To me, “The Cold Equations” is best understood as a response to the common SF theme of cleverness, technical know-how, and big brass balls being sufficient to overcome any obstacle. In Barton’s case, by the time he discovered Marian there was simply nothing he could do, because he wasn’t living in the WhoVerse or even the TrekVerse. That’s not to say there was nothing that could have been done beforehand; clearly a better pre-flight check was all that was required, and I suspect Barton, on subsequent missions, insisted on that elementary change. But needed systemic changes don’t alter Barton’s situation in the moment.
How is that different from every episode of, say, Star Trek: The Next Generation in which only Data’s uniqueness allowed the crew to survive the subspace menace of the week?
Godwin’s story isn’t about cleverness, it’s about emotion. That, and the fact that there are, in fact, unwinnable scenarios. We live in a universe which at a minimum is indifferent to our suffering and which often gives the illusion of being hostile to our interests; we never have complete information, and over time the numbers always get us. Barton’s inability to save Marian is no different than, say, the nameless Romulan Commander in “Balance of Terror” doing his damnedest to get home, but ultimately being overwhelmed by Kirk’s Enterprise.
Yeah, and probably the first words out of the pilot’s mouth were on the order of, “Well, you sure owe me, pal. Let’s talk about payoff, shall we?”
But to get back to the OP, I remember reading a quote that, IIRC, went something like this: “Every single item on a flight checklist is there because someone died because it wasn’t there before.” :eek: An alternate title for this story might be something like “Checklist Revision”, because I bet “Check for stoways” will be on the list in the future.
The whole point of the story was Godwin set up an unwinnable situation and then was willing to follow through on it - the characters lost. It’s a cliche of SF and many other genres where you regularly see characters beating “impossible” odds. Godwin was willing to avert the cliche.
On the other hand, science fiction stories are notorious for going to impressive lengths to defined how and why things work, especially for much more trivial things (notorious parody here).
The character is a pilot, not the engineer who designed the craft, and this isn’t the Star Trek universe where absolutely everyone is an ubermensch who could build a spacecraft out of spare parts if they needed to. Having him go on about details of the situation that aren’t strictly relevant to his job of getting the EDS to its target would be out of character. Either he doesn’t know those details, or they are not work talking about. I like to imagine that there is a girl’s weight in jettison-able equipment on the EDS that a more knowledgeable man could have identified, but the pilot isn’t smart enough to be fucking with it, and contacting someone who knows better would take too long.
It’s a very good sci-fi author who can convey a consistent universe without resorting to having characters expodump. This story may not be the best piece of work, but at least the author avoids that.
I like to imagine that the ship that launches this thing is semi-military and not used to having civilian passengers, and all its procedures are set up imagining everyone has military discipline – i.e. everyone has somewhere to be at all times, and all equipment is constantly accounted for. The idea that there might be people on board with nothing better to do than wander around and get into things was not accounted for.
My point is that the mere existence of no-win situations is boring: There are plenty of trivial examples like that of the guy who’s just jumped off a building. Their mere existence does not mean that the poor schmuck in the situation is a mere slave to the cold laws of physics, because that schmuck is only in the situation because of a prior decision. Or, to put it another way, there is a solution to the no-win situation: The solution for the jumper was to not jump, and the solution for the pilot was to inspect the ship beforehand. We’re just jumping into the story at a point past where the protagonist has opted against the solution.
Having seen Les Miz on stage umpty-jillion times and at the movies once, I obviously disagree with you about no-win situations being boring.
I guess it depends on what you’re looking for in a story. I love a clever hero triumphing over impossible odds as much as anyone, hence my newly-formed adoration of Doctor Who and my long-term love of most Trek incarnations. But what really interests me are the characters. Too, TCE works mostly in a context of the larger science-fiction tradition. It’d be a failure without that tradition.
ETA: Also, there ISN’T always a solution to the no-win situation. Every story in which the antagonist is another person rather than nature, and in which the protagonist and antagonist have incompatible goals, involves one of them losing. When the stories well-written, it involves one of them losing after fighting really, really hard and seeming to be winning at one point.
A no-win situation is not boring if the factors that lead up to it are understandable. It’s a staple of some of the oldest dramas, the greek tragedies. We see a character make a choice and from that moment they are doomed. The tension is not lost because we understand their actions and we can see ourselves in the same position. The same is not true of The Cold Equations. The story itself even makes reference to prescribed protocols for handling stowaways. Checklist Revision would be a terrible name for it because it goes out of its way to say that there will be no such editing. For the plot to make sense, you have to expect humans across the board to be fundamentally nonhuman.
It’s not that he wrote an unwinnable situation and was willing to go through with it. He wrote a bad unwinnable situation and went through it anyway.
No, their mere existence is boring. A no-win situation can certainly be interesting; it just has to do more than merely exist. Victor Hugo pulled this off magnificently; Tom Godwin less so.
I get that the stowaway’s ejection is supposed to be some kind of situational-irony type surprise, but it’s hardly impressive to the modern reader. The “b-b-but how can we kill it? it has a VAGINE” thing was impressive, but not in a good way. And throughout the story, one cannot help wondering why nobody thought to post a guard to deter stowaways or maybe lock the door? Also why would anybody even want to stowaway on a spaceship if it meant everyone on it would die? The whole setup is unbelievably, catastrophically poorly planned and yet the characters act as if the stowaway’s completely preventable murder is the fault of natural universal law instead of the result of the captain and crew of the vessel all being pathologically incompetent buffoons.
