|
|
|| Adventure Links || Archives || Articles || Independent Developers || Interviews || JA Forum ||
|| JA Staff/Contacts || The JAVE || Letters || Reviews || Search || Upcoming Releases || Walkthroughs ||
|| What's New / Home || Play Games! ||
| Over 1 Million Visitors a Month! |
|
Articles
Adventure
Seeker: The Avatar of Horror – Part II
by
Paul Crowley
(Part I here)
(In Which The Point, As It Were, Or, In The Usual
Parlance Of Those Unaware Of The Subjunctive, As It Was, Is Eventually,
Though Evidently In A Long-Winded Manner, Attained)
A computer game is planned. An immense amount of work is accomplished, a story is devised, an uncountable number of polygons are drawn in the ethereal, slightly crazy sphere of cyberspace, various employees sleep at odd hours before the cold glow of their monitors. Advertising appears, interest is piqued, previews, then reviews, are written among the various online gaming magazines, the great American media-cum-meatgrinder machine rouses itself once more and roars and spins into life. Neat little boxes with nifty artwork, containing antiseptic, not-quite-square jewel cases with perfectly round, machine stamped CD’s flow out into the nation’s retail outlets. Wallets are opened, cash and/or credit cards are handed to salespeople, electronic signals, the economy’s lifeblood, zing and zang and zoom along quantum pathways into secure spaces where, incredibly, they are, for the most part, correctly credited to the various actors who have participated in yet another fulsome demonstration of why the liberal capitalist West has so utterly triumphed in its centuries-long battle with the rest of the planet (no, I am not a Republican. In fact, I am a defiant member of that soon-to-be-extinct-genus, Liberalis Democratus. That doesn’t mean I can’t admire Adam Smith) (I am aware that none of you particularly needed to have that last bit of information shared with you, and I apologize for injecting myself crudely and shamelessly into this column. I will try to avoid such lapses in the future) (Unless, of course, Paul Crowley Fan Clubs spring up all over the known world, in which case I shall be forced to divulge each and every last speck of personal information in my possession, along with alluring, yet demure, photographs).
And what is the object of all this furious labor, this frantic attention, this fusillade of monetary fandangos (ah, Spiro, we hardly knew ye!)?
A dinky little computer horror game, for Christ’s sake!. Yet another messy shoot-‘em-up, packed with disgusting and vicious enemies the destruction of whom is the seeming sole object of the game, along with the sort of weaponry normally thought to be of interest only to inbred, fatigue-wearing numbskulls who spend all their free time waiting around for the “second” American Revolution and practicing various doctrinaire isms directed against anyone not a bona fide, certificate-of-authenticity White (such a reassuring color, somehow) Anglo (because they’re the least objectionable of all those European pansies trying to tell us how to run our country) Saxon (for some good old Teutonic manliness) Male (what’s your problem?). Among this weaponry are flamethrowers, yes, that’s right, flamethrowers, for the love of bleeding Jesus, as well as other rather nasty accoutrements of the ballistic military sort. A dime a dozen game, from the same school as Doom, that foulest, most despicable and utterly-without-redeeming-value misapplication of the programmer’s art, the one that started it all, the Black Book of computer gaming, in other words, the same old dreary, violent…
Well, you get the point: man opens door, man sees monster, monster sees man, monster indicates intention to gobble, gut, decapitate or otherwise inconvenience man, man shoots monster, ejecta of the monster bodily type spew across space, man holds smoking barrel of weapon to mouth and coolly blows out smoke. And then it starts all over again. This is surely the sort of game geared to appeal to “young people” (by whom I mean anyone who can’t quite remember who was on whose side during World War II, or, a bit more kindly, as I once wrote to our collective Editor/Owner Mr. Sluganski, “the sort of hyena-like barbarians who would give William Golding a bad fright.”).
Except that this one is special.
This one has a history.
This one is the scion of a line of distinguished forebears, who have disturbed and discomfited and distracted three generations of Americans.
This one is The Thing.
____________________
Some background (all right, all right, I hear all those offstage groans,
don’t think I’m not taking names down) for a moment:
Those of you who are familiar with the first bit of writing that appeared under my byline in this site (a letter to the editor that Randy Sluganski then ran as an article, entitled “I Grow Old, I Grow Old…”) already know that while I am primarily an adventure gamer, I have come to judge games not so much by overarching labels (adventure, shooter etc.) as by standards of story, plot development, human interest, internal integrity and the respect, or lack of it, shown by the game designers to the game player. I have, while continuing as a “pure” adventure gamer for most of the time, played a variety of games from other niches of the gaming world and, usually, I have not been disappointed. While I can think of nothing more boring than simply mowing down an endless succession of enemies, there are “shooters” (such as Max Payne or Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault) out there that present the gamer with a lot more than bang-bang thrills and are in my opinion just as entitled to the sobriquet “adventure” as any traditional adventure game. If problem solving is an integral element of adventure gaming, then these two nominal shooters are every bit as challenging as any puzzle-laden adventure.
