By Danny Sichel: [Reprinted from the Winter 2021/2022 issue of WARP.] The latest Clarkesworld is out, and it includes “The Cold Calculations” by Aimee Ogden, most recent in a string of answer stories to Tom Godwin’s 1954 “The Cold Equations” – from “The Cold Solution” (Don Sakers, 1991), to “The Cold Crowdfunding Campaign” (Cora Buhlert, 2020), and many others with less obvious titles.
“The Cold Equations” — also known as the “throw the girl out the airlock” story — has long been criticized for multiple shortcomings, in both its themes and its content. The situation is contrived! The society is broken! The EDS is bad engineering! There are other things Barton could have thrown out! Many people have complained about this last one, incidentally. There are indeed items on board that could very well have been sacrificed (including, as in Sakers’ story, the legs of both the pilot and the stowaway, which Sakers’ pilot assumed could be re-grown); apparently Damon Knight came up with a whole list.
Lately, though, a far more common criticism has been that “The Cold Equations” isn’t the story that Tom Godwin wanted to write. When Godwin sold the story to John W. Campbell for publication in Astounding Science Fiction, Campbell sent the story back for rewrites three times, because — in the words of Joseph L. Green, who spent five days with Campbell in 1970 — “Godwin kept coming up with ingenious ways to save the girl!” The moral of the story is often seen as being “space is dangerous”. This may be the case, but as Campbell biographer Alec Nevala-Lee found in a letter Campbell wrote to a friend, the story was also written as a “gimmick on the proposition ‘Human sacrifice is absolutely unacceptable.’” The situation in “The Cold Equations” is intended to force the reader to agree that human sacrifice can be not just acceptable, but necessary. As a result, you can definitely see a lot of places where Campbell’s thumb is on the scale, and remnants of earlier versions.
There are a lot of things wrong with “The Cold Equations”, and therefore I choose my words very carefully when I say: Campbell’s interference made the story better, but not for the reasons he thought.
What makes “The Cold Equations” special, what makes it an enduring classic, is that it’s about failure. Given the grossly negligent environment in which Marilyn was able to stow away in the first place (per Richard Harter, “there is a word for pilots who short cut their preflight checklist. They are called dead.”), without which the story couldn’t have happened in the first place, and the complete lack of margin for error, and, really, all the other factors that Godwin-under-Campbell’s-guidance used to make the story possible… given all that, if Barton had been able to jettison the pilot’s chair, or whatever “ingenious” thing Godwin had originally intended as the basis for a happy ending, then today… no one would remember it. It would have been Just Another Puzzle Story.
It’s more than that, though. I first read “The Cold Equations” in the early ’90s, in the same general span of time that I read “The Old Man and the Sea”, which is also about failure in some very important ways, and which may have nudged my thinking in certain directions. As is typical, I was aghast by the story’s conclusion, especially because there were so many possibilities as to how it could have been resolved without a death. But, I thought, that was the whole point.
I saw “The Cold Equations” as a classic not because the tragedy was unavoidable, but because it wasn’t.
This is what makes literature, isn’t it? Characters who aren’t perfect. They have flaws. That’s why the whole concept of the “tragic flaw” exists.
Barton was in a puzzle story. A life was on the line. All the pieces of the solution were there. And… he didn’t put them together. He wasn’t insightful or creative or educated enough to see the solution. He wasn’t bold or confident or stubborn enough to go against regulations. The pressure was on… and he didn’t make the right decision at the right moment. He wasn’t good enough.
He wasn’t the hero. He was only the protagonist.
“I didn’t do anything,” Marilyn says at the end, as she goes out the airlock to die. “I didn’t do anything.”
And neither did Barton.
And that’s why, despite everything, the story works.
Illustration posted by @23katiejoy.
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The amount of damage Campbell had inflicted on various writers is incredible. I get it, the guy was very influential but stories like this, or Heinlein’s Sixth Column are simply inexcusable.
I disagree.
You write,
It’s precisely that “grossly negligent environment” , all those factors that Campbell forced Godwin to include in order to push his politics, that make the story fail right from the start. It is precisely Campbell’s meddling that breaks the story on a fundamental level.
In order to make the human sacrifice not only acceptable but necessary, the entire scenario is contrived not just to be “grossly negligent”, but to deliberately place no value on human life as such – as exemplified most directly in
It’s right there: no consideration at all for the human life of the stowaway (including whether or not they had themselves snuck onto the EDS or someone else had put them there, for example – hey, excellent idea for how to get someone killed …).
The story really becomes a tautology: In a context where human life is not valued, human sacrifice is acceptable.
To placate Campbell, Godwin had to create a plausible-at-first-glance scenario that created the contrived situation, so that the human sacrifice became unavoidable in that context.
However, it is very quickly apparent to a reader that the situation is contrived in ways that really make very little sense, even if you postulate a society where most human lives don’t matter.