It actually kind of makes as a cynical feminist allegory, but I don’t think the author was that clever.
I think that we could make the story more plausible this way. The ship has an ordinary range of X. A flight of X would have plenty of safety margins. Now an emergency has developed and the ship has to fly a distance of X + Y. The engineers calculate an X + Y flight can be done if and only if we use every bit of safety margin, strip the ship of every thing we do not need. Now a stowaway becomes more of a problem.
The story was implausible long before the girl stowed away. They were in a starship. FTL travel is impossible so the whole story is implausible.
But SF doesn’t work like that. Authors are allowed to establish their own rules as long as they state what the rules are and stick to them. You can say that things like starships or time travel or telepathy are possible as long as you say so outright and follow through on what you’e established as the reality of the setting. And you don’t have to waste a lot time arguing that your premise is plausible - you’re allowed to just say “People can travel back in time. Now let’s go shoot some dinosaurs.”
And that’s exactly what Godwin did. He said that the ship only had enough fuel for one person. So now deal with that reality.
You’re not getting it. It’s not that the parameter itself is implausible. The human attitudes are implausible and that’s the factor that makes it relevant.
What attitudes? They’re in a spaceship and it only has so much fuel. That’s the situation.
If it makes you feel better pretend the reason the spaceship only has that much fuel is because there was a leak or the fuel tank was contaminated by cosmic rays or the fuel was stolen by space pirates. None of that is important. The story isn’t about why the spaceship doesn’t have enough fuel. It’s about what do you do when you’re in a spaceship that doesn’t have enough fuel.
Maybe Mr. Godwin would have been better off writing about a magic-powered dirigible and how we all are in the end nothing but puppets to the eldritch flow. But he didn’t. He wrote a science fiction story that’s supposed to make us think about how we’re ultimately at the mercy of cold physics but actually all it makes us think is “That entire story was just plain dumb.”
To answer the OP:
No
Godwin imagined a situation where the margin of error was precariously small. You can say it’s bad engineering, but it might have been bad management – the company might have decided that the cost wasn’t worth it for so unlikely an event. The point of the story is that physical reality trumps human feelings, morality, and compassion. The young woman is doomed by her actions and the workings of physics. She’d thought she’d get away with it because it was a minor transgression, but the laws of physics effectively made it a death sentence. The idea has been used countless times in other fiction (for instance, in Jsames Cameron’s The Abyss), and the details may differ, making the scenario more or less likely. You’d be a fool to argue that this kind of thing can’t happen in the Real World – people certainly have died because of poor engineering and bad management cost-cutting.
Nor do i think that “all this story does is make you think of the bad engineering”. One of the criticisms of this story isn’t that it’s bad, but that Godwin has written a story that had a;lready been done many times before. The Wikipedia page includes an entire section on this:
One source left out of that is Robert Cromie’s 19890 novel A Plunge Into Space, in which the trsavelers use an anti-gravity sphere (long before Wells did so) to travel intospace, and a young female stowaway has to be jettisoned to save the lives of the others on board. I observe thyat this story was written a cquarter of a century before Tom Godwin was even born (!)
Clearly the engineering in A Plunge Into Space seems to be ceven worse than in Godwin. But that’s clearly not the point. Nor is it the point in the other uses of the trope cited above, and it obviously didn’t make all of their readers think “Gee, what awful engineering!” The concept of humanity’s fatwe being guided by cruel working of physical laws rather than a compassionate universe is the point, and it’s what people have generally seen in the story. Until now, apparently.
I’m with you - no, it didn’t put me off. I was a teenager when I first read it and didn’t even think about the plot holes. The thinking behind the story was clear - space is unforgiving of ignorance and sometimes there is no good solution - and it was all the more effective for all the other SF stories I had read where our hero does his thing and saves the day.
Ok, looking at it now there are lots of plot-holes that the author could have closed - in engineering and/or procedures - but it’s a short story. The situation has to be sketched, not described in minute detail. More padding to close the loop holes just slows down the narrative leading to the inescapable logic of the cold equations.
Except clearly the existence of this thread shows that a lot of people DID have the reaction that we’re discussing (which is certainly the reaction I had) that the setup, and the elements of the setup which have to do with human psychology and procedure, is so preposterous that we can’t overlook it and thus don’t really react to the story on the level it wants. Ergo the story, which is failing to reach a bunch of people it otherwise could reach, is badly written, and in a way that ought to be fairly easily fixable.
But as the story is written, “physics” is not the reason the stowaway has to die. It’s not even one of the top five reasons. It has nothing to do with math, engineering, or the sterile indifference of God. The conceit hinges on the fact that everyone in charge of vessel operations is apparently debilitatingly, tragically mentally retarded. This is not a minor continuity error to be waved away. It completely subverts the ostensible “moral” of the story. I honestly thought the thing was some kind of joke when I first read it.
I am sure many writers have done well with the basic premise of the story. This is not at all surprising. I know third graders who could have done a better job.
But I guess readers’ expectations were different back then or something.
For instance, if there were a freak once in a century “space storm” that already slowed down the craft to close to its built in tolerances. Then the pilot looks around and spaces everything that’s not tied down, and some things that are, in order to save weight, but the vessel is still probably not going to make it. Then he looks in the final closet and sees something else that might make the difference.
