John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? is recognized as a classic of science fiction's self-proclaimed golden age and is a story deeply concerned with a classic theme in science fiction: distinguishing between the alien other and the human self. Campbell's eerie story of an alien able so perfectly to imitate other living beings that it is almost impossible to distinguish between the indigenous and the invading confronts us with a theme that appears time and again in science fiction story and film: the invasion from within. As Jack Rawlins has argued, Campbell's story stands apart from other treatments of this theme--particularly film ones and including the films inspired by the story itself (1)--in that Who Goes There? insists upon a scientific rather than an emotional response to the horror of invasion of the self. Other critics have noted the psychological dimension of alienation that the story draws upon, and have seen its concern with policing the boundaries of self as the expression of anxieties about self control and self knowledge. John Rieder convincingly argues that this alienation might also be understood in Marxist terms. Rieder sees the alien in SF as a representation of the alienation that is specific to the bourgeois subject and the experience of "a secret, autonomous force in the bourgeois subject's experience of his or her own interiority" (26). De Villo Sloan points out that the story "lament[s] the decline of humanism" and offers its hero, McReady, as "the truly human hei[r] of renaissance humanism battling the emergence of the new unhumans" (186). In my reading of Who Goes There? I want to extend the discussion of the story's concern with alienation and humanism noted by Rieder and Sloan respectively. My central thesis is that the story reveals through its anxiety about re-establishing a boundary between self and other the very precariousness of that boundary, a precariousness that is far more powerful than are the story's attempts to re-fix the meanings of self and other by destroying the monster/alien. The self/other binary that this story is most concerned with is the species boundary between humans and all other living things on the planet (any of which, recall, can be taken over by the alien). I agree with Sloan that the defense of humanism is the central problematic of Who Goes There? but take this conclusion as my departure point for a fuller exploration of precisely what is defended under the names "human" and "humanism."