Even if you accept that the society is a harsh and uncaring one, the story that Godwin had to write attempts to get away with two contradictory things regarding science: on the one hand a scientifically bad setting with bad engineering practices, and on the other hand and at the same time trying to persuade the reader that the concluding human sacrifice is necessary because of science (it’s right there in the title after all).
Godwin had to start with bad science in order to force the “scientifically required” outcome. That makes it a bad, a failed, science fiction story. And all this happened entirely because Campbell, as editor, demanded that Godwin the author present Campbell’s particular political agenda.
Interestingly, of course, the story ends up instead showing how ludicrous Campbell’s political agenda really was, and remains. So one could say that Campbell, in pushing his politics onto Godwin, succeeded in showing the world how horrible his politics were – the only way for them to make any sense is in a scenario in which human life has no value.
So while I might say that The Cold Equations should absolutely remembered and talked about, it is precisely for its failings that it should be remembered.
But continuing to talk about something that failed, and in particular talking about its failings, does not make it suddenly a success, in particular it does not make it a success at its initial goal.
It also does not in any way, shape or form, elevate those people, actions, choices etc that led to those failings, to any form of success, or to anything desirable.
Many misdeeds and their bad outcomes are remembered, but that does not make the perpetrator suddenly “good” for what they did, or the result any less broken. So saying “We would not have remembered The Cold Equations if Campbell hadn’t ruined it” does not mean that Campbell’s meddling suddenly did not ruin the story, or that it has somehow become “a good thing” that he did.
Click
Cold click.
This is a really interesting perspective.
I also liked the recent story “The four thousand, the eight hundred’ In that one, the protagonist tries to solve the puzzle and save everyone but fails. She’s just not clever enough.
And, a year after this essay was originally published, I discover James D. McDonald’s “The Coldest Equations Yet”, which I would absolutely have mentioned if I’d known about it.
Christian: as I said, I chose my words very carefully. My argument is not that Campbell did a good thing, it’s that his interference made the story better. A subtle distinction, but a real one.
I read this when young, and the message I got is that the Universe doesn’t care, that a moment of inattention, one brief impulsive decision, or plain bad luck, can kill you. Not a bad lesson for a boy just learning to drive. Campbell/Godwin left a lot of loopholes that could have been used to save the girl, but in real life there are situations where the girl can’t be saved. The story should have been tightened.
In later years I codified part of the general lesson as: When you get too stupid to live, you die. It’s hard to feel sorry for the several hundredth anti-vaxxer who dies of COVID.
@Danny Sichel,
You may have chosen your words carefully, but I still think you’re wrong: the story became a worse story due to Campbell’s meddling.
A more standard “hero protagonist solves the puzzle” story might not have been particularly remarkable (though we will never know – it might have been a classic story in that vein), but the story as mutilated by Campbell became simply a bad story. The only reason it’s still being talked about is really because of how bad it is and how it ended up there.
@Rob Chilson,
there are many stories that could be told to show that the universe does not care; but The Cold Equations is not that story. The Cold Equations tells us that when society does not value human life, human life is not valued – a simplistic tautology that only tells us that it was written to present a particular thesis.
It could have been a story that warns us to not push society in such a direction – to make sure that human life should always be valued, to try to avoid such tragedies … if it had discussed some of the issues with the setting, for example. The ending would not even have needed to have changed at all: it could have remained the tragic story of how a girl’s well-intentioned mistake led to a tragedy for her … but then there would have been failings, reasons for the outcome, also on other parts of the setting, and then the result would not have been so inevitable-from-the-start, and then Campbell wouldn’t have been able to push his political agenda.
As it is, Campbell’s editing, him political agenda trying to persuade people that “human sacrifice may be necessary” ended up destroying the story.
@Rob Chilson,
another comment: you paraphrase the lesson as “When you get too stupid to live, you die” – but I think the story does not in any way shape or form show that Marilyn is “too stupid to live”:
She received no information about the conditions, she wasn’t taught anything about the environment where she was going, and the only thing intended to protect her (or anyone else) was a sign that didn’t mention anything about danger or possible consequences and could have just as easily been on a janitor’s closet. And had she been the plucky protagonist of an adventure, such a sign would absolutely have been on the to-ignore list, and readers would have commended her on her bravery.
So lumping her in with people who are wilfully ignoring not only detailed information with reasons and descriptions of consequences, and actual active assistance! that is being offered to them at every turn, seems unwarranted.
Going through the “Unauthorized Personnel Keep Out” doors was a huge part of one of LMB’s stories. I think it “Ethan of Athos” — Ethan was startled by the way Quinn kept taking him through doors that said something like “Unauthorized Personnel Keep Out” (or that story’s equivalent).
