Science fiction celebrates all manner of things; one of them is what some people might call “making hard decisions” and other people call “needless cruelty driven by contrived and arbitrary worldbuilding chosen to facilitate facile philosophical positions.” Tomato, tomato.
Few works exemplify this as perfectly as Tom Godwin’s classic tale “The Cold Equations.” The story is perfectly spherical nonsense, absurd from any direction one looks at it. Because it provides an apparent justification for doing terrible things in the name of necessity, a lot of fans and editors love it. Just look at how often it has been anthologized.
I suppose if I don’t put in a spoiler warning for a 65-year-old story, someone somewhere will complain. So here it is in bold print…
[Spoilers below. And also murderous jerks.]
I am totally going to reveal in the text below that the adorable young girl in the story is executed because she stows away on a space ship run by an organization whose motto appears to be “Depraved Negligence.”
A quick synopsis for those of you who don’t want to spend the time to read the story, which is available here: a single-crew emergency dispatch ship (EDS) bearing much-needed medical supplies is launched towards colony world Woden. After launch, pilot Barton discovers too late that Marilyn Lee Cross has stowed away on the vessel. The regulations are very clear:
Paragraph L, Section 8, of Interstellar Regulations: “Any stowaway discovered in an EDS shall be jettisoned immediately following discovery.”
There is no room for mercy because the ship has only enough fuel to reach Woden (assuming that no extra mass is added to ship). After a certain amount of dither, poor naive Marilyn is spaced. The Cold Equations always win.
Some critics have gone after this story on plausibility grounds—what sort of idiots would design a system with no redundancy or margin of error?—but, hey, SF is filled with set-ups that are exquisitely designed to tell the story the author wants to tell. It’s traditional. So, I’ll refrain from criticizing “The Cold Equations” for its bold spaceship design. If we allow Niven’s poorly programmed robot probes or Spinrad’s orgasm-fuelled FTL drive, we’ve got to allow a situation where ships are used at the ragged edge of their performance capacity1 .
BUT…let’s consider another aspect of worldbuilding. How is the ship protected against stowaways?
As far as I can tell from the text, the sole security measures used prior to dispatching EDSes is a sign that reads “UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL KEEP OUT!” and the vague hope that if someone does try to sneak on board, someone or other will notice. Marilyn says, “I just sort of walked in when no one was looking my way.”
The only lock mentioned is the airlock through which Marilyn exits the story.
Digression time:
I once made the mistake of musing while boarding a plane how odd it was that given my anxiety about being in vehicles controlled by other people (a side effect of the event that led to me spending a year legally dead2), flying didn’t particularly stress me. Cue sudden onset airplane phobia. One of the ways I mitigate this is by watching episodes after episode of the airplane crash forensic show, Mayday. I find the recurring theme, that airplane mishaps almost never have a single cause, reassuring. At least in theory.3
It’s a shame that Mayday devotes so little of its time to dissecting old science fiction stories. Trust me, a Mayday-style post-flight analysis of Marilyn’s murder would be hilarious. The spaceline authorities would explain that they’ve been killing people for years without anyone complaining. They would then admit that although people stowing away on emergency craft is a common enough problem that there are draconian regulations in place to deal with stowaways, it’s apparently never occurred to anyone to include searching for stowaways in the pre-flight check list. Or even to install locks anywhere.
Now, as for the characters in the story…if they hate ejecting people into space, why haven’t they installed their own locks? Why haven’t they put a stowaway check in the departure checklist?
But of course, the point of the story, as determined by the author and his editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., is to underline a moral: the universe doesn’t care about human feelings. Natural law dictates that hard men must make hard choices.
What the story actually says is that lousy procedures kill.
Just another instance of humans looking for justifications to be beastly to each other.
Still, there is a story that makes the point Godwin and Campbell thought they were making (i.e., nature is merciless). This story is, of course, Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” in which an arrogant man’s ignorance of Yukon winter conditions leads to his (entirely avoidable, if he had been a person who would listen to advice) death. Anthologize that!
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Cue the possibly apocryphal story of WWII Imperial Japanese Navy pilots being sent out with insufficient fuel for the round trip and instructions to rise to the occasion. What people consider reasonable safety margins can be very unreasonable.
[2]There are no tax benefits, no matter what Douglas Adams claimed.
[3]In practice, it does not help at all. I take anti-anxiety meds as I walk onto the plane, and then slowly count to 300 after takeoff. Your midair calamities are a very small fraction of the fatal events involving planes. Most occur at takeoff or on landing so if you survive takeoff, you’re halfway home—assuming no bird-strikes, fuel-air explosions, trainee military pilots flying under radio silence across commercial flight paths, unscheduled mountain peaks, volcanic ash clouds, mid-flight fires, pilots handing over control of the plane to children, metal fatigue, meteor strikes, or bombs. But that goes without saying.
“The Cold Equations” is a philosophical conundrum put in story form. Yes, it has absurdly constrained parameters, that is part of the point. The real world may offer some more flexibility but there are situations where you cannot perfectly serve all moral imperatives at the same time. There are people who are very uncomfortable at that idea.
See Jaime Lannister’s speech on conflicts of honor.
What moral imperative drives “no preflight checks for stowaways on a small, collapsible ship?”
“Breaking Strain” by Clarke has a better take on a similar situation.
Cory Doctorow agrees with you (but at slightly greater length).
https://locusmag.com/2014/03/cory-doctorow-cold-equations-and-moral-hazard/
@1
The ‘philosophical conunundrum’ is essentially the trolley problem, and it strikes me that Philippa Foot, in coming up with it, came up with a considerably better and more plausible story, even as presented in the dry form of a textbook.
I bet the pilots would be more diligent about looking for stowaways if it was the pilot who was tossed out the airlock whenever stowaways were found. Of course, this would require all stowaways to have some degree of piloting skill.
And unless there’s a story inside the pictured anthology that involves fur bikini clad heroine with her cats in a frozen tundra, the cover artist heard “cold” and “stowaway girl” and made a best guess…
I just think it’s weird that the depicted anthology up top is named for its famous science fiction story about spaceships but has a cover image of a fantasy warrioress in a stone-age bikini. I can see how she might be cold in that getup, but where are the equations?
(Sure, it’s not weird that a book would put a scantily-clad woman on the cover, but it’s weird that the title and the image are trying to sell two competing things.)
EDIT: Oops, just beaten to it by #7.
From what I’ve heard, Tom Godwin wrote the story with the stowaway surviving, and Campbell insisted on having her die – which may be why there are references in the story to massive equipment onboard the ship that could have been jettisoned instead of her (these were foreshadowing of a solution that Godwin wasn’t able to use).
“What the story actually says is that lousy procedures kill.” – something we could call “(Tom) Godwin’s Law.”
Not to mention that if the margins for error are that tiny, then by the time they discovered her it was already too late! And no amount of authorial (or editorial) handwavium can fix that.
It kind of makes you wonder, especially when me at – what 12? 13? could spot the obvious problem.
@2 – it means you getting hung up on the premise, since the actual question is:
Do you harm the sympathetic person in front of you who has made an error in judgement, or do you harm a multitude of people who are just faceless statistics to you?
The title of the story is unkind to maths.
@8/Christopher: Perhaps her stone-age binoculars symbolise the equations.
@1 Crusader75
A good story would present a moral conundrum in a way that left the reader unable to find an alternative solution, like “do a preflight check to make sure you don’t have extra weight”.
I’m all for suspension of disbelief, but there’s a difference between overlooking holes in the plot and shrugging off a story whose entire plot is one giant hole.
When you have a nonexistent margin for error, you check everything before you launch. Failing to do so isn’t making a hard choice; it’s just plain incompetence.
@11 Crusader75
The actual question is “Why can’t Godwin write a story that presents a moral question in a way that doesn’t completely murder suspension of disbelief?”
The answer is that Godwin is a bad writer.
I enjoy stories that involve the Good of the Known Few v.s. Good of the Faceless Many. I just don’t enjoy badly written stories, regardless of the moral parable involved.
From the cover image – why not just jettison the tiger?
A lot of writers wish they’d written a story that was still talked about 65 years after it was published
@15
That’s like saying a lot of movie directors wish they’d directed a movie that’s remembered years later, like Plan 9 From Outer Space.
In #14, Andy Cooke writes:
From the cover image – why not just jettison the tiger?
You’re thinking of a Frank R. Stockton story, “The Lady, or the Tiger?”
The Webcomic Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger did a merciless takedown of the entire premise. The storyline involved a lightning-fast rescue of the girl, an arrest, and a trial wherein the pilot, the ship’s designers, the shipping company and IIRC the entire homeworld of the company were found to be criminally negligent. The comic’s Author shares your disdain for the contrived setup.
@16
Not really, Plan 9 was just trash, Cold Equations an average story that enraged most readers because he killed a little girl, and that’s why people still talk about it. All that stuff how the story breaks suspension of disbelief due to how it is constructed is true to some degree, but it’s not the reason people still talk about it. Godwin broke a taboo and people hated the story for it and that’s why it will still be remembered far into the future, because its a story that easily gets people riled up, even 65 years later
The character in London’s “To Build A Fire” is familiar with the conditions. He knows better than to build his fire under a tree (which, when heated by the fire, will drop snow on him and the fire, essentially killing him); he just makes the mistake anyway because he’s at the very end of his bodily resources, right on the edge of death. Oops, I suppose that should have had a spoiler warning also!
“To Build A Fire” is, in fact, anthologized. I read it in a high school fiction anthology textbook — although the story itself did not get assigned in that class. (Needless to say I read every story in the book.)
@6 James Davis Nicoll — That was one of the lesser idiocies of the story. Even if none of the pilots are disturbed at all about killing people, surely they’d have a tiny bit of self preservation. Not all stowaways would be naive children, presumably some of them would come armed and prepared to use it. Checking for stowaways and using locks would be minimal self-preservation.
And great cite of “To Build a Fire”, I’ve had the same thought. Plus, anyone reading it will never go out camping or hiking without at least three methods of starting a fire!
If your philosophical dilemma can be resolved by opening a closet door* and peeking inside, it is not a particularly strong dilemma.
* “There is absolutely no margin for excess in the design of this ship! That’s why we left the closet empty and made sure the door weighed no more than two kilograms!”
“Why does it have a closet and door in the first place?”
It’s The Yearling, rewritten so that, instead of feeling the agony of an impossible choice, the reader is led by the hand through an abstract logic puzzle and given a cookie at the end for being so gosh-darn tough-minded. The implausibilities of the scenario bother me less than this shameless pandering.
@18, the pilot was acquitted. The pilot was ready to jettison himself, and was trying to teach the stowaway how to pilot the craft after he was gone.
@23, I think that was the airlock, actually.
But then, that begs a different question. If this ship is trying to be as lightweight as possible, with only one pilot and no backup plans, then why even have an airlock?
I’d always assumed that the point of the story was the (disavowed) pleasure of the writer (and some readers) took in imagining the “deserved” death of an “irrational” young woman – that it’s basically a misogynist fantasy about being forced (ooooh, forced!) to murder a girl. And that it’s also a “girls and things marked as girlish don’t belong in our Very Serious Science Fiction” story. I mean, try to imagine the same writer writing this story but with a male stowaway, and you immediately see that the point of the story is that girls don’t understand the tough, manly nature of reality and in a “just” world they get what’s coming to them. Or resentment, in fact.
It’s grimly hilarious to imagine a hidden history of murdered stowaways and the company saying “no one complained, it would be too expensive to add locks on our Very Scientific doors anyway”, though.
No airlock would mean the stockaway on board the tiny ship that’s apparently too big to search before launch would quite possibly die of lack of air after launch and where’s the story in that?
One of the odder subgenres I’ve been sent more than one book on is Herpetologists’ Tragic Deaths. It’s a biased sample that implies a common retirement path for herpetologists who handle venomous animals is that they get too comfortable with their job, cut one corner too many and find themselves elbow deep in a sack of kraits[1]. Pilots who don’t check the closet first strike me as close cousins of people who reach into sample sacks without looking first.
1: It turns out there’s considerable overlap in the illicit drug trade and illicit animal trade. It also turns out that the overlap between the cocaine trade and venomous snake trade has terrible industrial safety procedures.
I really hope one of the other tor dot com writers is going to do a piece on that remarkable Star Wars comic that came out recently.
@7 While “The Cold Equations” got top billing; the first and longest story in this collection was _The Survivors_ (don’t remember if there were any the fur bikinis, but cats, girl, and frozen tundra were all present).
I think I understand the point Godwin was trying to make, about how sometimes there are no good choices, but like Captain Kirk I don’t believe in the ‘no win’ scenario.
“The answer is that Godwin is a bad writer.”
Or a decent writer with a bad editor, maybe. Maybe Godwin didn’t care to make Campbell’s desired ending more plausible.
@14: and if jettisoning the tiger isn’t enough, jettison the bikini?
So now I really want to know more about how you died for a year.
