Science Fiction Roll of Honor

I like to approach every book as if I'm the first person to ever read it, or to ever feel the emotions portrayed by its author.

Isn't that the point of literature, classic or otherwise? To inspire awe, or at least a sense of wonder?

When I stumbled upon, for four dollars, the gem Roll of Honor at Half Price I certainly felt appreciative of works by masters including Isaac Asimov ("The Last Question", a soul-searching introspective on the microscopic, yet meaningful role of human beings in the vast complexity of the universe; ending with a surprisingly funny commentary on religious belief)

and others like Robert Bloch, the Psycho writer who has a charmingly dark sense of humor (Bloch wrote "Daybroke" in 1958 - the story's protagonist is a man who cunningly evaded a nuclear apocalypse, but is forced as he walks through the obliterated town to see gruesome reminders of the materialistic culture which once was - and he ends this with the statement from the supposedly failed general of the U.S. Army, "What do you mean, man?" said the general, flames rising, "We won!")

Robert Bloch was also the editor of another absolute all-time favorite short story anthology that I also snatched up at a thrift store called "Monsters in our Midst".

My favorite, and the favorite of "Honor" editor Frederik Pohl - who explains the sci-fi writing community's formation with each story's introduction - was "Who Goes There" by John W. Campbell.

Campbell's story is the longest, Pohl explains, because he was featured in three World Cons - 1947, 1954, and 1957, and also Campbell published and masterminded the magazine "Astounding".

"Who goes there" is a story about a U.S. research lab in Antarctica in 1938.
The opening scene is different, in many ways, from its adaptation, the John Carpenter movie The Thing which was set in 1982.

While Carpenter chose to open with a helicopter chasing a husky dog running across a vast Alaskan wilderness, Campbell's story begins with the immediate realization that something is terribly wrong.

"The place stank", Campbell wrote.

He describes the dripping of the ice-alien-monster haunting the nightmares of the luckless

Campbell's McReady was "a forgotten myth... a looming bronze statue that held life and walked."

In Carpenter's movie, although the details are changed, the characters' desperation is conveyed so effectively, just like the story. We are consumed by the claustrophobia and paranoia that they feel. Each interpretation defies you to look away or to stop reading.

The way that Campbell describes the group's reaction reminds me of Joseph Heller's Catch 22. They are tolerant in a trained, desensitized way of the insane reactions that people have to unbelievable, inescapable situations.

The Thing captures this militaristic mentality in the way that each scene, acted carefully, conveys the sense that humanity as a whole will survive if the individuals sacrifice themselves.

Strangely, the story ends happily. We are one step behind the future world of the aliens, which "came from a world with a bluer sun."