We will not revisit the entire substance of my previous letter/article here, but it is safe to say that my interests often lead me, when I am not looking forward to getting my hands on such as Syberia or Dark Fall or the next Ragnar Tornquist work of genius, to games which fall somewhere outside my normal area of interest.
The publication in 2002 of Universal Interactive’s The Thing, a single-CD game, was preceded by a national television advertising campaign and a whole lot of excited interest on my part, because of the story’s engaging history and because I am an enthusiast of the two films which preceded the present computer game. Many of you will have at least a passing acquaintance with these films (more on them later). But (if I may be permitted to quote Yoda), “There is…another.” And that “another” is the one that started it all, an intriguing story that appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction in August 1938.
Now, August 1938 was an interesting time to be living in, especially if you happened to be, say a German Jew, or an Ethiopian, or a Spanish Republican, and it was going to get a lot more interesting in about a month’s time for certain Czechoslovakians. A number of significant events were taking place during this 1938 summer: Europe was in something of an uproar over the clever manipulations of a regional dictator who had played his cards quite nicely up to that point (sound familiar?), and the sleeping giant (as the great and tragic Yamamoto was to characterize the United States after his nominal victory at Pearl Harbor) had yet to rouse itself from its dreary slumber despite the efforts of its chief executive to steer it into meaningful engagement with the rest of the planet. At the same time, in that exotic land, formerly Anatolia or Asia Minor, now Turkey, one of the great soldier-statesman of the early 20th century was dying of cirrhosis. Born Mustafa Kemal, he was by now known as “Ataturk”; he had forcibly marched his people, heirs of the vanished Ottoman Empire, dazed and disrupted by their disastrous participation in the Great War, into the modern secular era, and he was, as the historian Lord Kinross has remarked, separated from the other dictators of his age by two major contradistinctions: he presided over the retraction rather than the expansion of an empire and he took care to put into place a political system which would survive his own passing. Meanwhile, the Poles were arguing with the aforementioned regional dictator over, among other things, the disposition of the “corridor” which ran north to the “free” city of Danzig, and diplomats were scrambling to foment a solution to this crisis because no one could possibly desire to return to the trench-horrors of the Great War. At the same time, the leader of the workers’ paradise to the east (no slouch himself in the regional dictator department) was getting ready to sign what he thought was going to be The Deal Of The Century with the first regional dictator in about a year, and boy, was he ever going to be surprised in, oh, June of 1941! A few, a very few men in the West (an American president, an out-of-power, disrespected Tory politician, an irritating, but well read and brilliant French lieutenant-colonel who would later become president of his country and who was attempting, without success, to alert his military and political superiors to the new German tactical doctrine of the armored spearhead, soon to become famous as the main component of “blitzkrieg”) were cognizant of what was to come, but they were hampered by the understandable inability of the interwar generations in their respective lands to countenance the revival of even the rumor of war. Preparations were busily underway in New York for the projected opening in the spring of 1939 of a World’s Fair which would preach to its attendees of international comity and the march of progress (exemplified, memorably, by a “talking” robot) before being rudely interrupted by the collision of empires which would earn itself the history-book label World War II.
Along with these events drawing ever so inexorably to their conclusion was a phenomenon, hardly noticeable among the great and grand doings that preoccupied most people, which was laying the groundwork for the growth of a truly American literary expression. Although the genesis of this expression could be argued to have occurred in Old Europe rather than the United States, a group of American authors was in the process of taking over the existing European tradition and making it their own. The names formerly associated with this speculative and adventurous tradition, names of British provenance like Verne and Welles, would eventually give way before names like Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein, names of differing European backgrounds, it is true, but names which nevertheless sprang from the melting pot continent on the other side of the ocean.
This nascent craft of American science fiction (intertwined with fantasy and horror) was finding its outlet in a growing number of small magazines devoted to its product that, along with comic books, were fast becoming the exclusive literature of interest among boys (and some girls) of just about any age. Although much of what was written before, and would be written after, August 1938 was hardly memorable, it was providing an exciting, one could say a living laboratory, out of which would come the better material of later years.