On the story – this is the antithesis of the classic SF story, the exact reversal of how things should normally go. Instead of the hero finding a last minute reprieve or clever use of physics, the authors arbitrarily render each useless – the point hammered home is that this is not your regular story, the pilot is not the hero, and the girl must die.
It’s a cold hearted bludgeon of a tale, heavy handed in how fate must unwind. And yet it is somewhat refreshing for that simplicity – we expect the pretty young girl to live and so she can’t. And how much of the reaction is exactly to that – does the reaction to the story change if it’s a boy, or another man, or a large dog?
We often talk about ‘You can’t fight fate’ and then exalt those who try. It’s much rarer to see a calm acceptance of inevitability, though it rarely makes for a good story and is invariably the result of human stupidity. I’m also reminded of Into the Wild, where the boy gets himself killed through ignorance.
In the thread about The Mote in God’s Eye, we were also talking about “The Mercenary” by Jerry Pournelle. Another story whose premise pushes the protagonist to commit heinous acts, with the only viable solution to the planet’s problems the slaughter of thousands of people. Malthusian philosophy taken to its most repugnant extremes.
It wasn’t Godwin that wanted to kill her, it was Campbell. According the history of this story, Campbell sent it back several times because Godwin kept finding ways to save the girl. It wasn’t until Campbell made it plain that he wanted her to die, that Godwin wrote the version we see.
I for one would love to see the rejected versions of the story, but they’re more than likely long gone.
@16 In my, admittedly limited, experience of people in the creative industry, the phrase “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about” is a truism. Best or worst, it doesn’t matter; what matters are the lunch invites and the royalty payments. Especially the royalty payments, because hate readers’ cash is just as sweet.
I think my favourite example of the trading of lives is in the Doctor Who novel “Sky Pirates!”. It is a goofy screwball comedy, in the manner of a particularly fantastic “Road to” movie (The Road to Reality?) which ends with the pocket universe they are in being destroyed. If the Doctor destroys it then he completes a near genocide the Timelords started billions of years ago and millions of people will die with a few thousand survivors. If he doesn’t then the foe being fought will genocide everybody in the pocket universe and then restart war that could spiral further. There is no way to save everybody and no third option, which is pretty hard when it comes at the climax of a screwball comedy.
It wasn’t a little girl, it was a girl old enough to make her going to her death with dignity plausible.
I can easily see the story as being about a boy who stows away– his motivations would include more about wanting adventure in addition to wanting to see his brother.
In “To Build a Fire” the protagonist ignores a lot of advice– he doesn’t realize that the weather being (from memory) ten or twenty degrees colder than usual adds tremendously to the danger. In fact, he thinks of the people giving him advice as womanish, which makes the story a handy example of toxic masculinity.
I can’t believe I’m speaking up in defense of a Baen Books cover, but
a.) This is not as bad as some. See the Flandry books for comparanda.
b.) The cover is probably meant to illustrate The Survivors (available via Project Gutenberg as Space Prison). Not many people have read it, and I haven’t read it recently, but I seem to remember it’s about stranded space travellers practicing low-tech survival on an inhospitable planet. It certainly involves big-cat style predators who become allies of the humans against the Bad People.
c.) I hold no brief, as it were, for the fur bikini—an impractical garment, too warm in summer, too cold in winter, does not launder well, etc.
I’m also thinking about the recent movie “Passengers”. A lot of the problems could have been avoided there if they had included the machine for inducing cold sleep ON THE SHIP. Do they seriously never think about the possibility, however remote, of a cryopod failing mid-flight?
If it was the airlock and not a closet, that just makes the matter worse. How did the pilot miss seeing the stowaway when he boarded? Did he not bother to lock the airlock hatch behind him in the brief time between boarding and lift-off? It still all comes down to a plot and characters being railroaded by deliberately bad engineering and deliberately bad preflight procedures for the sake of a questionable moral point.
@10: Exactly: since they don’t bother to check the rescue ship’s mass, it was launched with too much momentum. It doesn’t matter whether the pilot tosses the stowaway or not; with zero margin for error, he’s still doomed to crash.
I read this story just a few years ago, and a) it’s obvious nonsense, as above, and b) what bothered me most is that the pilot doesn’t kill the stowaway. He explains why the girl ought to kill herself, and when she does, he assists her. The pilot’s role is entirely passive—essentially the same as a troll on twitter making death threats, but they work. The story doesn’t even have the moral courage of its own supposed moral courageousness, forcing the pilot to kill an innocent. It has her comply, so that the pilot doesn’t have to do anything but feel a certain noble, manly sadness. That’s the real contrivance of the story to me.
If you want to see a version of “The Cold Equations” which turns out better, there are thousands of them. Almost every issue of the magazines of the era has the a forgettable story in which hero comes up with some clever way which allows everyone to get out alive. This particular story is remembered because it is different, and commentators from then until now have been desperately trying to rewrite it to fit the mold
There are also stories in which the hero gives up his life for the greater good, but making the hero an unsuspecting girl breaks a lot of traditions.
John
‘If you want to see a version of “The Cold Equations” which turns out better, there are thousands of them.’
The criticism isn’t about the unhappy ending, it’s about that ending being poorly motivated and framed, resting less on hard physics and more on human incompetence. Which makes sense given that the ending was imposed on the author by a mad editor.
We’re giving the story the respect of analyzing it as a hard SF story, not as some literary fluff Making A Point.
It occurs to me that I should direct people here to my 2014 Buzzy Mag story “The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing,” available for free at the link (recommended for mature readers) and reprinted in my 2018 collection Among the Wild Cybers. It’s a story that I occasionally thought of as (and may have been briefly tempted to title) “The Warm Equations,” because it involves a similar theme of the unforgiving realities of space requiring a sacrifice, but it was more of a choice based on emotion and the need for human connection. Still, it took me quite a few drafts to finesse it so that the final decision and the cultural context that led to it made sense, and so that it skirted the potential pitfalls of the idea.
I like to think that the ending of ‘The Martian’ was written as a repudiation of ‘The Cold Equations’. Throughout the novel, I just kept thinking “Weir, you monster, ANOTHER catastrophe!”
Then that ending, when the crew jettisons every bit of unnecessary mass to take a stab at rescuing their colleague… I got goosebumps. I immediately thought, “He kicked that ‘cold equations’ story in the plums!”
@47/Kirth: There are tons of stories and movies about space crews jettisoning mass in order to avoid leaving crew behind. The third act of George Pal’s 1950 film Destination Moon revolves around such a dilemma, predating “The Cold Equations” by 4 years and finding a better solution to the problem. Star Trek‘s “The Galileo Seven” addresses it too, though they’re unable to ditch enough mass to save all the crew and the question of who gets left behind drives much of the drama. It’s also a plot point in the really terrible 1967 B-movie Doomsday Machine, but that film doesn’t resolve the issue any better than it does anything else.
Tom Holt in “Flying Dutch” provides a more detailed argument that death is a tax holiday, since you get a year’s income allowance etc. while actually living and earning for less than a year. But this doesn’t work if you come back to life. Clearly that’s your mistake.
My recollection from “The Cold Equations” was that a shuttle stowaway was basically guaranteed to be a ruthless space pirate ready to murder the pilot and steal the basically valuable ship, or maybe demand ransom or something. And so well worth killing upon detection. I might be interpolating.
Isaac Asimov’s “C-Chute” provides the ship he’s using with a dedicated mini-airlock for discreet ejection of a corpse. Which is convenient.
I read C-Shute as a teen and it only just now occurs to me that it’s odd corpses are a frequent enough problem that they have an airlock for them.
@49,
Considering that the “ruthless space pirate” would be coming from someplace that seemed to be a quasi-military installation of some sort (if it was civilian they would have put locks on the doors to keep unauthorized people out of stupidly-designed, no-margin-for-error little ships), this speaks worlds about the general incompetence of the hierarchy. Also, “ruthless space pirate” and “authorized pilot” would likely be two sets with a large area of intersection.
As for the tax holiday by death, that’s only for non-US jurisdictions.
@50,
There is a commercial airline that has a special cabinet if people die on a flight. A special airlock seems a bit odd, but one would just put it near the morgue.
@Mayhem no. 34, Nancy Lebovitz no. 38: Into the Wild is a true story, about a young man who simply could not understand that the universe would not catch him if he took a flying leap off the path of common sense. If his biographer (thanatographer?) is right about his motivations, he seriously thought that by dumping everything that was known about the territory he was exploring, he would somehow become heroic, a first-in person, a discoverer. And, apparently, that nothing really bad could happen to him thereby. Because nothing bad happens to nice clean-cut all-American white boys who just want to wander God’s earth being spiritual.
I wouldn’t call it toxic masculinity so much as privilege: an innocent conviction that life would be cushioned for him as it had always been (raised on a NASA salary, star athlete, great grades, looked harmless enough to skate past a lot of suspicious cops in his little Datsun as he wandered around, started his adult life with enough saved up to support one person comfortably for a year and managed to do okay even after giving it all away which leads me to suspect family financial support). Which, come to think of it, is a quintessentially young white male upper- and middle-class viewpoint, so it’s tangential to toxic masculinity. Anyway, he was wrong, so he died.
Ironically, his story kinda proves the apparent original moral of “The Cold Equations,” that the best intentions in the world cannot change natural laws. I actually missed that when I first read it; I thought the moral was “the decisions of other people far away who have no idea you exist can suddenly and irretrievably screw up your life, so don’t trust the system; always check before you commit.”
@51
That was Singapore Airlines for certain long haul flights, but they retired that class of aircraft and don’t have it any more. Nowadays most airlines just put bodies in the back row or rear galley out of the way until they land. It’s quite disconcerting when you come across one and realise what it is.
@52
Yes, it was the similar blithe attitude that everything would be all right for them that I think the two stories have in common. In Into the Wild it’s genuine reality striking back, here it’s the author and editor, but in both cases, a casual assumption turns out to be fatally wrong. I do like your original moral though.
I think Tom Godwin just hasn’t done his job well enough. The story has a valid point – the Universe doesn’t care about people or any other species (check with the dinosaurs, if you have any doubts) – but the set up that is supposed to show that is just too unrealistic. In fact, our entire civilization – being locked on a single planet – is in the same situation as the stowaway girl from the story, it is just that the planet seems wast and the fragility of our situation is not so tangible.
@54/Valentin D. Ivanov: As paleontologists love to point out, the dinosaurs are still around and thriving — we call them birds now.
I read Godwin’s “The Survivors” as a stand-alone novel when I was about ten or eleven, and loved it. Well, what American boy in the pre-counterculture sixties wouldn’t love patriotic (patriotic to the future Earth federation or whatever it was) quasi-military outdoor adventure? Kind of an extended Boy Scout jamboree among the stars. As I recall, “Survivors” also has a few episodes of “we have to let this person die to save everyone else” in it, so I guess this serious moral question (or kinky fetish) was an ongoing concern of the author.
If “Survivors” had any scene remotely like the cover of this book, I am sure that would have been burned into my pubescent imagination.
As for the fur bikini: it’s a dry cold, so you only need to protect the most sensitive parts of your anatomy. And she’s using a cross-bow because the electro-magnetic fields on that planet cause bullets to deviate from their intended course. How’s that for hard science?
Jenny Islander, I haven’t read Into the Wild, but I doubt I’d say it’s about toxic masculinity. “Privilege” might be appropriate, but I feel like there’s something else there about feeling obliged to face danger without having any idea of what’s involved. It’s a sort of deprivation as well as luxury.
“To Build a Fire” has the viewpoint character ignoring sensible caution from other men because he thinks of it as “womanish”, a rather different thing.
@NancyLebovitz no. 57: Yes, it’s most definitely about toxic masculinity, although I doubt London would have understood the term without a lot of coffee and explanation. Ofc. I read it in an Alaskan classroom, so the moral we drew from it was mostly “This is what cheechakos do, don’t be this guy.” Or as the one jock in the back of the room hissed, apparently involuntarily, as we all read it in class: “Oh my God, this guy is so stupid.”
It just struck me that it’s about 90 percent likely that Chris McCandless (the Into the Wild guy) probably read it too. SMH.
I adore this article. I agree with most of its assessments, but they are almost entirely out of context of the original story. It is an example of how viewpoints and culture change over time. Consider this: the story was written when:
1. Cars did not have seatbelts (four years later they would be introduced as an option).
2. Occupational hazards were everywhere. Death “on the job” was not unusual; factory workers were maimed or killed by machinery.
There was less concern for public health and safety (no profit in it). Wander in where you don’t belong? Well, we did post a sign warning you. Too bad. Your death doesn’t cost us a penny.
As a result people were (of necessity) somewhat more personally responsible for their own safety and well-being.
I hope we can halt the apparent rush to return to those days.
People have been arguing about this story for decades. The same people, as the reviewer may remember from his Usenet days.
You can make the math and engineering work.
For a long time, in the real world, the areas under the landing paths at LAX and some other airports were routinely treated to a rain of people who had tried to stow away in the wheel wells of jetliners. After losing consciousness and/or dying in flight, they plummeted thousands of feet when the landing gear doors opened.
