Frozen Hell

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The greatest science fiction horror story of all time opens with the accidental discovery of a relic that has gone undisturbed for ages. Frozen Hell was unearthed in much the same way, although its reappearance was somewhat less dramatic. Instead of the Antarctic ice, it resided in an offsite storage facility used by Houghton Library at Harvard, and it wasn’t detected through a magnetic anomaly, but through a line in a letter and an obscure catalog entry. It went overlooked for six decades, rather than 20 million years, which was still long enough for it to be forgotten. And instead of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, it lay within a carton of a few dozen manila folders, labeled lightly in pencil, that contained the bulk of the fiction of John W. Campbell, Jr., and Don A. Stuart, who somehow were the same man.

When you glance through the browned typewriter carbons inside the box, you find many titles that only the most dedicated science fiction fan would recognize. Among the manuscripts are drafts of the superscience sagas, such as “Uncertainty” and The Mightiest Machine, that Campbell cranked out in the ’30s under his own name, as well as other works, notably the novel The Moon is Hell, that wouldn’t appear in print until much later. There are also the vastly superior stories that he wrote as Don A. Stuart, including early versions of “Night,” “Dead Knowledge,” and “Forgetfulness,” and a few efforts—“The Bridge of One Crossing,” “The Gods Laugh Twice,” “Silence”—that he never published at all. One precious folder holds a copy of “Beyond the Door,” the only known work of fiction by his remarkable wife Doña.

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