well, that’s on high school.
Again, without getting into “No True Scotsman” what is “important literature”?
Damned if I can tell.
Does your company:
(a) share a border and many facilities with a junior high school, so there are frequently kids right outside the secure area
(b) keep something inside the security area that kids would really really like, such as ponies, and everyone knows about it
(c) but it turns out that these ponies are venomous and deadly
(d) but you don’t bother publicizing (c) very well
If so, then maybe you would take security a bit more seriously.
When did you go to high school? Dick recently got a Library of America volume. And the high school English collections my kids had had lots of sf in them.
BTW, if you think things do happen in real life because of people doing insane and irrational things, I advise you to read the history of the financial crisis. “Think that housing prices would never go down? What moron would do that?” Only most of the finance industry.
And, another BTW, this story was written before knives had to have warning labels saying they were sharp. I can imagine that in a space environment they didn’t have a lot of spare people to guard every one of the zillion dangerous areas, and they also figured most people were smart enough not to do dangerous stuff.
The character in the story isn’t a junior high schooler–she’s at least 16, and probably around 20.
There are a million things in this world that could easily kill a child and are protected by somewhere between a cyclone fence and nothing. DrDeth’s reference to the “attractive nuisance doctrine” is ridiculous for all kinds of reasons, but perhaps the most important is that it only requires a reasonable effort.
We have all kinds of interesting things where I work, but one thing that comes to mind is the liquid nitrogen storage. Obviously, this could severely injure or kill someone. It’s protected–by a pretty tall fence. So, effectively no protection at all to anyone willing to go through a little effort. When I was a kid, liquid nitrogen was about a hundred times more interesting than ponies (who am I kidding–that’s still true today), and that’s exactly the kind of thing I might sneak into if I were motivated enough.
We also don’t know that there weren’t warnings. We live in a world today where warnings are often well past the point of “boy who cried wolf”–they’re plastered on all kinds of perfectly safe things (the CA Prop 65 carcinogen warnings come to mind). So we ignore them. The story’s character may well have ignored these warnings, thinking that they are just scare tactics or useless nagging.
But it doesn’t sound like they even told people why stowing away would be dangerous! The story is a laughable failure on every level imaginable.
The fundamental problem with the story isn’t even the implausibility of the scenario. It’s the fact that in the scenario as stated, the moral culpability (and the civil liability, come to that) for this ridiculous security misstep falls squarely on the crew.
A Locked door being Unreasonable? Maybe even a guard? Why no pre-flight check?
Remember, each ship carried a blaster for exactly this reason- stowaways which must be blasted and jettisoned into space.
There is a warning- a “UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL KEEP OUT!” sign. Nothing else.
We do know what the signage was. She saw and went past a sign that said “authorized personnel only”. That’s a sign that you can find all over the place, and the vast majority of places with such a sign, it doesn’t indicate any hazard at all. Most places, if you ignore such a sign, you really will just get escorted back out, or a small fine at worst, if you even receive any punishment at all. The sign that should have been up would have been something like
! DANGER !
Lethal hazard beyond this point
Weight-critical area
[sub]All materials beyond this point must
be weighed to within a precision of
5 grams, and weights reported to
quartermaster on duty. Unauthorized
material or persons will be ejected to
space, and anyone leaving unauthorized
material will be subject to a minimum
fine of $10,000 or a minimum prison
term of 5 years.[/sub]
Let’s not forget Mary Shelly, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. One of the bestselling modern authors, Stephen King, has written a lot of science fiction. The Running Man, Tommyknockers, Under the Dome, and many of his short stories are all science fiction.
I don’t think his publisher would agree with you. And anyway, Stephen King is not considered “great literature” by literary illuminati.
Again, what is “great literature as defined by literary illuminati” Who are they? When did they make this definition?
Really, after a bit, when someone asks you repeatedly to back up your assumptions, you need to either put up or shut up.
Ironically, the blaster weighs like 150 lbs.
I suspect King’s publisher would acknowledge that there’s no objective method for putting a book in one genre or the other and would agree with me that you could place some of his work in the science fiction genre quite easily. Put some of King’s work in the science fiction area and you limit his audience in a way that putting him in adult fiction does not.
So please, if you contend that many of King’s books I’ve mentioned is not science fiction then please come up with a good argument for why they aren’t. Because “his publishers wouldn’t agree with you” isn’t a good argument.
No one said there weren’t security personnel about–just that they weren’t effective. She specifically says “I just sort of walked in when no one was looking my way.” That turns out to be an effective way of bypassing security at any number of real-world locations.
That the pre-flight check should have caught it is a more compelling argument–but as the story described, this is an event that happens perhaps once in a pilot’s lifetime. People make mistakes over that kind of timeframe, and often it’s only luck that they live to tell about it. I’d bet that any given pilot screws up a fuel or weight & balance calculation any number of times in their life. It’s rare that it causes any sort of problem, but occasionally it causes a disaster. Complacency breeds carelessness.
Now you’re starting to get it.
I always liked how James Cameron captured this detail in his film:
WARNING
R.M.S. Titanic is a modern high-speed luxury cruise ship. While White Star Line has taken every reasonible measure to ensure
unmatched safety and comfort for her passengers, it should be noted that Titanic is not literally “unsinkable”, and this term should
be regarded as no more than a marketing device. Like any seagoing vessel, Titanic may be subjected to unexpected forces that
exceed her design strength, creating a state of less than optimal bouyancy.
Passengers should also note that for your comfort and convenience, White Star Line does not provide lifeboats to accomodate the
entire ships complement. Should the ship encounter a situation of reduced floatability, passengers are encouraged to make their
own arrangements for returning to shore.
Sure, but the author of the story is asking the reader to assign blame to the stowaway, not the careless, complacent crew.
That’s why it blows.
And when the Titanic sank and a bunch of passengers drowned, did anybody blame the passengers?
Certainly granted that this is all my speculation, but there is very little described about the organizational structure of the mothership at all. If it worked like the Enterprise where everyone is hyper-competent an there is a nearly sapient computer tracking everyone, then it *would *be strange that the girl got onto the EDS.
But, there are a lot of organizations that are a lot less competent than Starfleet, and frankly it is more realistic for them to be that way. The story isn’t “we’re spacing cute girls left and right – there goes the tenth one this week”, it’s “on one very bad day some security guard was a bit inattentive and a pre-flight check was rushed and this horrible thing happened”.