There was never a requirement that the pilots check the landing gear for stowaways. The rain only stopped when, post-9/11, airports beefed up security to prevent anybody from getting to the aircraft in the first place. That was not done for the benefit of the stowaways.
“SF is filled with set-ups that are exquisitely designed to tell the story the author wants to tell. It’s traditional. So, I’ll refrain from criticizing “The Cold Equations” for its bold spaceship design.”
As someone who watches classic Star Trek a lot, I’d say that lousy security is traditional too. But it’s one thing to use these elements to create a dangerous situation for the protagonists to get out of, and quite another to use them to create a hopeless situation.
@56/Thomas: “As for the fur bikini: it’s a dry cold, so you only need to protect the most sensitive parts of your anatomy.”
Which should include the lower stomach and the kidneys.
@59/Lee: That’s a good point.
@60/Viadd: “For a long time, in the real world, the areas under the landing paths at LAX and some other airports were routinely treated to a rain of people who had tried to stow away in the wheel wells of jetliners. After losing consciousness and/or dying in flight, they plummeted thousands of feet when the landing gear doors opened.”
What? I’ve never heard of that. Do you have a source for it?
Anyway, checking a supply closet should be easier than checking an aircraft’s landing gear, and the hold of a hyperspace cruiser should be easier to monitor than an airfield, so the situations are not equivalent.
“The Cold Equations” is one of those story that pushes your buttons as you read it, for the most part. It’s on reflection — sometimes immediately after reading, sometimes later, occasionally during — that one tends to think “Hey, wait a minute now….”
A fairer death-in-fiction setup that comes to my mind occurs in Nevil Shute’s MOST SECRET. During the London Blitz of WWII, a young woman is pinned but alive in the wreckage of a bombed building. Trying to rescue her quickly could trigger further collapse and crush her, but *if* rescuers can get equipment and supplies there quickly enough, and *if* they have enough time, she could be saved. Except they can’t; there are too many roads blocked, too many other rescue efforts taking place, they can’t stop fires nearby from spreading to the woman’s house, and the woman burns to death. (Her death is the primary motivation for one of the book’s main characters.) I don’t know if Shute based that chapter on an actual incident, but it’s possible.
And I’ll add in that while the story collection pictured may have been titled after Godwin’s most famous work, it’s well worth picking up for “The Survivors”-aka-“Space Prison”. Great survival-&-revenge story. I think it was the first multi-generational story I ever read. (One word of caution: If you like Space Prison, *DON’T* seek out the sequel, The Space Barbarians. It clunks. It clunks so hard, so loudly, one would expect it to blow its space pistons out of the bookcover and into orbit.)
JennyIslander @@@@@ 52: The accusations of child abuse in his sister’s book make it pretty clear that this was not a guy whose upbringing led him to believe that nothing bad could happen to him.
I always hated this story. It argues for the necessity of sacrifice–by other people. Sure, the girl stowed away– to see her brother– but that small bit of recklessness is just a pretext to turn the girl into a sacrifice for someone else’s idea of a “higher good.” Indeed, the contrived nature of the “necessity” of her death gives a ritual air to the whole affair– in the end, this is human sacrifice. Hardly any coincidence that the person being sacrificed is an innocent young girl.
It makes me think about the over-used line about having to break a few eggs to make an omelette. Even when the line is used to point out a character’s using or cynical nature, the message still seems to be that some of us are simply there to be used or used up by higher and hungrier beings, those with a mission.
@@@@@ 55. ChristopherLBennett
Never heard of those bird things. :)
Seriously, they are a pale shadow of their former selves.
PS One other point that seems lost in this discussion is that the story correctly – at least in my view – shows that women tend to be the victims in such situations. It’s too late to ask Goodwin now if this was an intentionally put message but it seems an important one.
BTW, I read this story in a Russian translation a zillion of years ago and it was very powerful back then, and it powerful now, despite all its problems. As somebody said already, “it pushes your buttons”. The Wiki says that there is a bunch of very similar stories, going back all the way to 1890. It will be nice someone (I am looking at you James Davis Nicoll) with an access to a good library to do a comparative review and to tell how the situation was treated in those other works.
@61
I wouldn’t’ call it “routine”, but Wikipedia has a partial list…
“In at least one instance, on July 31, 2013, a cat survived a flight from Athens to Zürich in the front undercarriage of an Airbus A321”
@67. Common enough that at least one of the NCSI&Order shows (I forget which, they all blur together after a while) used it as the basis of their bizarre case of the week.
@60/Viadd: I think the difference is that an airplane can still fly and land safely if it has the extra mass of a stowaway aboard, but the premise of “The Cold Equations” is that spaceship fuel and thrust are precisely calibrated based on the mass (which is basically true; any deviation from the calculated mass would throw off course corrections from what they were computed to be, and in the vastness of space, even a slight course deviation could result in missing one’s target planet entirely). So given that, it stands to reason that you’d absolutely have to know the exact mass of your craft before taking off. That’s at least as powerful an incentive for keeping out stowaways as the post-9/11 security concerns you mention.
@65/Valentin Ivanov: “Seriously, they are a pale shadow of their former selves.”
Oh, hardly. As the article I linked to points out, there are more than twice as many bird species on Earth than mammal species. Some of them, e.g. ratites like the cassowary, are nearly as large and powerful as their extinct dinosaur relatives, and some of them, like corvids and parrots, show strikingly high intelligence.
Also, keep in mind that in mass extinctions on land, as in most revolutions, it’s the powerful, dominant groups that are the first against the wall while the small, inconsequential folk pretty much go on living like they always did. The reason mammals and birds survived the K-T extinction event while larger species didn’t is because they were small enough to weather the crisis — they didn’t need as much food to stay alive, and they reproduced more quickly so they could evolve and adapt more quickly. So don’t dismiss the little guys. When the next mass extinction happens, the little birds will probably outlive the big mighty mammals, and in another 20 or 30 million years, the Earth could belong to the dinosaurs once again.
Actually, there was a story in which the stowaway was a young boy – I forget the title, but it was by E C Tubb, and the teenaged brother-in-law of a spaceship pilot stows away, because he wants to be an astronaut. The point that I couldn’t believe was that a space-mad teenager wouldn’t understand about mass ratio – even the pilot says that he’s told the lad about it! But, out the airlock he has to go…
The thing about checking the closet is that the person whose life it saves could well be the pilot’s so you’d think he’d be motivated to spend the ten seconds or so.
Of course, this could be an example of normalization of deviation, where because the pilot got away with bad procedure and short cuts before, he assumes he always will. NoD is a great way to end up a shuttle short.
@59,
Occupational hazards are still an issue in the US, especially in agriculture, food processing (including commercial fishing), and underground mining. However, for most workers in the US, the biggest killers are homicides and motor vehicle accidents. Even decades ago, though, murdering stowaways would be considered unacceptable.
On a slightly different tack, what kind of vehicle with insanely stringent mass limits has a closet snd enough room in which to stand? Had Godwin ever seen a vehicle designed under strict weight limits? Light aircraft don’t have closets or standing room. Cargo goes in a baggage compartment, which may not be accessible from the pilot’s seat.
@49,
Since the cruisers seem to be at least quasi-military, the existence of space pirates on board speaks worlds about the competence of the hierarchy. Maybe have a few sentries to keep pirates and stowaways out of the ill-designed single seat ships? Obviously, a pirate would simply kill the pilot immediately upon launch, so looking for a stowaway wouldn’t be a viable plan.
I bet the author of this piece has some very critical things to say about Romeo and Juliet. I mean, why wouldn’t Juliet make sure that Romeo knew about her plan before she went ahead with it? Like, wait for him to reply to her letter acknowledging receipt? Massive plot hole. It’s like he sadistically wanted to tell a story about young Veronese kids dying. Clearly a misoveronian. You can’t imagine him writing that story about Paduans, can you?
a Mayday-style post-flight analysis of Marilyn’s murder would be hilarious. The spaceline authorities would explain that they’ve been killing people for years without anyone complaining. They would then admit that although people stowing away on emergency craft is a common enough problem that there are draconian regulations in place to deal with stowaways, it’s apparently never occurred to anyone to include searching for stowaways in the pre-flight check list. Or even to install locks anywhere.Now, as for the characters in the story…if they hate ejecting people into space, why haven’t they installed their own locks? Why haven’t they put a stowaway check in the departure checklist?
You should maybe watch some episodes of Mayday and count how many accidents could have been averted by exactly that sort of commonplace precaution that no one thought to put in place.
@67/wiredog: Real life never ceases to amaze me. Thanks for the link!
Juliet is 13. Romeo is somewhat older. I used to take care of a house right next to a pizza place local high school students frequented and based on the romantic interactions I observed, Romeo and Juliet is grim realism. At least Juliet never attempted to coyly flirt with Romeo, only to hit herself in the eye with the ear-bud she was twirling.
The worst teen romancing I saw was on the bus, where despite the active intervention of a friend clearly invested in the budding romance desperately trying to keep her pals on topic, the conversation staggered along like a drunken koala on a trampoline. Simply admitting that they liked each other, then proceeding to the parameters of how they would then conduct themselves, was beyond either of the teens. Watching their pal’s agony while trying to herd kittens was hilarious tragic.
That was the conversation that taught me no romance is advanced by the sudden and unprompted announcement “I LIKE CATS!”
@74, what does the Prince say at the end of your copy of Romeo and Juliet? Does he say, how sad about those kids but these things happen, none of the adults are culpable at all, the society doesn’t need to change? Must be a rare variant edition!
I remember taking a friend who had a 13 year old daughter to a production of R&J at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. She said that the actress playing Juliet was a very convincing 13 year-old.
@69,
If you absolutely need to know the mass, measure it immediately pre-launch. The “Cold Equations” universe had severely stupid people writing policies and procedures
@Jenny Islander:
There has been a lot of criticism of Into the Wild. The dead man’s friends say that he did have maps, for instance, and a guidebook to local plants. I like Jon Krakauer’s stuff, but it is widely thought that too much of ItW came from his guesswork rather than facts.
Into the Wild is proof that having loved “My Side of the Mountain” is not enough as a survival technique.
It seems to me that I have read any number of stories where the happy ending was the result of some authorial error or stupidity, yet no one ever seems to complain about that as much as they do about The Cold Equations.
I wonder why?
I was surprised to learn that “To Build a Fire” was taught in college literature classes (in Arizona) as though it should be new to the reader. I was introduced to it in (iirc) 3rd grade. In Alaska. As part of the winter survival unit. With the strong note to not be like this fool, and a quiz to identify the mistakes he made. (He was doomed at the point he in his arrogance decided he was more clever and powerful than winter.)
I first read it at ten as part of a collection of Jack London stories whose title I forget. I was living in Brazil at the time so the lessons weren’t directly applicable to my environment.
(I guess my dad could have benefited from “respect nature” but he didn’t even lose his foot so it was all good.)
@83 Mostly because the people ranting about how the happy endings weren’t possible were twisting things to benefit their position just as badly as TCE does to get its bad ending. In truth it is a lot easier to get a positive ending than it is to get a negative one, you have to active work to make things worse and get things to fall apart. It is just sad that in real life we have so many people who make that their life’s work. Take pretty much any human created disaster and you’ll find that somewhere in it, someone was presented with an array of choices and they actively chose to make the worst one possible.
A considerably better story on this theme is Heinlein’s “Sky Lift”. It slightly predates “The Cold Equations” and was not published by Campbell, so it’s probably not a reaction to it.
Christopher R. Bennett@48: Certainly Heinlein’s “Destination Moon” screenplay, which George Pal filmed, isn’t a reaction to it. It is, however, a much better story, as you correctly point out.
Admittedly, I haven’t read the story in a long, long time (or maybe I’ve never read it and only know it by reputation), but if the margins are that tight, isn’t he already screwed by the time he discovers the stowaway, possibly already screwed from the moment he launches?
@74/ajay: The problem with comparing “The Cold Equations” to a Shakespeare tragedy is that tragedies are usually about awful things that could’ve been avoided if not for the characters’ fatal flaws and bad decisions. The fact that they didn’t have to happen is what makes them tragic. But TCE purports to present a situation that’s unavoidable, where the only bad decision was the one made by the stowaway and everything else was just grim necessity. The article is pointing out that that’s not true, that there are actually many other people’s bad decisions and bad policies at fault and that the outcome should have been avoidable.
@87/JohnArkansawyer: That was my point, that Destination Moon came first, and no doubt others did too. “The Cold Equations” did not invent the plot device of spaceship weight limitations endangering lives, and so #47’s suggestion that The Martian was directly reacting to TCE seems unlikely. It’s just a common trope of space-survival stories and has been since well before TCE.
@86 It is a curious view of space travel that thinks that everyone surviving it is the natural state of affairs, and it requires a lot of effort to get anyone to die up there.
