It’s always interesting to me to trace
influences over time in Science Fiction and fantasy. I made an interesting discovery
recently as I was reading Cap Kennedy #15, Mimics of
Dephene (1975). This is a space
opera series from the 1970s written by Gregory Kern, who was actually E.
C. Tubb (1919 – 2010). The book would seem to be a relatively minor one in the
series, but at the very top of page 62, (Daw Books, Inc. 1975, April), I found
a fascinating paragraph.
To set it up, Cap and his colleague, a
scientist named Jarl Luden, discover an alien mimic who is trying to pass as a
human. Luden remarks: "'There is a certain test. Take some tissue, some
blood, and touch it with a hot wire. Normal blood will not react, but that
taken from a Mimic will incorporate an individual survival-pattern. It will
recoil from the threat of heat.’”
My mind, and quite possibly yours,
instantly leaped to the John Carpenter movie, The Thing, which opened
June 25, 1982. Here’s the speech Macready gives in the movie just before
running the blood test that reveals ‘The Thing.’ “You see, when a man bleeds.
It’s just tissue. But blood from one of you things won’t obey when it’s
attacked. It’ll try and survive. Crawl away from a hot needle…” In the movie
they actually use a hot wire for the test.
I went back to the original novella that
was the basis for John Carpenter’s The
Thing. This is Who Goes There, by
John W. Campbell Jr, which was published in Astounding
Science Fiction in 1938. I’d read it a very long time ago but in checking
it out I found that the hot wire test was
used in that book. This is probably where Kern/Tubb got the idea for Kennedy
#15, and would also seem the likely influence on Carpenter. Oddly, though, the
wording in the movie is closer to that in Mimics
of Dephene than in the novella. Coincidence? Probably.
However, a second tantalizing connection
between the Cap Kennedy book and the “thing” is seen later. On page 93 of the
Kennedy book, when a mimic is imitating Luden, Kennedy tells one of the forms
to "Open your mouth." As soon as the being does so, Kennedy shoots
him down. When the real Luden wants to know how Kennedy distinguished between the
mimic and the real, Kennedy says: "...no Mimic could have known what was
inside your mouth. Expensive dental work."
In the 2011 remake/prequel to The Thing, we find out that the
creatures can't mimic dental implants and these get left behind when a human is
taken over. This is one way to identify them. And this element did not appear in Who Goes There, or at least I couldn’t find it with a pretty close
search. (I wonder if it might have been in the original script for that movie.)
Although certainly no proof of direct connection,
the fact that Mimics of Dephene can
be linked to both the 1982 and the 2011 movies, tantalizes me. I can’t find any
evidence that Tubb himself had anything to do with either movie, so if there was an influence, it came
from someone else. Were both links purely coincidental, or had someone who worked
on these movies read Cap Kennedy #15? Could it have been John Carpenter
himself? If anyone knows him, maybe you’ll ask him for me. I’d sure like to
know.
