspondents praise the story, as well as Gallun’s The Seeds of Dusk, Norman L. Knight’s Isle of the Golden Swarm, and Manly Wade Wellman’s Men Against the Stars. McClary’s Three Thousand Years receives mixed notices (some complain it is too similar to a previous work, Rebirth).
The last letter comes from Isaac Asimov of Brooklyn. He suggests a “mutant” cover showing the rings of Saturn from that planet’s surface, and then makes a plea for longer stories:

Your “novelettes” are often only a page or two longer than the short stories. This is unfortunate as the long complete story fills an indispensable cavity in the scheme of things. Its length permits the development in more complete detail of the plot and it has none of the elements of discontinuity which mark the serial.
I think it would be quite easy for you to give us two thirty-page novelettes each month if you would give us only one serial at a time.
Furthermore, one science article is quite enough, and the ten pages thus saved could quite profitably be turned to fictional uses.  p. 161

Presumably he will be pleased by the inclusion of Campbell’s long story (around 22,000 words) in this issue.
In conclusion, this is an issue which improves after a lacklustre start (either that or I just adjusted to the awfulness), and it is worth reading for the Campbell story.  ●

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1. Alva Rogers says, in A Requiem for Astounding, that the cover “is possibly one of Wesso’s finest”, and that Who Goes There? was “without question, the outstanding story of the year”. He adds, “This brilliantly conceived and written tale of Antarctic horror is probably the greatest thing Campbell ever wrote.”
Rogers also notes that Malcolm Jameson’s contribution is his first SF story.

2. I note from Wikipedia that The Thing was initially badly received—I saw when it was first released and thought it was great; glad everyone else caught up. There appears to be a 2011 prequel of the same name, and I’d wager it’s awful (I have a sixth sense for these things).

3. For more about the arrival of Burks and Hubbard at Astounding, read footnote four in the July review.

4. Tremaine’s story is the third in a row that features a drive malfunction—they must all have been built by British Leyland. (Topical Election joke about nationalised industries; I’ll explain it over a stale British Rail sandwich and cup of tepid tea.)

5. There is a lot of history behind Campbell’s story, but I’ll deal with that in an upcoming review of Frozen Hell, the expanded version of Who Goes There?

6. I count seven stories in Unknown under Kuttner’s own name (and dozens elsewhere) before he reappeared with Nothing but Gingerbread Left in the January 1943 Astounding. There were three “Lewis Padgett” stories in Astounding that appeared in late 1942.

7. The book by Wynant Davis Hubbard is called Ibana (New York Graphic Society Publishers, Ltd., 1962): “. . . 13 square miles of glorious lion country in Northern Rhodesia, is also the African adventure of a young American couple who lived there four exciting years taming the land and its wild inhabitants as ranchers and zoologists.”
It appears to be based on four previously published articles, the first of which appeared in the 14^th April 1934 Saturday Evening Post.

Subscribe to the The Saturday Evening Post archive here.

8. Street and Smith took over Astounding Stories in September 1933 after Clayton Magazines went bust in March of that year.

9. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue were published in the October edition:

Campbell uses a different scoring system here from the one he would eventually settle on, but Who Goes There? is the obvious winner.  ●