But it’s true that, for example, almost every Star Trek episode about a transporter or holodeck malfunction requires lousy engineering, for it to happen at all. Few people denounce those stories on that account, though. I can’t help but think that is in some way connected with the fact that none of those episodes ends up with a teenage girl having to commit suicide at the climax of the story.
@90/ad: Yeah, I never bought the premise that a holodeck gun can kill you if the safeties are turned off. First, why can the safeties be turned off in the first place? Second, why would you need to bother simulating holographic bullets when they move too fast to be seen? Also, why weren’t all holodecks yanked out of service and redesigned after the first time that happened?
I’m more forgiving of transporter-malfunction episodes, because they usually happen under extreme circumstances like when the ship is under attack or when an unprecedented alien phenomenon is affecting the system. The one real exception was in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in which case the malfunction was implicitly the result of the ship’s systems being rushed into use before they were ready, due to the emergency.
However, there is the unforgivably stupid case of “And the Children Shall Lead,” where two security guards died because Spock beamed them down without checking first to make sure they were still in orbit of the planet. You’d think the transporter mechanism would be designed to scan the target area and sound an “Error: planet not found” alarm or something. And you’d think they would’ve contacted the previous shift’s guards to get their report before sending down their reliefs. So that’s a case where it only happened due to bad writing, but then, the whole episode was badly written.
@74, I don’t know about the writer of the piece, but for me, it’s not so Romeo and Juliet but the way it’s frequently taught as if Romeo (who is, after all directly responsible for the death of his cousin) and Juliet are guiltless because they’re following the Path of True Love(TM). Not only are English teachers responsible for applying 20th (and 21st) Century norms to 15th Century Italy, but Shakespeare was applying his contemporary norms to a very different culture.
Entropy means that there are lots and lots of ways of dying, in a sense it’s quite easy. However, being alive, and even more, intelligent, means that there’s also quite a lot of work going into not dying. So while yes, space is a horrible hostile place and will try to kill, we know that and put in a lot of effort to avoid it — to the point that I don’t think anyone has actually died in space yet, just on launch or re-entry.
The point about weaker safety culture seems apropos, though then again, apparently Godwin wanted the girl to live and it’s Campbell who insisted on a dead girl.
@93/Damien: “I don’t think anyone has actually died in space yet, just on launch or re-entry.”
Three people have — the crew of Soyuz 11 in 1971. It was in the early stages of a re-entry maneuver, granted, but it was due to an accidental decompression at an altitude of 168 km, which is high enough to qualify as being in space where records and statistics are concerned (basically it’s anything above 100 km).
I just remembered that the standard of workmanship on any one academic paper is rarely high (as far as I can see), rather than the culmination of your life’s work, you want to spray those things out in volume… which will apply to short stories as well, so flaws isn’t terrible negligence of writer and editor, but business as usual. Yes, there’s peer review, but that’s just a plausibility check.
As for Star Trek “condemned to death and they go through with it” issues, there’s “The Empath”, arguably Nice Kirk in “The Enemy Within”, and if you accept sequels, “Tuvix” and “Similitude”. Two of those are transporter incidents. One other non-transporter classic episode at least, shall we make a contest?
@83/ad: Because happy endings don’t trigger our problem-solving mode.
@66, Valentin. I spoke with Tom Godwin’s daughter at a convention back in the early 1990s. (Don’t ask me how much she weighed!). She explained to me that choosing a young woman to be the stowaway, in his view, was the most sympathetic choice he could make then. It was just about making the choice the most agonizing possible, ramping up the trolley problem.
Is it possible Campbell’s instincts as an editor were good? He probably should have pushed for a more plausible story, but we’re still discussing this one.
I’m reminded of a Gordon Dickson’s “Lost Dorsai” where some Dorsai are trapped by a bad contract. The negotiator is convinced there’s a way out, but there just isn’t time to find it. One of the characters (a bagpiper who loves the military but not combat) solves enough of the problem with his own heroic death. I don’t know whether readers have fount any solutions in the terms of the contract.
@61, the story isn’t equivalent to failing to check on the wheel well of the aircraft, it’s the equivalent of a pilot of an airliner failing to notice there’s someone crouched behind one of the cockpit seats who is fiddling with the breaker panel.
Count me into the group who consider the story so contrived that any “moral” or “philosophical point” that’s supposed to be there is pointless. It’s in the same class of self-congratulatory bullshit (whether it was Goodwin or Campbell who was ultimately responsible) as the assorted novels where every single character who doesn’t share the author’s personal political viewpoint are evil incarnate and deserving of everything that happens to them, and then use that as justification to “prove” the author-avatars are of course totally correct.
@99/Keith: I’ve never seen “The Cold Equations” as saying that the stowaway deserved to die on moral grounds; rather, it was presented as a tragically unavoidable necessity. The point of the title is that the inflexible mathematics and physics of the situation rendered any human moral considerations irrelevant.
Ooh, I get comment #100! I hereby take satisfaction in this purely arbitrary accomplishment that only carries value to practitioners of base-10 mathematics.
@100 the WoT and Stormlight Archive re-readers call it the hunny.
@100 I think it has to be considered testimony to the power of the short story that it has generated 100 comments more than half a century after it was written by an author who must be almost completely forgotten by now.
All these bitter denunciations seem to demonstrate that the author was right to sacrifice a teenage girl, rather than an older space pilot. I doubt anyone would remember it otherwise.
ad@102: That’s an interesting point. I’d like to you define the word power in this context. What sort of power are you talking about? Useful contrasts might be to the power of the stories “Sky Lift” by Heinlein and “The Sharing of Flesh” by Anderson.
Okay, here’s a question: How much of the fame of “The Cold Equations” is due to the story itself, and how much is due to the fact that it was adapted as an episode of the radio series X Minus One in 1955, the British TV anthology series Out of This World in 1962, and the syndicated Twilight Zone revival in 1989, and again as a Sci-Fi Channel movie in 1996? Okay, the fact that it got several adaptations suggests it was an influential story, but maybe the first adaptation prompted the second, and so forth, so the broadcast adaptations raised its profile beyond what it otherwise would’ve had.
@104 Its publication history from ISFDB http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?55860
implies that, adaptations aside, people wanted to read it. At least one placement appears to be a school reader, so…
It presents a basically simple problem; two people travelling by spaceship can make it to where they’re going if… one of them doesn’t. And it is unusual in SF in not providing a surprise escape. It’s why we remember “that one”.
The trolley problem is another crude but understandable ethical puzzle: I’m afraid my answer is that I won’t compound an accident that isn’t my fault by committing a homicidal assault which is. I have Asperger’s syndrome which may help me to leave it at that. My reluctance to play also is boosted by knowing that a “right” answer just gets me given another, trickier trolley problem, so I don’t actually win. Now if the original accident is my fault… then I suppose killing one more person won’t hurt (!) but it’s pretty bad already; but I also remember David Gunson’s stand-up about air traffic control: if there’s an accident and it’s really bad, an inquiry will be held at which the air traffic controller is the only surviving witness, so if you keep your nerve and tell a good story, you may be okay.
@105/Robert Carnegie: Well, all but the first couple of those reprints are after the X Minus One adaptation, so it’s probably a mix of both — the story was notable enough to get adapted pretty soon, and the adaptation raised its profile still further, and it became a self-reinforcing cycle.
@102,
Stories of self-sacrifice abound; stories where the hero (and the pilot is being portrayed heroically) murders* an innocent** are rare. The set-up for the story “forced” the pilot into the murder, however the stowaway issue was clearly not unique — there was a written policy and standard procedure to deal with it — so it’s clear that the hierarchy, including the pilots and their leadership didn’t have the moral sense to write and enforce procedures to keep children or adults from stowing away, like looking in the closet***.
* Of course it was murder, morally if not legally. The girl was a child, and children, at least in civilized societies are not deliberately killed for rule breaking.
** She was a minor child, unaware of the consequences. The posited space pirate’s stowing away would be a common story.
*** Why does this little, no mass margin ship have a closet? Getting rid of the closet and standing and walking room for the pilot would save many times the mass of a stowaway and make stowing away impossible. Was the closet supposed to be a toilet? If so, why? If the ships had that narrow a mass margin, the pilot would get a “human element range extender” — a catheter — and diapers, as did the astronauts through Apollo and pilots before that. There was no toilet or closet on the Spirit of St Louis
It’s conceivable that the ships should have closets or some method of stowing cargo. They should not have solid doors. They should have a mesh covering or somesuch.
@92 you would have liked my high school English teacher. He had a very cynical attitude towards Romeo and Juliet. (He was, in my opinion, quite fair to them. But even a fair reading of their actions is pretty hard on them.)
I enjoyed The Cold Equations when I read it as a teenager (I will second the idea that having autism may play a part in this), so later on I read an anthology of Godwin’s work (quite possibly the one pictured here). It stands up a lot less well in that context, as there is an excessive fatalism running through a lot of the stories. Now, I can see this being a reaction to the Tom Swift-like heroics of the genre at the time, where any problem could easily be solved. But human nature is completely ignored. Except for the fact that some people are selfish or stupid or lazy or whatever, and that can cause a problem. But if you can’t find a way to convince the selfish/stupid/lazy people to smarten up before it become necessary to kill them, you’re not doing a very good job as an administrator. (Or whatever you want to call the person who takes charge of ensuring that everyone who crashed on the planet survives.)
The late SF writer, editor, and critic Damon Knight talked about first and second order idiot plots. The First Order Idiot Plot only worked because the protagonist of the story was an idiot. The Second Order Idiot Plot only worked because everyone in the story was an idiot.
The Cold Equations was an emotionally gripping tale built on a foundation of utter nonsense. It was a textbook illustration of Second Order Idiot Plot. That the circumstances could happen as described required unbelievable assumptions about the society in which it was set.
A poster in an online forum decades back where I talked about First and Second Order Idiot Plots asked whether there might be Third Order Idiot Plots that required the readers to be idiots. I said “Yes. They’re called Star Trek novels…” and grinned, ducked and ran. (This was in the glory days of ST tie-ins where an ST novel became a best seller because it was an ST novel, so who cared whether it was actually a decent book? Things have improved since.)
@110/DMcCunney: You can, however, get a valid story out of a situation where one or more characters other than the protagonist are idiots, and their idiocy creates an obstacle to the protagonist’s success. I daresay quite a few classic Doctor Who stories depend on the idiocy of authority figures stymieing the Doctor’s efforts to save people from the monsters. See also any horror movie where the grownups are closed-minded fools and it’s up to the plucky, resourceful teenagers to stop the alien invaders.
@29- To which particular Star Wars comic are you referring?
In one of the Heinlein novels, one of the characters says “Natural laws have no pity”. Also, given the tight parameters at launch to arrive at the proper destination, would not the action of ejecting the girl cause a course deviation (action -reaction) that would cause the ship to miss the destination?
@@@@@ No. 81, Carl:
Krakauer discussed the guidebook at length in Into the Wild. If I remember correctly, Krakauer leaned to the idea that what did McCandless in was that the guidebook omitted to warn readers not to eat parts of a particular plant that he apparently did eat, while giving that warning for other related plants. (It’s been well over 12 years since I read it, so I can’t be any more specific.) Also, as to McCandless’s reading, Jack London was IIRC one of his literary idols. Into the Wild goes into that.
I have not read The Cold Equations but I did read a substantial chunk of the Unabomber manifesto, which starts from the same point, and also has a certain number of holes in the working out of the idea.
One realization of the theme that I am enjoying currently is the Baru Cormorant series by Seth Dickinson.
@72:
On a slightly different tack, what kind of vehicle with insanely stringent mass limits has a closet snd enough room in which to stand?
Other writers knew this back then; cf <i>The Space Merchants</i>, in which the first ship to Venus is piloted by someone very short in a compartment with no room to move.
ad@102: the discussion is a tribute not to the power of the story but to the … blindness … of people who still cite it as backing for their ideas about how the universe works.
I haven’t read the book shown above, but according to ISFDB it also contains “Mother of Invention”, which begins (in the version reprinted in Spectrum V) by quoting a paper by an Antarean philosopher:
The punchline of this particular story: “We brought the planet with us.”( (rollover to see). This was also a Campbell purchase originally; I wonder which one was more reworked-to-order.
@110 People complaining about this story seems to be complaining about the procedures which enabled its situation to arise in the first place. That means they are complaining about the stupidity of people who are not actually characters in the story. They left the story before it opened. Presumably this would be a Zero Order Idiot Plot.
Stories of that kind must be pretty common.
Indeed, they can be pretty common in reality: The Tenerife Air Disaster was caused by a 747 captain deciding to take off before he had permission from the control tower, the Herald of Free Enterprise sank because she left harbour with the bow doors open, etc. WW2 went the way it did in part because the British Government decided in the 1930s that the one thing it would not need in the event of a world war was an army.
By comparison, the before-the-story stupidity that led to The Cold Equations does not sound especially stupid. No one would mind, if the author had not decided to have a sacrifice that hurts the reader, instead of one that makes the reader feel warm and noble.
As Joss Whedon said of the decision to kill off a character: “I knew it was the right decision, because it hurt.”
