It was a story. I’ll give you that one. Also, I don’t remember any gross spelling errors or anything so hey, grade A, am I right?
Also, I would have liked the story a lot better had it been entitled “Space: No Bitches Allowed.”
Perhaps this is a failed attempt at a joke, on the grounds that technobabble would be better, but I will take it seriously.
A far better, and extremely minimal solution, would simply be to say that it was a last-minute emergency, the main ship’s work crew had to fix up whatever they had on the spot, and the passenger IS supposed to be there but her weight was left off their checklist. The entire prep is being done in under an hour, and people simply make a mistake. The pilot knows he’s pushing the shuttle to its absolute maximum, and if he tries to make planetfall with even a +/- 1% weight variance, he and the entire colony is screwed.
Suddenly, there’s a reasonable human error - and it doesn’t crowd the rest of the story or the intended moral. The ship’s engineer can get on the comm and tell them urgently what’s wrong. When the pair realize what’s going on, they’re frantically trying to pick something out they can jettison or somehow cut down on. They don’t have much time, and it becomes incresingly clear the only weight left is the girl and the medicine. Heck, I might not even end it. Let them come to that cold and stark realization. Let the pilot realize the facts - the cold equations, as it were, and tell her that he won’t judge either way, but it’s her choice: an unknown number of colonists who probably need the medicine badly, or her own life. And let her choice not be written in the story.
The above would not only explain everything needed in a pretty short time - you can explain in relevant detail without hyper-accurate technical details - but would increase, not decrease, the intended moral. Because “space sucks and it doesn’t care who you are” only makes sense when humans have done everything reasonable. In the story as written, the humans were largely a bunch of lazy nimrods. This also counters leahcim’s issue with it being too technical, and enhances the stark and callous nature of, well, nature.
(A) this is your own insertion, and (B) isn’t supported by anything in the text and (C) there’s a low-class civilian maid, which seems unlikely for a military vessel.
(1) Comparing this to the worst tendencies of Star Trek isn’t exactly helping your case.
(2) I honestly… well, I don’t really like Star Trek. It’s OK, and I really enjoy the best episodes and never felt muc desire to go back and watch any, so that isn’t the best example to use. But in any case, the good episodes don’t use that kind of nonsense.
(3) The comparison you choose is ahilariously bad pick, because we weren’t distracted by the Romulan commander being a complete dumbass during the entire episode. He was presented as a compelling character, not evil and not stupid, making a intelligent and intelligable choice. neither, for matter, did the entire story require thousands of implicit morons and contrivances to make it happen.
I will also say I didn’t think too much of the characters in [The Cold Equations] as written, which I felt were written too flat for me to invest much in. I don’t say that’s a universal and you may disagree on that, but I never accepted them as people. It’s a story I do not, and cannot, suspend my disbelief in. I don’t care about them as people, so their supposed difficult choice has no weight with me.
I almost think you’re rejecting the story because for some reason you just don’t like the implications of what it says. Maybe something about how ignorance can sometimes be more dangerous than we think?
Because in my opinion, your change eliminates most of the power of the story. It’s important that it wasn’t just a mistake or just a mechanical failure: after all random accidents kill people all the time (right here right now on earth), and sometimes in a delayed enough fashion that the victim can realize what’s going on. I mean, cancer is pretty much a random accident, and it happens to people all the time, and they almost always have time for them, their loved ones and others to realize what will happen. It sucks of course, but it’s not quite the same as the story.
What’s important in the story is that the girl is NOT completely innocent. She did something she wasn’t supposed to. But the penalty she’s facing is way beyond proportionate to her transgression. That’s why it’s heart-rending: the pilot has no choice because, after all, it was her screw-up, but it’s horrible that he has to punish someone who barely knows better so severely for something they thought was relatively minor. It would be completely different to have a tale of an authorized passenger bravely sacrificing herself in the face of random accident.
Anyway, I think anyone who insists on thirty pages of backstory covering all the details of pre-flight stowaway checks in order to overcome all your imagined objections to the hypothetical situation in a short science fiction story, should either avoid reading science fiction or perhaps ask themselves why they so strenuously want to insist that this kind of situation could never, ever, ever happen unless it was somebody else’s fault.
Its worse than that. It’s SHE dies. Or he dies, she dies (unless she got piloting spacecraft for dummies with her), and a buttload of other people die too.
Thats one cold equation that cannot be quibbled with right there.
What makes it an extra cold equation is that to solve it somebody ACTIVELY has to finish the process.
She doesn’t just have to die. She has to step into the airlock. He has the press the button and so on and so on.
I could tell you are going to have a massive stroke very soon. Could you commit suicide or could somebodyelse easily kill just a bit earlier if I told you doing so would save many?
Simple logic and morality tells most people thats a no brainer.
OTOH, for most people that last tiny step is on hell of a doozy.
Well yes, they were. If the story had been written 15 years later, it would have been no big deal. SF was a lot darker then. But ASF was the magazine with a tradition of the smart engineering or science savvy hero pulling a solution out of his ass to save the day. TCE was designed to make this impossible. I can go and look up the letters published in response to the story, but I suspect that a lot of them had the same reaction - “this could never actually happen because …” - which is missing the point. BTW, the idea that in space the smallest mishap could kill you even if on Earth it would be no problem, was pretty common at this time.
