THINGS FOR THE MEMORIES
In the first of the Star Trek movies, Bones McCoy beams onto the massively refurbished Enterprise and Admiral Kirk tells him, “There’s a thing out there,” at which point McCoy breaks in, “Why is it any object we don’t understand is always called a thing?”
Kirk ignored the question, but I think he should have said, “Because it sounds so cool.”
And it does. Particularly if it’s italicized: Thing.
“Outer space” is a cool phrase, too, though I’ve never been sure about its exact meaning. Or its inexact meaning, either. Surely it at least means farther out than near space, where the atmosphere has thinned until it can be disregarded aerodynamically, but how far beyond that is “outer”? Beyond the Moon’s orbit? Beyond the asteroid belt? Beyond the orbit of Pluto (planet or not)? Farther out than Alpha Centauri? Whatever, it sounds cool.
So Things from Outer Space sounds like a truly cool title to me, and I’m surprised that, as far as I know, there has never been a movie called The Thing (or Things) from Outer Space. The answer might be a legal matter. The second Star Trek movie was originally going to be titled The Vengeance of Khan until (according to accounts at the time) George Lucas & Company complained that the title was too similar to the upcoming Revenge of the Jedi, and Paramount released it instead as The Wrath of Kahn. (And after all that, someone at Lucasfilms changed their mind and the third Star Wars flick became Return of the Jedi. I often refer to it as Retread of the Jedi.) Somewhat earlier, Columbia made it known that a movie announced as Alien Encounter was too similar to Close Encounters of the Third Kind,so it became Starship Invasions.
So it might have been that the 1951 RKO-Radio movie, The Thing from Another World sucked all the legal oxygen out of the word “Thing,” then two years later, Universal-International’s It Came from Outer Space did the same for “Outer Space.” So, an obvious title was off limits.
I’ll hope that nobody has a problem with the title of this anthology, perhaps due to the passage of time. (Did someone say, “But, you can’t copyright a title”? Technically true, but the Hollywood legal beagles are darkly ingenious, threatening to sue because the title was also a trademark; or threatening to sue because the similarity of titles constitutes damages and financial loss to their client; or just plain threatening to sue, which suit you might win, but can you afford millions in legal fees and court costs? Welcome to the real world.)
Getting back to the 1951 movie, The Thing from Another World, that movie was based on John W. Campbell’s great novella, “Who Goes There?” (included herein, as you have doubtless already noticed), which has one of the Things to end all Things, and the men battling it call it a thing. That might have something to do with the movie not being titled “Who Goes There?”, but instead being released as The Thing from Another World. I doubt that MGM would have worried about it being confused with Quo Vadis, released the same year (a re-re-remake, incidentally). In any case, The Thing from Another World sounds scarier. (According to some accounts, the “From Another World” part of the title was an afterthought, and the faded three words which appear underneath the words “The Thing,” which seem to be burning through the screen at the beginning, makes the three words look like an afterthought.)
The movie was a financial success; one reviewer commented that RKO had “laid a golden monster.” But it was not well received in the SF community. Isaac Asimov once called it one of the worst science fiction movies ever. The reason was that the movie left out the most science fictional thing about The Thing. Since the story is only a few pages away, I won’t tell you what was left out, but I think judgments such as Asimov’s are not just unduly harsh, but bloody ridiculous. Getting back to the original story, however, consider the blurb for the story, possibly written by editor Campbell himself, as it originally appeared in the August 1938 Astounding Stories: “Who—is that your closest friend—or a monstrous imitation, breed of an alien, deadly world? WHO GOES THERE—?” (If that sounds pulpish, well it was a pulp magazine.)