Then there’s Bill Roper’s unforgettable take on this, “Teenage Popsicle Girl”:
http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/teenage-popsicle-girl.html
I remember thinking that if approached logically, it would make more sense to tell the young girl “I’ll need you to wait here for a moment while I contact my superiors” – wait in the airlock (without telling her that’s what it is) – and then flush her out immediately, without agonizing over it or trying to get her to accept it. The reason being: it’s foolish to assume you have everything calculated precisely enough to be able to wait until the last possible moment, and it’s always better to leave a margin for error: furthermore you’re probably not doing her any favors by making her face her impending death.
So the only way to read the story was to dismiss the premise, and read it as a story about finding out that you’re about to die and that there is nothing to be done about it – essentially the same story as being diagnosed with a particularly deadly disease, but having the story condensed into a couple hours, where it is amenable to being treated in short story form.
Yeah, off topic but on that front: As Europe trends back towards right wing fascism, and the UK back towards “glorious isolation”, the British Government is cutting the number of tanks the army can field by a third. Apparently we don’t need an army in the event of a future war.
We are so fucked.
Re: Romeo and Juliet. Personally I blame Friar Lawrence. His course of action when Juliet came to him for help should have been obvious, pop the girl into a local convent for her safety and take the whole story to the Prince who will LOVE this solution to his persistent problem of the vendetta. There will of course be a lot of screaming and yelling from the Montague and Capulet parents but they’ll have the authority of the Prince and the Church too against them. Eventually they will be forced to accept the marriage and reluctantly bury the hatchet.
Instead the idiot Friar decides to play games with dangerous drugs.
I’ve often heard of the story but read it now for the first time. I note that the girl’s gender got her an extra hour of life.
princessroxana@122
It’s not at all unlikely that the actual reaction of the elder Capulet and Montague to Romeo and Juliet’s marriage would be “Why didn’t WE think of that?”. The feud is already winding down by the beginning of the play and exists mostly because no one has gotten around to formally ending it.
@124, True. And the worst hotheads are already dead. Still I’m sure there would be some protests if only for the look of the thing.
@122 I once came across the argument that Juliet – a twelve year old girl in the throes of her first infatuation – is the most sensible and thoughtful person in the play.
Then again, it would be a very unrealistic story that had everyone within it acting wisely.
I took a two-week summer creative writing course with Ursula Le Guin during my post-grad bygone days. I’ll never forget what she said about that story: “It’s the most sadistic story I’ve ever read.”
@124,
Marrying for love was abnormal in Renaissance Italy; Romeo and Juliet would be married in ways to forward their families interests, with Romeo likely marrying in his late twenties to a women of about sixteen. Neither would be given much choice.
“The Cold Equations,” in its defense, is from an era where astronauts were picked not only for skill, but for their small stature, to be launched on rockets where every ounce was at a premium. So, right or wrong, it is not surprising such attitudes bled into the fiction of the day.
Interesting how everybody is trying to solve the problem posed by cold equations using methods that were not available in the story. I find cold equations to be a story of a ship with fixed boundaries and limits to its resources, that finds itself over-populated. That describes our planet today, but the problem can’t be solved by someone leaving the ship. The cold equations of over-population demand that the population die back to what the planet can sustain. Very few people believe this can happen.
“Interesting how everybody is trying to solve the problem posed by cold equations using methods that were not available in the story.”
Sure they were. If ship-killing stowaways are so common that you have homicide-level policies for dealing with them, then simple measures to make sure you *don’t launch with a stowaway*, like “locks” or “pre-flight check” or “what is my total ship mass, anyway?” are available and make sense. Yes, they would mean the story wouldn’t happen, but that’s the point: the story premise is stupid.
“The cold equations of over-population demand that the population die back to what the planet can sustain.”
False. With the right tech and use of resources we can support many more people than exist. Also, birthrates are naturally falling everywhere; global population is projected to peak around 10 billion and then decline like Japan. The “die back” can happen through old age.
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” ―Oscar Wilde
If Godwin had published a version with the girl surviving, it would be a trivial piece that said nothing, it would not be remembered.
If he’d used a teen boy stowaway, we’re generally OK with boys sacrificing themselves, or suddenly developing piloting and martial arts skills far beyond their years, throwing the pilot out the airlock, and saving the day. Sweet Cthulhu, do I hate Luke Skywalker. But in either case, it’d be more disposable trash, Tom Swift Jr.
If he’d had precise technical details so you could be sure it was or was not necessary to dispose of the stowaway, this would be long settled and forgotten.
So at the goal of being talked about, it succeeds perfectly. The cold equations are that The Cold Equations is the most memorable short story.
It’s been a long time since I read The Survivors or any of his shorts in my semi-random archive.org magazine reading, so now I’m adding his entire 3 novels, 27 short stories to my re-read list.
@132/mdhughes: People still talk about Plan 9 from Outer Space, but that doesn’t make it Citizen Kane.
@129/AlanBrown: ““The Cold Equations,” in its defense, is from an era where astronauts were picked not only for skill, but for their small stature, to be launched on rockets where every ounce was at a premium.”
Picking small people sounds like a good approach for the EDS pilots in the story too. On the other hand, pilots are expected to jettison male, adult stowaways, so I guess they must be big and strong. Someone should have thought of solving this dilemma by installing better security measures.
Anyone else remember an adaptation of “The Cold Equations” for TV in the ’90s? I want to say it aired on the Sci-Fi Channel but can’t be for sure.
@135/Spike: Yes, I mentioned the 1996 Sci-Fi Channel movie adaptation in comment #104. It starred Billy Campbell as the astronaut Barton and Poppy Montgomery as the stowaway Marilyn (nicknamed Lee for some reason), aged up to mid-20s so that they could insert a love story between them to pad it out to movie length. It was a low-budget film whose writers and director have very few other credits.
The film also fleshed out the story in ways that tried to justify its premise; it established the larger world as an oppressive corporate dystopia to give some context and justification to the death-penalty policy and the negligence toward human safety, and it established the ship as a disposable single-use craft that therefore had no excess stuff to jettison.
By the way, I didn’t personally remember this; I had to look around online until I found a detailed review. However, I won’t link to that review, because it’s strongly misogynistic in its language and attitude toward the female lead.
@136. Okay, thanks, I missed your earlier comment.
Funny, until reading this article I wasn’t even sure what the name of the story was. I just remembered it as that Sci-Fi movie thing about the stowaway. I watched it so long ago it almost seemed like a dream.
Billy “Rocketeer” Campbell, you say? I couldn’t remember who starred in it. I might have to hunt it down and give it another watch. He and Poppy Montogomery are solid actors.
Montogomery? Yeah, it’s early…
@136 That sounds like the wrong way to justify the premise; it is just another way to say that everything is really all about Good People and Bad People. But the point of this story is clearly meant to be that the Laws of Nature have the moral position of the Childlike Empress: they draw no distinction between good things and people, and evil ones.
So if you are in the middle of a desperate race against time to save the day, when something goes very badly wrong, someone’s day is going unsaved, however moral you all are. If everyone could have survived something going very badly wrong, it could not have been that desperate a race to start with.
As for the argument that the original story does not do enough to justify its premise – it does enough for the ending to hurt people. You might as well complain that the Trolley Problem does not do enough to justify its premise. A better written story would hurt the reader more, not less. And the critics are not complaining that reading The Cold Equations did not hurt them enough.
@139/ad: Yes, it’s already been thoroughly discussed what the point of the story was meant to be, but the point of this thread is that the story failed to justify that point, that the situation was not purely the result of the laws of nature, but the result of clumsy, arbitrary, and inhumane ship design and policies. The movie attempted to justify those contrivances and make them less arbitrary. Which seems a natural enough thing to do when you’re adapting a story that’s been frequently criticized for its plot holes over the preceding four decades, and when you need to pad the thing out to movie length somehow.
And I don’t think the Trolley Problem is a good analogy, because it’s a situation that’s blatantly contrived to force a desired outcome, which may work as a moral allegory but is a crappy way to plot a work of fiction. If your readers are pulled out of the story by their questions about why the situation’s that way to begin with, then it doesn’t work as a story. It’s not valid to say that stories are entitled to get to their point by any method whether or not it makes sense or is good writing. How you get to the goal matters. A good magician and a bad magician may both be able to pull off the mechanics of the same magic trick, but the bad magician will telegraph the moves and give the trick away, while the good one will succeed in selling the illusion and creating the desired sense of wonder. It’s called willing suspension of disbelief, not mandatory. The audience isn’t obligated to buy what the writer tries to sell them. The writer has to earn it by doing it well.
@139/ad: It doesn’t hurt too little or too much, it hurts in the wrong way.
There is no shortage of stories about the uncaring Laws of Nature that actually are about the uncaring Laws of Nature. For example stories set in traditional societies where a baby dies.
Also, the Trolley Problem totally has a solution.
You grab the switch lever, and wait until the trolley’s front wheels are on the points, then throw it. The points will change, trapping the rear and front wheels on different tracks and jam upright. The worst that will happen is a few bruises and scuffs. Day saved, smile for the camera.
@142/random22: You remind me of my problem with Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “The Most Toys.” It’s supposed to be a Cold Equations/Trolley Problem situation where Data is left with no choice but to violate his code against killing (although he’s rescued by transporter at the moment he pulls the trigger, so his hands remain bloodless), but to me, it’s always been obvious that he did have a non-lethal option the writers and producers all overlooked — namely, using the Horribly Deadly Ray Gun to just barely graze the belt-mounted field generator that prevented him from touching the bad guy, thereby shorting out the field and allowing Data to restrain the guy nonlethally. (The scene was staged so that the generator box was on Fajo’s hip, so Data had a clear shot to graze the box without hitting Fajo.) And if that option was immediately obvious to me, it was implausible that a supergenius android couldn’t see it too. So the premise that the situation was insoluble was simply wrong. The writers merely missed the solution.
I guess the moral is, avoid telling stories that insist there’s only one possible option no matter what, because the odds are that somebody in the audience will spot a solution you missed.
@129: “The Cold Equations,” in its defense, is from an era where astronauts were picked not only for skill, but for their small stature, to be launched on rockets where every ounce was at a premium. The criteria for US astronauts were developed in late 1958 to early 1959, over four years after this story was published. Some authors (see my cite of Pohl above) thought size would be critical; some of those specified plausibly small crew compartments, rather than one big enough for a stowaway to hide in. However, from what I’ve read of stories of that period, most authors ignored the issue. Wikipedia reports that the Mercury Seven were limited to 5’11” tall (IIRC slightly over average even today) and 180 pounds (hardly lightweight); it reports that 5’11” was the largest person the Mercury capsule could hold. There may also have been minimum sizes, because a space-suited astronaut would have to be able to reach all the controls, or that may have already been covered by restricting the group to test pilots (who would have had some of the same issue).
@134: The pilot has a hand weapon; that is supposed to trump size according to weapon mythology. Of course, the idea that stowaways are so likely that the pilot must go armed is another failure of the story’s logic.
@143. I never understood why Data didn’t simply go outside, shut the door, change the code and lock Fajo inside the shuttle bay. Then he could commandeer the ship and contact the Enterprise. Minimal violence needed.
@140 What justification would be adequate then? What ship designs and policies could the author have written that would not allow people to complain that the girl could have survived if the designs and policies had been different?
Suppose I rewrote the story so that it states that the usual safety precautions were not followed because only members of the Safety Procedures Guild were allowed to implement them, and the Guild was on strike. Would people praise me for fixing this all-important flaw in the worldbuilding? Or would they denounce me for attacking unions?
I’m betting on the latter, because however flawed the worldbuilding, nobody is ever infuriated by it. So the fury must come from another cause. Fix the worldbuilding, and you just get a different rationalization for the fury.
I would say that the fury is really caused by the fact that the protagonist does this terrible thing, and there is no one in the story to blame for it. The story offers no outlet for the audiences anger. So everyone goes searching for someone to be annoyed with.
(My proposed rewrite would offer the chance to blame the striking safety people, but I expect people would not want to do that, so they would blame me instead…)
@145/Spike: Nice thinking, but I don’t think it would’ve worked, since there were a couple of nameless extras in the cargo bay too, whom Fajo had threatened to kill if Data didn’t surrender. So Data wouldn’t have had time to get both of them out of the bay and lock Fajo in before he could’ve killed one or both of them.
@146/ad: “What justification would be adequate then?”
Uhh, yeah, that’s exactly the question the movie was trying to answer.
@147 So the right justification is “evil people are to blame”? Doesn’t that take away the whole point of a story in which the only thing to blame is meant to be The Cold Equations?
@147. If I’m remembering it correctly, the extras had already left the shuttle bay by that time. Yeah, Fajo threatens killing someone else, then motions for the extra to leave. Nice thinking there, Fajo! Really begging for a mutiny now.
ad@148
It’s a justification that at least makes sense. The story as it appeared in print doesn’t
@129, @144: I wanted someone to mention there weren’t any astronauts in 1954. Well, not astronauts in space. For that matter, an equal number of men and women.
