Thematically, it may very well be. But most people simply don’t think of it as a work of science fiction.
Um, the story as written sets this up nicely. They are in a disposable emergency capsule for a rescue mission, and they calculate the fuel for the smallest safety margin. That’s not where the problem with the story lies.
I disagree. A key element of the story is that the girl made a deliberate choice to disregard an instruction, and the consequences are determined by the needs of physics (for the ship to land safely). The point is that she made a decision and her ignorance had huge consequences for her that she didn’t understand. By making the problem that there was a fuel leak or an accident on the thrusters or anything else takes away the point - that the girl is guilty. Then it’s just “shit happens”, not “ignorance can get you killed”.
Yes, the concept of the story is good. It’s the execution that has problems.
I think it does change the moral of the story. The story isn’t “shit happens, now what do you do?” The story is “ignorance can get you killed.” The girl is guilty for breaking the rules, but she didn’t know why the rules were what they were, and her society has left her breathtakingly unprepared by thinking the only conceivable penalty for breaking rules is a fine.
If the girl is supposed to be there but someone else made a mistake in a hurry, then that is a different story, a story about the brave sacrifice of a young girl when placed in a tragic circumstance, but not a story about a girl making a bad choice and being stuck with the consequences.
I’ve seen a better version of the “you made a bad choice and can’t escape the consequences”, though it didn’t involve spaceships. It’s in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Komarr.
Miles is on a planet with colonists where the atmosphere is toxic, they need breathing masks when outside. He’s with a man who used his mask and forgot to service it like he’s supposed to - clean and recharge. So Miles and the man are captured by bad guys, the bad guys tie up Miles and the man, give them their gas masks, and leave. The bad guys don’t wish to kill, they make an anonymous call to the authorities to go rescue Miles and the man, but it will take time for the authorities to get there. But the man’s mask wasn’t recharged, and so runs out of air, and he ends up dying, and Miles can’t do anything to save him because they’re both tied up and unable to reach each other. The man would have been fine if he had followed protocol and serviced his mask, or if any of the bad guys had considered that the man wouldn’t have serviced his mask. But it was such a natural thing to the locals where the man was a transplant.
That story works fine.
Dude. Seriously? They didn’t even lock the door. This spaceship was easier to get into than a restroom at Starbucks.
You need to have a pretty damn good imagination to figure out how that makes any sense.
Dude
Who needs locked doors in the future? Heck, they don’t even need guns. Though God apparently needs to hitch a ride now and then so who knows.
If I go into the woods, dig a deep hole, cover it with lichen, and then go home, and then you go for a walk in the woods and fall in the hole and die… is it your fault because you didn’t know there was a hole there? Is it gravity’s fault, maybe?
Hell, no. That’s not gravity, it’s manslaughter.
what
Not necessarily. Apollo 13 had the good fortune to have a second complete and functional spacecraft tagging along with the damaged one. While I’d hope that future spacecraft have better redundancy and repair capability, they aren’t likely to be completely ‘dual’ systems for reasons of economy.
This part is IMO the BIG thing…that seems to be less and less obvious as life gets better and beter.
One bad decision can still royally fuck up your life. These days you have to be pretty damn stupid, or a sociopath. Or on rare occasion just damn unlucky.
But it can happen.
Did you know that commercial aircraft–big ones, like 747’s–don’t even have “ignition” keys? That if you can sneak past the right people (and know how to fly one), you can essentially hop in one and take off? And that this is actually done semi-frequently by specialized airplane repo men?
Most stuff is way less secure than most people believe. I could easily see the girl in the story sneaking into a “secured” area on the mothership via tailgaiting, social engineering, etc., and that after that it was trivial to simply walk onto the ship.
But only if everyone else on the planet is either profoundly mentally retarded or murderously, eyeball-eatingly insane?
Funny you mention “people,” because the vessel in the story didn’t have a door guard posted either. No social engineering required.
Dude.
In hindsight I could say that about most disasters. Which usually involve hundreds if not thousands of people.
Who consigned it there? The only people I’ve met who dismiss it out of hand tend to dismiss fiction in general. The Cold Equations is a stupid story, but that’s no reason to toss out Octavia Butler, Gene Wolfe, Philip K Dick, William Gibson, and a host of other authors working within that field.
The vessel didn’t. But an entirely plausible setup on the mothership (which, IIRC, the story doesn’t exclude) is that the emergency vessels are all accessible from a “secured” area on the ship; ostensibly only accessible to pilots, maintenance crew, etc. The entry points to the secure area would have some kind of access control (guards, card readers, etc.), but these are often easy to bypass through social engineering. Heck, maybe she was on a guided tour of the area and “wandered off”.
I work for a company with ostensibly hi-tech security–cameras, access badges, security personnel, RFID trackers, etc.–but in the end it’s almost trivial for someone off the street to get inside. And once inside you can travel almost at will (some internal labs have additional security, but this is even more trivial to bypass). As proven by the fact that we’ve had multiple breaches of security where people did just that. They tend to get caught–but only after the fact.
OK, so put that in the story, then. Or maybe put clear warnings on the doors, but make the stowaway a little kid who can’t read yet who wandered away from Mom. Show us that the people in the story have made at least some attempt at what they’re doing.
Yes, it’s essential for the story to work that the stowaway did something wrong. But by the same token, it’s also essential to the story that the pilot and the rest of the crew wasn’t wrong, or at least was less wrong than the stowaway. With the way the story goes now, the girl didn’t die because she did something stupid-- She died because a bunch of other people did stupid things. And frankly, that’s not a very interesting story.
It’s a classic because we can all see the story he was trying to write, and we can tell that that’s a good story. It’s just not the story he actually did write.
There’s a Dr. Phil joke in here somewhere…
No argument there. But some posters seem to be arguing that the whole setup was implausible from the start, whereas I think it could be cleaned up with just a few sentences of explanation–and that with just a tiny bit of suspension of disbelief (which is necessary for just about any story, sci-fi or not), even that is unnecessary.
And the fact that it could have been cleaned up so much so easily had the author given even the smallest fraction of a shit makes the impossible plotting seem, like the poor security on the ship, almost maliciously deliberate.
I don’t disagree, but I also don’t remember being assigned Philip K. Dick books in high school. The greats of the genre are credited very little as authors of “important literature.”
No, the girl is not guilty. The spaceship company is criminally guilty. Either they are super incompetent, or it’s a trap set up to lure in unsuspecting visitors.