One of the most interesting of the new crop of sci-fi/fantasy/horror writers of the 1930’s was a man named John W. Campbell, Jr., who had pursued a science track in college even as he was selling his first science fiction story, at the age of 19, in 1930. Campbell went on to write for the rest of the decade under his own name and under a nom de plume (Don A. Stuart), eventually becoming the editor of Astounding Stories (renamed Astounding Science Fiction and in later years called Analog Science Fact/Fiction), staying in that job until his death in 1971.
Campbell could not be called a great stylist by any stretch of the
imagination (to call much of his work turgid and graceless would be a kindness in my view), but he was one of a handful of writers who, by dint of the range and power of their ideas, pulled science fiction up from the depths of the gooey-thing-that-eats-you-all-up-and-sprouts-ugly-tentacles-to-boot genre in which it was usually imprisoned and paved the way for the hard, science based fiction that became a staple of the latter half of the century recently ended and that enriched not only popular fiction, but the popular cinema as well. We are as indebted to Campbell as to anyone else for film masterworks such as 1979’s Alien, directed by the now famous (by virtue of such films as Thelma And Louise and Gladiator) Ridley Scott, which combined stunning “hard” science fiction ambience (those wonderful interstellar cargo ship sets) with pure, unadulterated horror (of the gooey-thing-that-eats-you-all-up-etc. variety, it must be said), overlain with a masterful Hitchcock-in-space tautness that would have made The Master himself (remember that creepy sci-fi/horror amalgam, The Birds?) proud.
One of Campbell’s last fictive efforts was a fifty-or-so page story, or novella, entitled Who Goes There?, published in (just in case you forgot while wading through all this mishegas) the August 1938 Astounding Science Fiction, of which he was by now the editor. While set firmly within the precincts of the Earth (albeit in a remote American science research station in the Antarctic), the story contained elements of space-opera (alien ship complete with indisposed alien visitor) along with a mounting dose of horror as, one by one, the men at the station were overwhelmed by the thing that had been unleashed in their midst and battled not only this adversary but their own fears and suspicions of each other. This adversary was known by no appellation other than thing, rendering it not only impersonal but wholly unapproachable, as opposed to some other, later examples of fictional extraterrestrial biota we are all familiar with (did somebody say Steven Spielberg?). The story, while not particularly brilliant in its purely literary complements, exhibited a sophisticated understanding of the dilemmas of leadership and crisis management in difficult circumstances, along with a whopping good conceit, the scariness of which depended as much on what wasn’t seen as what was.
Now, I’m not one of those crit-lit types who take inordinate pleasure in analyzing fiction and poetry to death in an abstruse and wholly incomprehensible manner of interest only to colleagues in academe. However, Who Goes There?, since it is the fons et origo of our present subject, deserves a bit of a look. So let us take some time to more closely examine this nearly forgotten story, this avatar of horror, which was to spawn three additional uniquely original iterations during the more than half-century which followed its initial publication.
____________________
I have already referred to Campbell’s less than mellifluous writing style, but buried here and about in the fifty pages of the story are indications of a finer than usual hand at work. Consider the two opening paragraphs, which start with an abrupt, harsh, compact statement of disagreeable fact and then open up into an almost lush description of the smell of a room, ending with a disturbing sight:
The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins
of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combated the musty smell of sweat-and-snow-drenched furs. The acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs,
diluted by time, hung in the air.
Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet, somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their associates – dogs, machines, and cooking – came another taint. It was a queer, neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of industry and life. And it was a life-smell. But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically onto the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the shielded glare of the electric light.
We are, without having had any time to adjust, immediately in the presence of something unknown, and disturbing. An economy of words has informed us that we have looked into a special, isolated and troubled place, a place we can infer is already unbalanced before any action, human or otherwise, has commenced. Here is a brief moment, later, in that same room:
He paused for a moment, the deep, steady voice giving way to the drone of wind overhead and the uneasy, malicious gurgling in the pipe of the galley stove.
A signal of what is coming has been given – the very object which contributes to the survival of the humans inhabiting this base, a galley stove, is portrayed in none too reassuring terms. In other words, what has been safe and sure will no longer be so.