@148/ad: Again, that’s the whole point of this article — that the story failed to prove that the forces of nature were the only things to blame. Just because the story intended that doesn’t mean we’re required to blindly accept its premise. Like I said, it’s called willing suspension of disbelief. If someone tries to sell you something and fails to convince you, you have a right to refuse to buy it.
And I’m not saying the filmmakers were “right.” I haven’t seen the film in 23 years (good grief, I’m old), and I have no personal stake in the question. I’m just saying it’s understandable why they attempted to address the story’s flaws. Whether an individual viewer thinks the attempt was successful is up to the viewer, but it wasn’t wrong for the filmmakers to try it.
@35,
Wasn’t the problem being solved was the people who were protesting against their oppression by the elites who hired Falkenhayn?
Killing protesters is very traditional
@146/ad: “What justification would be adequate then? What ship designs and policies could the author have written that would not allow people to complain that the girl could have survived if the designs and policies had been different?”
Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.
I asked myself the same question – What ship designs and policies could the author have written that would not bother me? – and couldn’t come up with anything. And I think the reason is that there is no such ship design and policy, and that’s where the real flaw of the story lies.
See, the whole point of technology is to make life better. To beat the uncaring Laws of Nature. Therefore, all the stories about the uncaring Laws of Nature that actually make sense take place in a low-tech environment, or one where there’s a shortage of some vital stuff due to an earlier catastrophe.
And therefore, in a good society (i.e. one that doesn’t make life better only for a subset of the population), the in-story reaction to a terrible thing like the killing of a young girl has to be “what can we do to prevent this from happening again?”, and not a vague feeling of sadness and acceptance. If it isn’t, the characters are to blame. (Or the author. Take your pick.) In an environment built by humans, humans are responsible. It’s as simple as that.
“[…] however flawed the worldbuilding, nobody is ever infuriated by it. So the fury must come from another cause. Fix the worldbuilding, and you just get a different rationalization for the fury.”
I think I answered that in comment #61. It’s one thing to use flawed worldbuilding to create a dangerous situation for the protagonists to get out of, and quite another to use it to create a hopeless situation. I’m happy to overlook the flaws in the first case, but not in the second one. Because in the first case, the moral isn’t “oh, how sad, but that’s just how things are”.
“I would say that the fury is really caused by the fact that the protagonist does this terrible thing, and there is no one in the story to blame for it. The story offers no outlet for the audiences anger. So everyone goes searching for someone to be annoyed with.”
It isn’t so much “searching for someone be annoyed with” as “searching for something to fix”. As I said in comment #96, the story triggers our problem-solving mode. And that’s a healthy reaction. Ultimately, it’s our problem-solving capabilities that enable us to make life better.
@154,
Yes, natural laws can’t be circumvented (although we seem to have some stupid leaders who think they don’t apply when their paymasters don’t like them); intelligent and moral people design policies and procedures so innocent people don’t get killed by their enforced blissful ignorance.
The message that comes across from “The Cold Equations” isn’t that natural laws can’t be circumvented; it’s that the so-called elites of TCE’s milieu are so blinded by their belief in the inevitability of failure that they don’t bother to solve the problem of stowaways. They’re no different than the executives who blocked exits at Triangle Shirtwaist.
The operators of the TCE cruisers probably spent a lot of money arguing against health and safety laws, just like the operators of the Sago Mine.
@swampyankee
The protesters were protesting the “oppression” of being given less free food and entertainment, and maybe expected to do some work. It’s a very direct reference to the Roman “bread and circuses”.
117: “WW2 went the way it did in part because the British Government decided in the 1930s that the one thing it would not need in the event of a world war was an army.”
Historical point: nope. In the 1930s, every country in Europe knew WWII was coming and every country in Europe – including Britain – was re-arming and planning for the next war. The idea that the UK was unprepared for WWII is ahistorical: the British government made mistakes in their planning, sure, but on the whole, the UK was as prepared for WWII as it feasibly could be – much better prepared than it is today for Brexit.
Moving back to the story, years and years ago a French friend sent me a filk tape which included a song based on the Cold Equations – the refrain was “but I didn’t do anything to die for” with repeated mentions of the brother the filk-narrator loved and wanted to see again and wasn’t going to.
I mentioned that filksong in particular when we discussed the tape – how it was a good ballad but I’d never liked the story, because it was all about how this setup just forced an adult man to have to kill a teenage girl.
“A girl??” said my French friend, who was not particularly widely-read in English-language SF. “I thought this was about a boy.” (Segue into brief discussion about how gender of singer in filk is often entirely unrelated to gender of narrator in filk song.)
She’d listened to the song and been quite happy with the sentiment when she thought it was about a teenage boy stowing away to see his brother only the lack of fuel means he has to die en route. She was far less happy with it when she realised the narrator was supposed to be a girl.
The gender combination I suppose John Campbell would have liked least, would have been an experienced female pilot calmly/regretfully killing off a boy stowaway: though all the caveats about how there shouldn’t even have been able to be a stowaway still apply.
@154/Jana: “Therefore, all the stories about the uncaring Laws of Nature that actually make sense take place in a low-tech environment, or one where there’s a shortage of some vital stuff due to an earlier catastrophe.”
In my story I linked to above, “The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing,” I set things up so that the situation that required humans to live in harsh and deadly conditions was the result of an accident — they were the descendants of an expedition whose members were stranded in an uninhabitable star system and had to scrape out subsistence however they could.
“And therefore, in a good society (i.e. one that doesn’t make life better only for a subset of the population), the in-story reaction to a terrible thing like the killing of a young girl has to be “what can we do to prevent this from happening again?”, and not a vague feeling of sadness and acceptance. If it isn’t, the characters are to blame. (Or the author. Take your pick.) In an environment built by humans, humans are responsible. It’s as simple as that.”
Yes, exactly. Very well said. Every time a mass shooting happens in the US and schoolchildren are murdered and terrorized, the politicians in the National Rifle Association’s pocket wring their hands and say “It’s impossible to prevent these tragedies, they’re just the price of freedom,” even though every other civilized country that’s had a mass shooting has immediately passed laws that have successfully prevented it from ever happening again. Similarly, many industrial or transportation accidents, food poisonings, etc. happen only because corporate executives are unwilling to spend the money to improve worker or consumer safety, rather than because it’s physically impossible for them to do so. A functional society will devise solutions, legal or technological, to improve its people’s safety. A society that just throws up its hands and claims it’s impossible to prevent more such deaths is simply being negligent. Blaming the uncaring laws of the universe is just an excuse for their own lack of care.
@157 I did not say that Britain did not rearm in the 1930s. I said it did not rebuild its Army. Britain would have been fine, if only WW2 had involved no fighting on land. When it became apparent that the country would have to make an effort on land comparable to the previous war, things were not fine.
But it does seem strange that the countries government was so sure it would not have to fight on land during a World War. As I said, people make the strangest mistakes.
@154. I think you have pretty much hit it. If you don’t like the point of the story, then it doesn’t matter how well the author justifies it. You are not going to be happy with the story. Complaining about how the author wrote the story is to shoot at completely the wrong target.
So why does (almost) everyone do that? Why does everyone complain about trivial little things like how well the author set up his story, when the real objection is to the whole point of the story? I suppose people respond to the story with a visceral dislike, and then go looking for reasons to justify that dislike. They react to the story without knowing why they react that way.
So lets change the point of the story, and see what happens:
1) The pilot does some fault finding, and makes some technical change that means This Can Never Happen Again. This seems like a pretty weak ending to a story in which a teenage girl voluntarily walks out of an airlock.
2) As above, but we take the opportunity to point out that this shows how important proper procedures are. Still weak.
3) The whole fiasco was due to a strike by the safety inspection people. Lets ban strikes by them forever! I think this would be denounced as an attack on unions and Noble Safety Inspectors.
4) The whole fiasco was due to cost-cutting by Evil Anonymous Corporation. They must be made to pay! That sounds like something people could get behind.
On the face of it “what can we do to prevent this happening again” will make few readers happier, unless it involves attacking someone wearing a black hat.
OTOH, lets change the point of the story without doing anything to prevent it happening again.
5) Last minute technobabble allows the pilot to have the ship land automatically. He saves the girl by taking her place and walking out of the airlock himself, sadly accepting his fate. This really sounds a lot less likely to annoy people.
6) Change the viewpoint character to the girl. At the end of the story, as she sees the necessity, she walks into the airlock, and ejects herself into space.
I don’t think 6) would anger anyone at all. It certainly sounds like something people would love to praise. But I didn’t change the plot, justifications, or world at all. All that changes is that the viewpoint character ends up in a heroic moment, rather than a wretched one.
@160/ad: ” I think you have pretty much hit it. If you don’t like the point of the story, then it doesn’t matter how well the author justifies it. You are not going to be happy with the story. Complaining about how the author wrote the story is to shoot at completely the wrong target.”
Again missing the point that the author did not justify it well, because the story pretended the outcome was impossible to avoid due to physical law when in fact it was purely the result of human failure to improve the system after previous such tragedies. If this had been the first time this ever happened, then that would be one thing, but the story showed that it happened regularly enough that there was an established procedure for dealing with it, a procedure that was ineptly designed because it only killed people after the fact rather than preventing the problem in the first place.
So hell yes, how the author wrote the story is exactly the right target, because the way the author wrote the story utterly disproves the point the story tried to make.
@160,
I worked in aerospace for a couple of decades; I’m a recovering aeronautical engineer. The industry goes to a great deal of the effort to keep highly trained aviators from doing things like retracting the landing gear after landing or going into an unrecoverable stall.
We don’t expect passengers to know not to, say, walk into propellers
Yeah, the story would be stronger if this was the first time something like this had happened. Or was otherwise freakishly rare. Or if the stowaway had disabled security — though then she would lose her tragic ‘innocence’.
The setup of “stowaways are common enough that we have a murder policy but not a ‘check for stowaways’ policy” is just mindbogglingly stupid.
@163/Damien: I was thinking about procedures that could prevent stowaways, and it occurred to me that part of the problem is that the story was written before the era of security cameras. (Not to mention seatbelts and most other modern safety systems, but I think that’s been mentioned in the thread already.)
164; As I recall, the in-text explanation of how the stowaway is disovered, is the pilot checking the mass of the ship after departure, discovering extra mass aboard, and going “Oh well, a stowaway again, better get my gun and kill him”.
There is an actual technical procedure for discovering a stowaway on board, and a known and expected process for dealing with the stowaway after discovery.
Plainly, there was nothing to prevent the pilot from running the same check – exact mass of ship, detect stowaway, deal with stowaway, continue journey – before the ship had left the station, when the expected process would be, march the stowaway to the airlock – at gun point if necessary, while delivering a lecture on the careful balance of ship mass and fuel – push stowaway through airlock onto station, and let the stowaway’s motivations be the station security’s problem from then on.
Having the process of run this check only after departure, at is just a callous set-up to let the pilot murder the stowaway – in-story because the culture to which the pilot belongs endorses vigilante murder rather than crime prevention: Doylistically, because Campbell wanted a story in which the girl got killed.
Security cameras wouldn’t have made any difference to either factor in killing off the girl.
@165/jcarnall: Well, I did say it was only part of the problem.
But you’re right — if it’s that urgent that the ship not have excess mass, then it makes absolutely no sense not to run that check before launch.
As I said: If the margins are that tight, there’s an excellent chance that by the time he discovers and ejects the stowaway, he’s already screwed — the ship is already off course and/or there’s already insufficient life support. (Unless there’s a throwaway line in there somewhere about how all of this was happening at exactly the point of no return.)
This discussion has clarified for me why this story, which does have its appeal, is ultimately unsatisfying: It’s sentimental pap for people whose hard hearts cover soft minds.* Pathos can be sentimental, like this, or tragic, as in Heinlein’s “Sky Lift”.
Think how much more pathetic the end of this story would be if the girl who died got on board the ship by being a properly clever and sneaky protagonist. Use the scenario in this story as a flashback to the first time a stowaway was killed. Acknowledge the procedural stupidity which allowed a naïve young girl who wanted an adventure and to see her brother to get on board. Take a second flashback to the hearing where the pilot was cleared of responsibility, and where that responsibility was properly placed on those whose carelessness put him in an untenable position. If it’s a military hearing, maybe execute a couple of particularly culpable idiots, just to drive the point home. Maybe a third flashback to the building of a better procedure. Then show us the girl defeating that better procedure so effectively that she is not found till after the point of no return.
The cold equations don’t discriminate between the wise and the foolish, the stupid and the smart. If you step out of line, they will still kill you. Like “Rogue Moon”. Like “Sky Lift”.
Being smart doesn’t always save you. Consider “The Sharing of Flesh”. Consider “The Long Watch”. These are themes explored by hard minds with tender hearts, in better stories by better writers.