In 1982, John Carpenter did a new version of the story, this time just titled The Thing, and that missing SF factor was not left out. This version, however, was not a hit—some blame its release’s coinciding with that of the mega-hit E.T., showing that people preferred a cute, cuddly alien to a hideous and implacably hostile one. The movie certainly deserved to be a hit, in spite of my not being happy with the sort of characters included. The 1951 movie has characters more like those in Campbell’s story, while most of the characters in the 1982 version are such losers that one wonders why they were picked to go on a mission to Antarctica. Pity that the two Things can’t somehow be merged into a more Campbellian Thing.
Also, I’d still like an explanation of why an Antarctic base has a flame thrower.
(Incidentally, until I wrote this introduction, it hadn’t occurred to me that it has now been longer since the 1982 movie than the time elapsed from the 1951 version to the remake. I must be getting old. But enough personal angst. )
More recently, there was a prequel to the 1982 movie, confusingly also called The Thing, which also did not do big box office. It may be a long time until anybody tries to adapt the story again, but the original novella is here and awaits your well-deserved attention. In addition, I’ve included a parody in verse of the novella by Randall Garrett, and a scary take on the 1982 movie from the viewpoint of the Thing by Peter Watts. So this book leads off with a Thing sandwich (A Thingwich?).
Following that is “The Colour Out of Space” by the grand master of horror, H. P. Lovecraft, who reportedly said that this was his favorite of all his stories. Interestingly, it too has had three movie versions, of which I’ve seen only the first, the 1965 Die, Monster, Die, whose only virtue was Boris Karloff being in the cast, and it’s a toss-up which was worse, the abominable script or Nick Adams’ acting. My brother saw the second movie version, The Curse (1987), and thought it was a more faithful and far better adaptation of the story, and there is a 2010 German adaptation titled Die Farbe, and released on DVD in the U.S. as The Color Out of Space, which has been highly praised by Lovecraft expert S. T. Joshi. (Remind me to order the DVD.)
If the long-suffering reader is wondering why I’m going on at length about movie versions of these two classic horror/SF stories, it’s because being made into a movie is something that happens only rarely with published SF stories. And when it happens, the results are rarely something to write home about. Even so, a Thing from outer space is something that moviemakers seem to think is a can’t-miss proposition. This was particularly true during the 1950s, and even more particularly true of one studio: American-International, which, sometimes with the help of Roger Corman, more often with less-talented entities, gave us The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes (minor Corman, but not a total loss), Not of This Earth (Corman; very good, followed by three remakes), It Conquered the World (another good Corman) Night of the Blood Beast (gaaahhh!), Invasion of the Saucer Men (okay, with some humor; loosely based on a story by former Amazing Stories editor Howard Browne), and probably more that I’ve forgotten.
Other studios got in on the Things from space bandwagon, not including the 1953 movie of The War of the Worlds, (based on the 1898 H. G. Wells novel) which preceded the bandwagon’s even having the horses hitched up. There were the very good The Creeping Unknown/The Quatermass Xperiment, and Enemy from Space/Quatermass 2, based on Nigel Kneale’s even better serials for British TV. (The third one, Five Million Years to Earth/Quatermass and the Pit took a decade and a half to get adapted, and was released long after the 1950s monster movie flood.) Then there was the not-hopeless Target Earth (based on another story by Howard Browne), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (in which the one alien we saw outside of his combat suit wasn’t very Thing-like), The Blob, and the amazingly awful Teenagers from Outer Space (the alien teens were all pretty boys; this time the Thing was a badly photographed, giant lobster), and need I mention Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Robot Monster (a Thing should not look like a gorilla in a space helmet). Much better was a movie with one of the most memorable titles of all: I Married a Monster from Outer Space
At the same time, the Things in SF novels were few and far between. One exception was Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. Another was Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, which was quickly filmed as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the first of three movies based on the novel. The movies are so well known that in the 1960s, paperback editions of the Finney novel began to appear with the movie’s title on the cover. Heinlein’s novel had to wait several decades before being turned into an inadequate movie, but then it was serialized in Galaxy rather than Collier’s. British writer, John Lymington, wrote about nasty critters from space in a handful of novels and one, The Night of the Big Heat, became a 1967 movie with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (once again, the only good things about a movie were the veteran actors). But on the whole, the important SF novels of the1950s, and most of the second string novels, too, were about other things than Things: More Than Human, The Space Merchants, The Demolished Man, The original Foundation Trilogy (mostly written in the 1940s, but collected as books in the 1950s), Double Star, Childhood’s End (which had aliens from space, but, in spite of their appearance, their behavior was altogether un-Thing-like, Fahrenheit 451, The Door into Summer, The Long Tomorrow, The Stars My Destination, and so on.
