Free Republic

Over the past several years, I’ve watched WorldCon repeatedly implode. Well, not exactly. It imploded in 2018 in a very spectacular way. WorldCon 2019 didn’t exactly implode, but then again, Jeanette Ng’s “acceptance” speech of the John W. Campbell award (now renamed “Astounding”) was her long awaited stab at a long-dead science fiction icon which spawned more of her displeasure at the “stale, pale, male crowd,” as well as a long list of other award renamings. The irony is that Ng also won a “Best Related Work” Hugo for 2020 because she complained about Campbell the year before. A rant...

John Carpenter’s The Thing is a classic science fiction horror film that has scared audiences for decades. But the film was inspired by an earlier story published in the 1930s, “Who Goes There?” by noted editor John W. Campbell Jr., and it turns out that that there’s more to that story. A researcher recently discovered an unpublished, novel-length manuscript of the story, and a small press is using Kickstarter to publish it... Alec Nevala-Lee notes that Campbell was inspired in part by explorer Richard Byrd, and possibly H.P. Lovecraft’s classic horror story “At the Mountains of Madness.” In 1938, a...