Let this be the marker for a new Godwin’s Law: A writer famous for one story isn’t much of a writer.**
Let this story be The Man–or The Girl, if you must–Who Learned Better. The hard way. Not the story of The Man Who Learned To Follow Procedure. Because that story sucks.
*To be clear about this, I have no quarrel with those who feel for the girl. I did. I still do. I feel for the pilot, too. That’s healthy sentimentalism. This is aimed at those who smack their lips at the girl getting her just desserts and admire the pilot for Making Hard Decisions. I mistrust those who glory in Hard Decisions. We all play to our strengths; those who get off on hard choices tend to lead people into them. That’s a leader who gets you killed. We cover their crimes in unhealthy sentiment.
**In retrospect, I was too hard here on Tom Godwin, who I haven’t read deeply. I’m going to. I think I owe him that now. If I don’t judge people by their worst mistake–which I try not to do–I shouldn’t judge a writer by one flawed story. And I’ll own my mistake by striking my remark out, rather than by pretending I didn’t say it–especially since people rightly took me to task for it in later comments.
Very probably true. OTOH, if a writer is famous for one story alone, there must be something to that story.
Sometimes authors have solid bodies of work, and then they write something that completely eclipses their prior efforts. Daniel Keyes, Walter M. Miller Jr. and arguably Bram Stoker, for example.
@170:
Sometimes, too, authors are known only for one work not because of the work’s quality but because of an adaptation or because one work fortuitously links with a cultural moment. An example of the first type is Damon Knight whose “To Serve Man” got boosted incredibly by being adapted by the Twilight Zone – but who wrote many other works worth recalling; for the second type, consider “Stranger in a Strange Land.”
@168,
“[H]ard hearts cover soft minds” is a great phrase.
Defending the logic of the story is impossible as to do so requires defending obviously flawed procedures.
@172/swampyankee: Or rather, it requires blaming uncaring, immutable natural law for what’s actually the easily avoidable consequence of flawed procedures. That’s why the logic doesn’t work — because it’s founded on a false premise. If the story had admitted that the procedures and human negligence were to blame (which sounds like what the ’96 movie did), that would be more honest. It just wouldn’t be the story it asserted itself to be.
What doesn’t work for me about Romeo and Juliet (which still makes me cry, all the same) is that Juliet is a girl who marries a hereditary enemy and sleeps with him under her parents’ roof and yet somehow it never occurs to her to just go join her husband in Mantua (or go with him there in the first place). And Friar Lawrence is just an idiot.
@174/etv13: I dunno, did women have the same freedom to move around in that society and time as men did?
@175,
Upper class women — and Juliet’s family was almost certainly in the ethereal upper reaches of the 1% — the answer is “No”; they’d never be out of the house without escorts. Think how the US right thinks women in Islamic countries are treated, and you’re in the right realm.
In any case, both Romeo (who was an idiot responsible for the death of his cousin) and Juliet would be both ver sheltered and very privileged by the standards of their day, and probably be particularly bratty in their middle school classrooms were they to be alive today.
@173,
TCE may have been more interesting had the pilot neglected his pre-flight checks because he was complacent or had a bad hangover from forbidden carousing. Of course, then there would be people a) defending him because stowaways were just not common, so it’s unnecessary reg or b) it’s okay for pilots to misbehave because male.
Surely she could have traveled with her husband, had it occurred to anyone that she should just go with him when he was exiled. And when her father wants her to marry Paris, the alternative he presents to her is to die in the streets. He’s not threatening to lock her up so she can’t get away. At that point she is Mrs. Romeo Montague, and she has Friar Lawrence and her nurse to help her. And I repeat, we have seen her to be a bold and daring young woman. And yet, all of a sudden, her only realistic choices are Marry Paris or Pretend to be Dead? It just seems weird to me that a girl who has shown a propensity for transgressive, outside the box behavior, all of a sudden is reduced to pretending to play along. And frankly, if I had to choose between a journey to Mantua, and entombment with mouldering corpses, I know which one I’d pick.
swampyankee@172:
I like it well enough to hope people use it correctly, and contrast it with its later echo: “hard minds with tender hearts”.
A friend pointed out I’d engaged in Ellisonesque rhetoric there, going for the jugular while kicking the crotch. “Ellisonesque” is an ambiguous compliment. Harlan treated me roughly (but fairly–I did ask a silly, though not stupid, question) in public just before I turned eighteen. It’s a favorite memory because I’m me. I love those who love me with harsh but fair assessment; most folks won’t do that and most folks don’t love that. To some, it might be a life-long scar.
So to make sure that remark only hits where intended, I’ve footnoted myself @168.
@169-171: I’ve struck that line from my comment. I haven’t read Tom Godwin enough to say he’s “not much of a writer”. I’m comfortable with leaving it at Heinlein and Anderson being better writers; probably Budrys is better as well, but I haven’t read him deeply enough to say. I had such strong memories of “Rogue Moon”! Yet I had to ask around to find the title and author. I could just as fairly made that remark about him. Thus I’ve struck it–but not erased it. I said it; I’ll own it.
I’m rereading Goodwin’s The Survivors.
Aliens conquerors dump culled humans on a hell planet. Huge die off. The survivors evolve to fit a 1.5 G death world. Then take their revenge.
The wilderness savvy carry long knives. A knife long enough to chop and froe wood, and stab a wild boar’s heart, earns its keep in the bush. Later generations, armed with a knife, have a good chance against a charging unicorn—think Cape Buffalo on steroids.
Another plot point is that the planet is iron poor. It takes a huge effort to find enough ore to make one interstellar transmitter.
It never occurred to my younger self on first reading, but…
What are all those long knives made of?
I start there and conclude Goodwin is hand waving again. There is an unexamined layer of difficulties for his stranded humans. Because they are limited to a Neolithic technology.
It’s still a great story.
Romeo and Juliet is thisclose –> <– to being a comedy. The first act, right up to the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, is a comedy. If those two live, and Friar Lawrence isn’t quite as much an idiot, it’s a comedy all the way through. I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to do that variation?
Tanith Lee’s Sung in Shadow is basically R&J with a twist, that twist being that (to borrow a friend’s phrase) you cannot spell necromancer without “romance”.
@175, CLB, You are right about the constraints on unmarried girls especially in early modern Italy. But we aren’t talking about real 16th c. Verona but a fantasy city created by Shakespeare. Juliet runs all over town and nobody minds as long as she has Nurse with her. In that fantasy world there is no reason why she and Nurse couldn’t have traveled under the protection of the friar sent with the letter to To Romeo, except it doesn’t suit the plot.
R&J is really just a Tudor era Sex Ed PSA.
@176/swampyankee: “Think how the US right thinks women in Islamic countries are treated, and you’re in the right realm.”
Which is pretty much how the extreme US Christian right treats its own women, as seen in things like the “quiverful” movement and arranged child marriages and the like. That kind of attitude has always been independent of any single religion or culture.
@179/Fernhunter: “Another plot point is that the planet is iron poor… What are all those long knives made of?”
Bronze, I’d imagine.
@173,
I’m not sure that the Friar had the legal authority to perform a legally valid marriage
>you cannot spell necromancer without “romance”
Oh now that I need to remember. I love it.
@184: Or obsidian.
@185, According to the council of Trent a legitimate Catholic marriage required a priest and two witnesses. Whether Shakespeare knew or cared is another matter.
@187/AndyLove: I think we can rule out obsidian based on Fernhunter‘s description. I just did some googling about it, and it seems that obsidian blades can be fairly long and incredibly sharp, but they are literally made of glass, so while they’re very good at slicing as long as you avoid bending or twisting the blade, they can’t chop things without chipping the edge. You could use stoneknapping techniques to re-sharpen the blade afterward, but then the blade would get smaller and eventually wear out or break. From the description, it sounds like the knives in the novella are a lot more durable than obsidian blades would be.
189: Thanks. Bronze it is, then.
@@@@@ 190, AndyLove
189: Thanks. Bronze it is, then.
If it’s such an iron poor world, it was probably formed in a first-generation stellar complex.
The heavier elements, including iron, are the result of supernovas exploding. Blasting heavy elements forged in huge stars out into space. Where they enrich the formation of second generation solar systems. Our solar system is second generation. That’s why we have iron, and gold, and copper, and uranium.
Bronze requires tin. No tin, no bronze. On Earth, tin is rare compared to iron. That’s one reason the birth of the iron age was such a game changer. To arm your soldiers with bronze weapons, you have to be rich enough to import tin. Or lucky enough to have tin ore in your territory.
By contrast, iron is everywhere. The Iron Age democratized violence. Suddenly barbarian herders and hunters could afford weapons that were better than bronze-armed city states and empires. The spread of blacksmithing technology is probably connected with things like the Mesopotamian Bronze Age Collapse.
If Ragnarök formed around a first generation star, it’s probably as short of tin as it is of iron.
As for flint or obsidian—think of chopping a sapling with a long shard of window glass.
The Aztecs inset obsidian blades in to wooden swords. I wonder it those were less breakable?
@191/Fernhunter: Iron-poor doesn’t mean completely devoid of iron. It just means the supply would be limited. Iron could exist, but be as rare and precious as gold or platinum — all the more precious because it’s so useful. Maybe the main source of iron on the planet is meteoric.
@192. I remember seeing an old movie which involved two warring Aztec-ish tribes(terminology?) which featured those wooden/obsidian swords. There was a big set piece battle featuring them, with the two faction leaders being involved in some sort of personal feud. I have no idea what that movie was called though, just it was from the technicolour and sound stage era which could be any time from the late 30s to the mid 60s. If anybody knows what it was then please let me know.
Those wood and obsidian weapons were called macuahuimeh (singular: macuahuitl). The conquistadors managed to destroy all but one, and that one was lost in a museum fire.
I am so tired of ‘iron poor planets’ where the colonizers weren’t eradicated by anemia.
@194/random22: The 1963 film Kings of the Sun, perhaps?
@195, Ouch. I hope the macuahuitl was thoroughly photographed and otherwise recorded.
@196. Yeah, could be. Thanks.
If a planet formed around a Population II star it wouldn’t support life like us, because it would have very little carbon or oxygen. Every nucleus heavier than helium was formed in Population II stars, then expelled into space by supernovae. Presumably (I haven’t read the story) this world was relatively iron-poor but not totally lacking in iron. Also I don’t know when it was published, quite possibly before the stellar life cycle was worked out in the first half of the Twentieth Century, and almost certainly before the author learned and fully understood it.
(Population II stars are the first generation of stars that don’t contain what astronomers call “metals”, which just means any nucleus with more than 2 protons. They were named before the life cycle was worked out.)
She’d listened to the song and been quite happy with the sentiment when she thought it was about a teenage boy stowing away to see his brother only the lack of fuel means he has to die en route. She was far less happy with it when she realised the narrator was supposed to be a girl.
This, I think, is a big part of why the story is so hated. If it’s a typical 50s SF kid – a cocky, precocious teenage boy – who does something stupid and ends up getting killed, the reaction would be very different. It would be a salutary example of what happens when you get into a situation where your privilege won’t protect you.
But it’s a girl; and you’re only allowed to have stupid boys who deserve to die.
@200/ajay: No, I don’t think so. The story is, of course, meant to be a tragedy, so having the victim be an innocent girl would’ve made it feel more poignant to those who bought into the premise. The problem with the story, as has been pointed out ad nauseam by now, is that the underlying concept of the story does not work because of logical and procedural flaws that can only be blamed on human negligence rather than the supposed “Cold Equations” of physics that the story is named for. So the problem isn’t who the victim is, the problem is that the mechanism of the victimization is unconvincingly contrived and thus fails to convey the desired point.
ajay@200: My problem with the story isn’t that it’s a girl who dies; it’s that someone stupid/foolish/naïve dies. A story where someone smart/clever/sophisticated dies by falling afoul of those cold, cold equations is more interesting and more tragic.
Otherwise, it’s no different from a Darwin Award meme.
@202/John: I’m not sure I agree. After all, it’s right there in the title — “Cold.” The point of the story is supposed to be that the universe is unsympathetic toward the people that we humans would feel sorry for. We’re supposed to find it unfair and sad that an innocent, helpless girl is condemned to death for a simple, childlike mistake. If she were someone resourceful and empowered who put up a good fight before losing, then it wouldn’t feel as unfair and sad.
It’s like the “Kick the Dog” trope. If you want to show that a villain is really cruel and ruthless, you have them kick a small, adorable puppy. If it’s a big dog that can fight back, it’s not as effective at showing how sadistic the villain is. In “The Cold Equations,” it’s the universe that’s (supposed to be) the ruthless, uncaring entity, so its victim needs to be small and helpless to sell the point.
After all, this is a story from the 1950s, a time when chivalry was still a cultural ideal and it was taken for granted that Women Should Be Protected. Nothing was more important than keeping women and girls safe (even at the cost of their freedom and independence) and nothing was more contemptible in a man than showing cruelty to a woman or contempt for her safety. Also, men at the time expected women to be childlike and naive in the ways of the world, slaves to emotion instead of reason, prone to make foolish decisions if they didn’t have men keeping them in check, protecting them from themselves as well as from external threats. So the fact that the girl’s naivete got her in trouble wouldn’t have been held against her; it would’ve been the very thing that, by the 1950s male mindset, would have made it urgent to protect her. Which was probably why a story where the male hero couldn’t save the girl but had to reluctantly sacrifice her was so startling.