Let’s skip across the Atlantic to take note of two and a half more exceptions which came from British writer John Wyndham, who wrote The Day of the Triffids/Revolt of the Triffids, about mobile, carnivorous plants which, in the original serial in Collier’s, came from Venus, brought back by Earthlings, but in the book version, were the result of Russian experiments here on Earth. That’s the half a book, and it was followed by The Kraken Wakes, published in the U.S. with somewhat different contents, as Out of the Deeps, in which Things from another planet, possibly Jupiter, land in the ocean, and assault the land. The novel is very effective and scary, even if the Things themselves are never seen, though their machines are visible as they collect human specimens. His other whole Things book, 1957’s The Midwich Cuckoos is another alien invasion story in which the aliens are not seen, so we don’t know how Thing-like they may be. Day of the Triffids has had an inadequate movie version (in which the triffids arrived in meteorites), and two better TV adaptations, and The Midwich Cuckoos has had two movie versions, both released under the title of Village of the Damned, but as far as I know The Kraken Wakes has only had a few radio adaptations.
Mention that the Triffids came from Russian labs gives me an excuse for a slight digression. All these invaders-from-space movies were, of course, not really about invaders-from-space at all, according to many critics and culture-watchers, who were eager to explain that they really were symbolic representations of the Communist Menace and our “paranoid” fear of it. A lot of these same explainers of culture also thought that fear of Communism was irrational, and besides the Republicans were more of a menace than the Commies any day of the week. This has always struck me as absurd, but then I’m part of that Republican Menace. In any case, in 1991 a TV movie titled Not of This World (I wonder if whoever owns the rights to Corman’s Not of This Earth complained) was shown, involving a Thing, arriving in a meteorite, then growing and killing—you know the drill. Movie critic John Leonard, who reviewed movies on a Sunday morning CBS show was baffled as to why the movie was made. We all know that the invaders from space movies of the 1950s, he dolefully reminded us, were symbolic of cold war paranoia (I’m working from memory, and he may not actually have used that imbecilic phrase), and The Cold War was over, so why does this movie exist? he wondered.
I wish I could remember who once sarcastically said, “Whatever would we do without intellectuals?”
But enough of movies. While SF novels rarely involved Things from space, still a number of short stories in the 1950s and 1960s nonetheless kept the Things from fading away, and several very good examples are here in these pages. Since that time, of course, horror fiction experienced a boom in popularity (Stephen King, a one-man boom, wrote The Tommyknockers, a novel-length Things story, for example), and Caitlin Kiernan, one of the best new horror writers, is present with a blend of the hard-boiled detective story and Lovecraftian Things from space. At the same time, award-winning writer Sarah A. Hoyt and David Afsharirad present brand new stories which take a lighter look at Things arriving on Earth. And the awesomely prolific Robert Silverberg sardonically considers whether a modern teenager might have something in common with an alien Thing. And more.
The Things from outer space have landed in these pages. If you want to consider them symbolic representations, blah, blah, blah, of the Russian (if not Communist) Menace, or the Republican Menace, (I feel very menacing!), or the Islamofascist Menace, or the Reality TV Menace, or whatnot, go ahead, but I think these stories don’t need a larger context to make them fun. And if you have too much scary fun, you can always hide under the bed from the Things.
—Hank Davis
2016