Fast upon this image, a description of the Antarctic environment:
Drift – a drift-wind was sweeping by overhead. Right now the snow picked up by the mumbling wind fled in level, blinding lanes across the face of the buried camp. If a man stepped out of the tunnels that connected each of the camp buildings beneath the surface, he’d be lost in ten paces. Out there, the slim, black finger of the radio mast lifted three hundred feet into the air, and at its peak was the clear night sky. A sky of thin, whining wind rushing steadily from beyond to another beyond under the licking, curling mantle of the aurora. And off north, the horizon flamed with queer, angry colors of the midnight twilight. That was Spring three hundred feet above Antarctica.
We have just been given a precise tone poem about what life is like,
from the vantage of nose and skin and eyes, for the men resident in this particular part of the planet. Except for a tendency to overuse the word “queer”, this is pretty good stuff for a horror story. It is, sad to say, not the accomplishment of the author to write like this throughout the novella, but he has given us a bit of rough poetry, both to draw us closer to the situation of his protagonists and to set the mood for what is to come.
After our introduction to the exotic venue of an ice-floored camp in Antarctica (not to mention one with an additional, nervous-making , last minute guest), Who Goes There? follows a fairly conventional scenario. Something has been discovered. Amid the natural tendency of scientists to examine their discovery, a lone voice is raised in Cassandran dissent, and overruled. Events go on in a fairly normal, if pregnant, vein for 15 pages, until all hell, briefly, breaks loose. The ensuing 37 pages evolve, by turns, into a struggle to first contain, then desperately defeat, certain catastrophe. An ingenious solution, which may or may not spell deliverance, presents itself, but complications abound; it is only by an inspired leap of intuition that a possible scheme of salvation is arrived at. The scheme is put into effect, amid hope and dread; a denouement is reached.
Scattered throughout the novella are the briefest of thumbnail portraits, of men named McReady, Garry, Blair, Copper, Connant, Clark, Benning, Norris, Dumont, Van Wall. We never learn the first names of these men, who begin to realize that they are engaged, besieged as they are amid an ice-bound vault at the bottom of the world, in a struggle not merely for their own survival, but for that of the entire human race. It is a deft touch, this lack of given names, and it mimics the habits of military and scientific men used to long term, isolated cohabitation with each other during specified missions, in this case a mission to study magnetic effects at the South pole. The constant addressing of each other by last names lends a certain crisp distance to the relations between these men, a shadow of formality between their persons, which ironically accentuates the sudden need that they share, at this treacherous moment, to stay together, to support one another. It is this very need, of support and back-watching, that is most problematical however, for it is the peculiar talent of their chance, alien guest to be able to absorb, and imitate, any life form it encounters on the Earth. Abruptly, they have been transformed from a group which casually cooperates with one another in the performance of both their various duties and the sheer cussed difficulty of living amicably with strangers, into a group of terrified potential victims, watching each other with suspicion and unable to spend a single moment without the dreadful feeling that they are about to be overcome by an alien horror in the form of the man sitting or standing a few feet away. (We will encounter this disturbing atmosphere again in our later avatars, most memorably when we are compelled not only to view, but to live within this field of dread, in the Universal Interactive computer game The Thing, but that, as they say, is a subject for later.)
The paranoid mise-en-scene with which we are confronted flows from very primal, universal human fears. The object of all this terror is a creature which, without any particular care or scruple about what it is doing, acting out of its own Darwinian imperatives, the result, presumably, of as long an evolutionary process on its home world as that of the human beings it is stalking, casually deprives its victims of any individual character, emotion, personality or Emersonian “mind on fire” quality which denotes them as unique. Having done so, it hides in plain sight, in the form of a formerly trusted colleague, until chance events provide it with the opportunity to strike again. The fear of losing one’s personality, one’s “soul”, so intimately connected with the universal human fear of death (as fear of oblivion) is here elementally played as a bad dream in which one knows the horror is coming but can do nothing to stop it. The men at the isolated station face not only death, but death-in-life.
All of this is accomplished with very little overt violence; it is the waiting, the watching, the psychological dislocations of terror and paranoia, that provide the bulk of the fear factor in this novella. The greatest battle in the entire history of humanity is taking place in this lonely scientific outpost, and no one, anywhere, may ever know it, until it is too late. And when it is too late, there will be no one left to mourn the death of the race or to record the valiant and desperate efforts that were made, in extremis, on its behalf. The ultimate loneliness, of unsung heroism, has descended upon this cold, dark corner of icy waste.
We will leave Who Goes There? for now, having sketched enough of its dimensions to limn its basic design without revealing its outcome. As the nearly last major fictional effort of a writer who changed the face of American science fiction, it deserves our attention, our respect and our reengagement; history of a sort was made in the writing of this tale, and it is toward the next phase of that history that our attentions now turn.
____________________