Hey, I saved both characters without ruining the premise, and the pilot even shared the final responsibility (he did fail to perform a proper pre-flight check, after all). What more do you want?
Bro…do you even lift?
Altho he’s being a bit obstreperous , I have always thought the same about this story. It’s not a good story*, it’s not by a good author- he was a hack who wrote a lot, but never won any awards or got any recognition apart from this tale. And, the story was likely entirely Campbell’s idea. He loved to rouse the readership up. Campbell succeeded, the story still remains controversial. But it also remains bad.
- trite plot, cardboard characters and as has been show, giant plotholes.
True. It’s not a great story. But it’s not a particularly bad one. I just feel the arguing over merits of the hypothetical technologies or operating procedures is not a reflection of the quality of the storytelling. It’s like people a hundred years from now saying the film Alien sucked because of our 1970s ideas on extra-terrestrial quarantine procedures.
Fact of the matter is that people do act in stupid or careless ways in real life. Engineers do come up with inefficient or dangerous designs. In the case of this story, how the girl ended up on the ship is of little importance.
No, it’s not like that at all. Door locks, door guards, adequate warning signs, public service announcements and pre-flight checks were all in use well prior to the time the story was written.
If it’s ruined the story for so many people through the years, perhaps it is more important than you think.
See, this is where I disagree. It’s important to the story that the girl has some culpability for putting herself in the situation. If she’s completely innocent of wrongdoing and her death is a totally unforeseeable accident, then it’s a different story. Also, if her death was preventable by normal standards of care by the crew that they failed to provide, then it’s a different story.
Yeah, my Dad did pre-flight checks on Goonie Birds pre WWII, and even back then, no pilot would take off without one. I imagine Wilbur and Orville did one.
Incidentally, if weight is such a limit- why carry a blaster? Why have a airlock at all? Those things add tonnes. If it’s a special shuttle that goes Station to planet and back, why does it need a airlock- unless it’s there to jettison stowaways.
I’ll agree and disagree. Cardboard characters? Absolutely. But I’d say that this advances the story, since all we need to know about her is that she is cute and culpable yet innocent, and all we have to know about him is that he is competent and trying to do his best. Trite plot? The plot is exactly the puzzle, as was so often the case in ASF at the time. Plotholes? Maybe, but the point is what happens when the dilemma is underway, not how it got there. Swapping any other pre-flight circumstances with the ones given that lead to the story wouldn’t change anything important.
Imagine how badly a novel length version of this story would suck. You could have her back story, you could have his back story, you could describe shipboard life, and you could set up her sneaking on better. It would be awful.
The novel-length Flowers for Algernon was really a lot worse than the short story, as an example of this being done, and in that case knowing Charley better had some benefit.
I disagree - the change you made does ruin the premise. Your version, both the girl and the pilot seem to have lived, albeit in desperate need of emergency medical care and, depending upon the future medical technology/transplant ability, a greatly impacted future. Essentially, you made a “human cunning triumphs over all” story, exactly what this story was trying to counter.
Lemur866, good rundown.
Ironic, because in Alien they violate the quarantine procedure.
They do say the blaster is there specifically to use on stowaways, a once in a lifetime occurrence for pilots. So they are aware of the possibility and have a policy and have supplied equipment to deal with stowaways, but they have not implemented any basic, simple controls to prevent the problem from occurring.
That’s not an “engineering” problem, that’s a management one. Really, there isn’t a lot of “bad engineering” in the story. I mean, the description of the vehicle having hatches and doors and such is inconsistent with the vehicle being described as an emergency use vehicle that is “small and collapsible”. The fuel margins are excessively thin, so either the author isn’t taking into consideration the healthy approach to “expect the unexpected” that an engineer would, or else their engines are sufficiently fuel efficient that those kinds of realistic concerns (such as there being a boulder field in the designated landing zone, requiring an extra boost at the end to traverse an extra 100 yards, kinda like Apollo 11) would still not add up to the 100 lbs of the teenage girl.
Most of the flaws are social philosophy, management and oversight, and a bit of sexism.
SF is full of puzzle stories - stories where the only important thing is beating the hero to the solution to the puzzle. In engineering sf it is something like this, in F&SF it might be a deal with the devil story.
I’d say a lot of them are just as weak in setting up the puzzle as this one is, and if you look hard at it the puzzle situation would never happen. But TCE is different because the hero doesn’t come up with the solution. When he (or she) does no one cares about the premise.
BTW Dr. Strangelove’s solution doesn’t mention that the ship crashes, because being in screaming pain from amputating 3 limbs is not conducive to concentrating on a difficult landing.
SF does indeed boast a long tradition of puzzle stories.
And like any other kind of story, some of them are good and some of them ain’t. The existence of other lousy ones doesn’t make this one any better. If you know of any worse, though, feel free to point one out, because it would be quite an impressive achievement. 
To me, this story is a first cousin to Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (although London’s story is clearly the better-written of the two). The moral of “The Cold Equations” is that ignorance cal kill, while the point of “to Build a Fire” is that overconfidence can kill. Both are messages that many people have trouble accepting (as anyone who’s seen some of the tourist behavior at various National Parks can attest to).
Didn’t anyone stop and think “If the pilot only has enough fuel to land, how is he suposed to get back?” In the story it didn’t sound like Group One would have any fuel lying around to use to refuel the ship. So how was he supposed to get back? They should have included enough fuel for him to return, then the girl wouldn’t have had to die.
The whole story is a paean to bad engineering.
Also bad security. What kind of spaceport, preparing an emergency craft carrying medicine to a plague planet, can’t bother to have someone stand sentry at the docking port to keep stowaways from sneaking aboard?
Same level of security that fails to prevent people from stowing away in wheelwells, I guess.
The story explicitly addresses that question. The pilot will have to stay with the colony until the next FTL cruiser makes a stop, which will be several months.
When’s the last time someone stowed away in a wheelwell of a U.S. military medical supplies flight?
I’m not sure where you get the impression that it’s a military ship in the story. The Stardust is a civilian colonization and resupply ship.
At any rate, I’m sure you recall the guy that sneaked into a National Guard armory and stole a tank. So it’s not like military security is invincible either.
And for what it’s worth, the EDS is not a large military ship, but a nearly disposable small craft. The closest modern-day analogy would be the light aircraft (Cessnas and such) that deliver supplies to remote villages. While I’m not aware of any cases of stowaways, they do crash all the time from pilot screwups in their weight and balance calculations.
Well, yeah, the guy did steal a tank. But can you imagine someone stowing away in a tank, and the crew not knowing it?
The courier vessel in the story is tiny, just big enough for the pilot and the medicine. Where does the stowaway hide?
As a matter of fact…to reduce space and weight…the ship shouldn’t have an airlock at all, just a door. So it shouldn’t have been possible to eject the stowaway.
There’s no way around it: it’s a stupid story.
I don’t know that it’s ever happened, but it’s not at all unimaginable that someone could stow away in the cargo area of a Cessna 172. If the plane was already loaded near its limit, it could easily crash.
It would require some degree of incompetence on the part of the pilot, but it’s not like pilots have never missed a step or two in their preflights.