Now there are lots of stories and real cases where sacrifices have to be made - not excluding the Donner party. But in this one no one was suffering, no one was in apparent danger, except through physics. And, unlike an airplane crash, there was ample time to go through all the possibilities.
This is also hardly the only ASF story with bad engineering. I remember one (with a slide rule on the cover of ASF) where the problem was to create a perfect square wave.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
In Carl Barks’s 1948 “Rocket Race to the Moon” (Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #93, June 1948 issue), Donald Duck’s nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie stow away on Donald’s rocketship. Once they land on the lunar surface, they discover that the extra weight of the young ducks has used up so much fuel that they do not have enough for the return trip, thus stranding them on the moon.
[/QUOTE]
Please tell me that the stupid little ducks got spaced in this story. 
Running out of fuel is a common source of drama - in fact I was watching a “Rocky Jones - Space Ranger” last night, from about the time of TCE, where this was used. Of course no kicking people out the airlock on that show - even people who die come back to life to not scare the kiddies.
Sure, but in all even remotely normal situations (which would certainly include spaceflight once it was commonplace enough for families to be travelling on spaceships, and wandering around moderately unsupervised) we put an enormous amount of effort into making sure that the more dire the consequences of a mistake are, the harder it is to make that mistake, and the more clearly we communicate the information about that mistake and why not to make it to everyone involved. I agree that “sorry, there is absolutely nothing clever you can come up with to get around this situation, based on the math” is on some level an interesting and Whedon-esque subversion of expectation, but the setup is just frustratingly preposterous, both for reasons of commission (we are specifically told that the shuttle to the planet is loaded with EXACTLY the required amount of fuel and not a drop more) and omission (all the utterly routine safety precautions and warnings that are not mentioned at all).
The pilot and his organization/company have been clearly running a trap to lure in the unwary so that they could off them in cold blood.
They KNOW that stowaways are fairly common, so much so that every pilot has a blaster to kill them. But they don’t bother with a armed guard, or a lock on the door, or a more explicit sign, a warning light or even a pre-flight check-in- something that has been standard since Orville told Wilbur “All Clear”.
Nope. The pilot and his org wanted hapless dudes to wander in so as to kill them. Just that they were hoping for another scruffy homeless guy or “low-life” …not a cute teen.
Cold blooded murderers.
I’m sure that when viewed in its historical context, the story had merits which are not immediately apparent today: a subversion of a particular trope common to pulp literature of the time, perhaps. But when it was presented to this modern reader as “a timeless classic of the genre” without any explanation as to why readers of the time felt it had merit, the adulation heaped upon this conceptual shambles of a story by science fiction fans really did seem bafflingly insane. If it had been among the first works of speculative fiction I’d ever read, it would have been the last. In fact, I would probably never again be able to trust an enthusiast of the genre alone with small children.
So. Would not recommend.
I think as a concept the classic today still has merit. Your space mileage and imagination may vary enormously obviously.
If that story is considered classic, then I begin to see why SF was consigned to the literary refuse pit all those years ago.
Yes, unfortunately the nature of the problem is a bit of a contrivance that requires a lot of suspension of disbelief for those of us with formal engineering backgrounds. However the story is not about the physics, it is about the human drama between two people who find themselves in an impossible no-win situation.
But such “cold equations” do occur in real life. Sometimes they can be favorably solved, like in Apollo 13. Sometimes they can’t, like with the Titanic.
You can’t always reprogram the Kobayashi Maru test.
I have no problem with the concept. I have a problem with this story precisely because it doesn’t even try to utilize this concept. “Formal engineering backgrounds?” Dude. Do you know any elementary school students? Read this story to them and ask them what they think.
Yeah. 1984, Slaughterhouse Five and Brave New World. All refuse.
… Neither of those is sci-fi…
1984 and Brave New World are able to enjoy literary success only because neither critics nor the public at large think of these works primarily as “science fiction,” preferring instead to term them as political allegory or satirical dystopians. Most works of arguable literary merit by authors known for their SF genre writings pass completely under the critical radar.
I’m not sure if we’re heading into “sci-fi” versus “science fiction” territory here. In all seriousness, how can George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four not be considered science fiction? It’s a story set in the future that examines the ramifications of technological innovations (ubiquitous surveillance) on society.
Slaughterhouse Five has a character who randomly travels through time and was kidnapped by aliens.
Brave New World is set hundreds of years in a future and features technological innovations including reliable birth control, devices that help you learn while you sleep and an economy driven by consumer consumption.
Why do you consider these books to be something besides science fiction?
I know a little something something about science, engineering. and doing dangerous shit thats dangerous if not done right and this doesn’t peg my OMG meter.
Yeah, there are points that make the safety officer in me go “shit, you could prevent that with procedure X”.
But you know what? I can say that about most disasters that happen.
Is “literary success “ one of those “No True Scotsman” terms? Because SF&F often have many places in the top bestseller lists. In fact the Amazon list has 6 of the Top 20 being F&SF.
Hell, Flowers for Algernon is another critically successful science fiction book.