A SFBC member wrote in -- actually hand-wrote, on a piece of paper and everything -- to ask a question. He didn't give permission to run that letter in our Interface letters column, so I won't quote him or use his name. (But I hope he's out there, since I doubt I'll have time to send him a reply through the post.)

Our friend, who hails from the great state of Alabama, is a big fan of the 1982 John Carpenter movie The Thing, and asked if there was a novelization of that movie, or a story similar to it. And I have some good news for him. First, the movie was based loosely on the John W. Campbell story "Who Goes There?" (and also on the previous filmed version of that story, 1951's The Thing From Another World). Also, Alan Dean Foster wrote a novelization, published in paperback in 1982 as The Thing.

Foster's The Thing is out of print now, but trivially findable used (ABEbooks.com lists 26 copies, as cheap as $1.75).

"Who Goes There?" is one of the great and famous stories of the SF genre (originally published under Campbell's pen name Don A. Stuart), and has been reprinted many times -- here's a list from The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

This has been the SFBC's free "What the Heck Was That Old Thing?" service; requests for service can be left as comments here or e-mailed to sfbceditors@sfbc.com.