@191 etc: there’s an argument that Earth is unusually iron-rich on the outside because our early history includes a newly formed planet colliding with another substantial body (Mars sized) named Theia. How do they know the name… anyway, Ear collided with Theia and of course produced Earth, and some leftover vowels which coalesced into a large but iron-poor satellite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis
But upon checking, this says that most of the iron is in Earth’s core and inaccessible to all be the most enthusiastic miners. But there may be some left over. I mean, we have some.
Perhaps another reason for a planet like Earth to be found iron-poor is that either an indigenous civilisation or visiting aliens have mined all the ore already.
@204,
“How do they know the name ..?”
good one! :)
ajay (74): Compare “The Message”, one of the weakest episodes of Firefly. “Darn it, Tracy, you wouldn’t be mortally wounded if you’d stuck to (or had faith in) the secret plan that we didn’t mention to you.”
Mike (97): Similarly one story by Poul Anderson has the evil invaders crucify a little girl in reprisal for resistance, forcing her father to watch her long dying, because to the author (as I think he said explicitly) harming a little girl was about the worst sin he could imagine.
Damien (131): I like to imagine that the benefit of depopulation is obtained instead by migration to more efficient substrates (as in the backstory of Greg Egan’s Diaspora).
Fernhunter (179): I learned a word!
Robert Carnegie (204): As a wee child I watched a documentary about Surtsey (an undersea volcano that had recently grown to make an island) and thought the same question: how do they know its name? — Many years later I understood that it was named for the Norse analogue of Vulcan.
Hmmm… I disagree. Sure it’s a bit clumsy, but I think most of the critics here miss the point. As I read the story, its main theme deals with human arrogance which has ultimately led to a mistaken notion of invulnerability. It’s another hubris tale. However, the hubris is not the problem of an individual, but rather the problem of an entire culture. Look at most story lines in Western art and you find the hero always escaping what Chinua Achebe called the “powers of event”—things like avalanches, falling pianos, etc… In a way, politely, I take this critique the same way. I teach teenagers, and although they aren’t lazy or shiftless, they do often think that the world will bend for them. Seems a bit petty folks.
It takes a level in unexamined privilege to come in at the very end of a 200+ comment discussion thread on “The Cold Equations” and without bothering to engage just dismiss us all as “you’re missing the point, the point is X” – when the point X is the conventional reading of the story and is precisely what has been raised, dissected, discussed, referenced in other stories, all through this 200+ commenrt thread.
The point of the story is “sometimes there is no way to save everyone, because physics”. The plot of the story is “sometimes there is no way to save everyone, because you didn’t try”. The story fails to effect its moral. The story has no other redeeming features, such as interesting characterisation, worldbuilding, or prose. The story is worthless.
I would very much enjoy a story that portrayed “sometimes there really is no way to save everyone, even if you try very, very hard, because physics” effectively, for a value of enjoyment that involves bawling with tears.
Summer, well said.
Arguably, “you can’t save everyone, because physics” happens in Farmer on Gamymede. The point isn’t made as sharply because the decisions aren’t a clear. (A girl dies because her health isn’t good enough to handle an unexpected emergency.)
Possibly the same point is made in Directive 51 by John Barnes and Station Eleven by Mandel– both books have people dying (more exactly, focus on a single person as a stand-in for many more) dying because because of lack of medical care after a disaster. One case is simply lack of medical care and the other is trapped in a high rise building.
They don’t make the point as clearly, either.
You can get such a story more effectively from something like triage after a mass casualty event. This story seems to have been interpreted more as “look what happens to stupid [or maybe stoopid] girls in space” than “look what happens when arrogant jackasses write and execute procedures”
(edit: correct spelling; no substantive change)
I actually don’t think the procedures were written by arrogant jackasses. They were written by nitwits who would rather have drama (criminal stowaway gets shot!) than effectiveness (mission is saved because criminal stowaway doesn’t have a chance to hide).
I’m reading Mehdelsohn’s The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein, and among many other things, she points out that Heinlein is firmly on the side of a right to own guns, but he portrays very little use of handguns– instead negotiation works better.
It’s worse than that, jcarnall. It seems that many of the critics here suffer from the same western affliction that Achebe identified. Granted, the story is clumsy and dated. However, I doubt the average 1954 American had any idea what the rigors of space travel were all about, so narrative clumsiness didn’t matter. None-the-less, I have no wish to fight, or invade. My apologies, I didn’t realize it was a private party.
I tried to point Lee Gold to this page, because the story came up in her conversation. She said,“Unfortunately my antivirus doesn’t like that URL.”
Did tor.com neglect to wash its hands before supper?
Hate this story.
Any man worthy of being a pilot would sacrifice himself before sending a young woman – especially his own sister – to her death to satisfy corporate regulations.
(I doubt the pilot’s 16 year old sister weighed much more than he did so the ship would land with a surplus of fuel.)
So, the girl is saved, corporate records a little more profit, and the pilot gets a niece or nephew named after him, maybe even a statue in a park somewhere.
Just a meticulously contrived way to justify killing a woman
And, no, this isn’t about feminism. It’s about good, old-fashioned chivalry.
Horrible story, horrible message.
I totally got the point and I hated it. I guess I’m like Kirk, I don’t believe in the no win scenario
@215/Michael: The stowaway was not the pilot’s sister, but a stranger. Her brother was a colonist at the ship’s destination, which was why she stowed away to visit him.
And the point of the story (whether you like the story or not) was the the girl could not land the ship and would die anyway, just a few days later, if not spaced.
@207,
I think most people here got the point; but dismissed the world-building that went into it. I currently teach teen-agers (I changed careers in my 50s), but before that I worked in aerospace engineering and software development.
If these spacecraft were so mass-critical that the only way to deal with a stowaway was death, the even the most minimal checklist would include having the pilot look in the goddamned closet. It would also include “measure the mass of the ship before it’s irreversibly committed to its mission.”
Godwin left too many holes in this story’s world building.
> Why have a closet in a vehicle that’s supposed to be so mass critical?
> If you have a closet, why doesn’t the pilot look in it? Pilots, before the story was written, were expected to do pre-flight checks to make sure there were no obvious problems, like people leaving control locks in place. This is such an obvious check that it’s completely incomprehensible as to why it wasn’t done.
> Why measure the mass after the craft was irrevocably committed?
> What procedures were in place to prevent stowaways from getting in? Wasn’t there anything resembling a security guard?
Regardless of the author’s intent, because of the implicit flaws in the way the story’s setting means that it cannot show the moral of an uncaring universe. The moral it shows is of an incompetent, uncaring human-designed system, not that of a cold, uncaring universe.
A better title would have been The Homicidal System.
@219, swampyankee:
Besides your excellent points:
Why send an absolutely mission-critical ship without backup fuel? Suppose the ship had to maneuver? For whatever unforeseen circumstance?
Are these guys so cheap they won’t fill the tank and tear out the closet and install obvious safety procedures? Before sending someone to save a planetary population?
I don’t want them running a roller coaster.
@@@@@ 5, tree and leaf:
The ‘philosophical conundrum’ is essentially the trolley problem, and it strikes me that Philippa Foot, in coming up with it, came up with a considerably better and more plausible story, even as presented in the dry form of a textbook.
The Trolley Problem is just as stupid as The Cold Equations.
You are Joe Blow, walking from here to there. Using an overpass above a trolly yard. You know as much about train-tracks and switches as most people—nothing. You see the trolley-problem playing out below you. Except—do you?
You see the tracks. You see the trolley. You see some people on one side, one person on the other. You see the switch. Since you are not a rail-engineer, you don’t understand what a switch is and how it works. You must also understand that—most improbably—the lever by your hand controls that particular switch. That if you move the lever it will change the direction of the trolley. Only when you figure that out can you grasp that a moral problem exists. You have seconds to sort all this stuff out.
Suppose you do grasp all of that. Are you right? Does that lever do what you guess it does? Suppose you move the lever and you make things worse. How? You don’t know. That’s the point. You can’t be sure. You have to:
Assume something you do can make a difference: Be certain the difference you make, makes a desirable change: All of this about a system strange to you: All of this in seconds.
Only when you figure all all these details out can you consider the moral implications of moving that lever. The trolley problem posits all the above as true. And goes straight to the moral question. Which is what some shrink thinks he is testing. By giving the test to college kids who don’t know one end of an idiot stick from the other.
I’ve thought The Cold Equations an absurd story, based on absurd premises, since I first read it.
But it’s no more absurd than The Trolley Problem. Which isn’t testing the moral question it thinks it is testing.
Didn’t someone write a “response” to this story, a re-write assuming an advanced medical emergency ship would have the state of the art medical equipment necessary for the pilot to successfully amputate the excess weight off of himself and the passenger, to bring the load calculations back into a successful parameter?
I admit, as a science fiction writer and fan, that I have no trouble believing the premise. Is the premise contrived? To an extent but we live in a society where plenty of little girls, adult men, adult women, and little boys are all killed because something costs less.
This book makes perfect sense in a future more like Weyland-Yutani than United Federation of Planets.
#222: Yes, I read that story. I think it was called “The Cool Equations”. And the pilot was a woman.
It occurs to me that the pilot and the girl in the original story are onstage, but the miners(?) who need the vaccine(?) are offstage. Would the weight of the story be different if they had at least one scene so the reader could see that they were numerous and suffering and going to die if they weren’t helped? Did they do “something to die for”? They presumably knew they were taking risks, but they also presumably thought they would get help.
As for the poster who thought the pilot should have killed the girl and it was lack of courage for him not to, the end of the story is a tearjerker, and the point is for the girl to have some dignity. Would it have been better in any sense for the girl to have struggled on the way out?
See also “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, in which it makes no sense to have a utopia dependent on torturing a child. The story is somewhat of a thought experiment (the frame is whether the reader can imagine a utopia without a horrible defect) but the emotional drive is about a tortured child and how people react to it. Could there have been a good way for Le Guin to pop the reader out to the thought experiment at the end of the story?
This thread needs some music: “The Flowers of Bermuda by Stan Rogers”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVUei-0WYC4
“He was Captain of the Nightingale
Twenty-one days from Clyde in coal
He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale
When he died on the North Rock Shoal
Just five short hours from Bermuda, in a fine October gale
There came a cry “Oh, there be breakers dead ahead!”
From the collier Nightingale
No sooner had the Captain brought
Her round, came a rending crash below
Hard on her beam ends, groaning, went the Nightingale
And overside her mainmast goes.
“Oh, Captain,
Are we all for drowning?” came the cry from all the crew.
“The boats be smashed! How then are we all to be saved?
They are stove in through and through!”
“Oh, are ye brave and hardy
Collier-men or are ye blind and cannot see?
The Captain’s gig still lies before ye whole and sound,
It shall carry all o’ we.”
He was Captain of the Nightingale
Twenty-one days from Clyde in coal
He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale
When he died on the North Rock Shoal
But when the crew was all assembled and the gig prepared for sea,
Twas seen there were but eighteen places to be manned
And nineteen mortal souls were we.
But cried the Captain “Now do not
Delay, nor do ye spare a thought for me.
My duty is to save ye all now, if I can.
See ye return as quick as can be.”
He was Captain of the Nightingale
Twenty-one days from Clyde in coal
He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale
When he died on the North Rock Shoal
Oh, there be flowers in Bermuda — beauty lies on every hand
And there be laughter, ease and drink for every man,
But there is no joy for me
For when we reached the wretched
Nightingale what an awful sight was plain
The Captain, drowned, was tangled in the mizzen-chains
Smiling bravely beneath the sea.
He was Captain of the Nightingale
Twenty-one days from Clyde in coal
He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale
When he died on the North Rock Shoal”
No one’s fault, it’s just that the ocean is like that sometimes.
@223/C.T. Phipps: “This book makes perfect sense in a future more like Weyland-Yutani than United Federation of Planets.”
But again, the problem is that the story doesn’t claim it was an avoidable mistake resulting from human negligence. The conceit of the story is that the tragedy was impossible to avoid due to the fundamental laws of physics. That’s the whole point of the title, that the girl is doomed by pure math and even the most well-intentioned people couldn’t do anything to save her. But that premise fails because it’s so obvious that the problem is easily avoidable and happens for purely arbitrary human reasons. It’s blaming physics for human negligence, and that’s passing the buck.
The difference from “Omelas,” which @224/Nancy mentions, is that LeGuin’s story was explicitly about human cruelty. It was overtly an indictment of human willingness to ignore others’ suffering in the name of the greater good. “The Cold Equations” pretends that humans are blameless for the problem, yet relies on human negligence to set up the crisis in the first place. So it’s not saying what it pretends it’s saying.