I think “The Cold Equations” is the story that keeps on giving. When I first read it, I could see why so many believed it was a classic. It’s a response to the SF puzzle stories that says, “Sometimes, bad things happen anyway.” At the same time, I can see why so many people hate the way it was constructed. And the other things it symbolizes — whether it’s JWC’s meddling, misogyny, bad engineering, or unfeeling governments and/or corporations.
I hadn’t read the James D. McDonald version yet, and I think that was a great take. It explains why she ended up there.
In fact, I love that so many reactions have come out of this story. On the other hand, it could have been better if it had addressed the problems within the setup.
Is the story more memorable because of the way it was meddled with? Sadly, that might be true. But that reminds me of a post I saw on a Jack the Ripper forum where someone pointed out that we wouldn’t know the names of the five canonical victims if they hadn’t been killed by Jack the Ripper. Uhm, true, but I’m sure they would have preferred to die another way than to be “remembered” by complete strangers who barely know them. 😐
BTW I’ve read that the story was controversial at the time it was published. But I was unable to find any responses to it in the Astounding Brass Tacks column. Does anyone know if Astounding published any responses (good or bad)? Or were the responses kept to fanzines?
I fully agree that exactly what angers readers about it makes it a good story and if any solution has been found in the original story there would not have been a bunch of solutions/responses to it and it would have been forgotten, for [1] the author is not of ‘SF greats’, [2] writing is far from perfect. Compare it with another story with a lot of responses – The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, on which both 1&2 are different and which still I guess generated less responses
@Oleksandr ZHOLUD,
“what angers readers about it makes it a good story”? That’s clearly nonsense. That would suggest that all a good story requires is for someone to be angry about it.
What annoys at least this reader is not that no solution was found. It is perfectly fine to write a tragedy, where in the end there is no solution – there are many examples of such stories and real-life events.
What makes the story bad to me is, as I said, the story creates a setting that is so bad from a scientific viewpoint as to be ludicrous while also asking the reader to accept this as the “correct” basis for the story, and further wanting the reader to then believe the conclusion that this extremely contrived setting must lead to that one outcome and there is nothing that could be done or could have been done about it … even though even a casual reader can identify a number of things that not only could have been done, but are already routinely being done in similar situations today (safety margins! locks on doors! pre-flight checks!).
And the fact that this setting etc was created to push the editor’s political agenda, makes the whole situation even worse – all while certainly making things more memorable, but memorable for how bad they are, and remain.
@Christian Brunschen: Thank you for saving me the time and energy of responding.
@Rob Chilson: I also read this as a teenager, when the first volume of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame appeared. The message I got wasn’t The Universe doesn’t care, it was You shouldn’t let sadists and idiots run things. As Christian has demonstrated at length, the whole set-up is designed to kill people. The present-day analogy would be an airline that fuels its planes with just enough fuel to reach their destinations provided the weather is exactly as predicted – but doesn’t bother to check how many passengers are on board or weigh the baggage before take-off.
The other message I got was that some people really hate teenage girls.
A gold star for Rob Chilson’s comment.
And a bag of dog poop for Hakan. Without all those stories you suggest should never have been written, or editors who should never have had their jobs, the science fiction field would be very dim indeed.
It’s wonderful that this story is still being discussed today, nearly three quarters of a century after being published.
So much of what I want to say has been said.
In pursuit of his agenda, Campbell killed every option for making it a good story. Everything, every “cold equation” that makes the girl’s death “inevitable,” is in the real world rank incompetence and callous indifference to human life on what is supposed to be a life-saving mission, but we are not supposed to see that. We are supposed to see clear-eyed, hard-headed, but not hard-hearted, rationality, responsibility, and realism.
It’s well-enough written, but its framework is fatally weakened by Campbell’s determination to get a particular result that the story didn’t support and the author didn’t want, and the result is a bad story.
What makes it infuriating is that Campbell himself, and too many others after him, have glorified it as honest, clear-eyed realism, when it is so fundamentally dishonest, and committed to the idea that human lives (but perhaps especially the lives of cute girls who show some initiative and wilfulness?) are of no value.
What is also rather saddening is that similar stories exist – which can be very gripping stories especially when they focus on how sometimes, self-sacrifice can be a noble / necessary thing … instead of trying to justify “sacrificing”, i.e., conveniently killing, other people.
Given much the same set of circumstances, an EDS needing to deliver medication to an endangered outpost … Barton could simply have encountered some unexpected malfunction – some unexpected space debris that knocked him ever so slightly off course, perhaps – which would have required more fuel to completely correct for than he has available.
He might in this case have the choice between
a) using all the fuel now to correct his course and being able to deliver the medication but not be able to return to the Stardust and face certain death, or
b) correct his course to be able to make his way to the Stardust (and thus return the EDS for future emergency missions) but not complete the mission and thus doom the outpost.
This would give moral / ethical issues to consider (including duty & regulations &c), the same “the math/science does not allow for a perfect outcome” situation is right there, it just wouldn’t require jettisoning a slightly naïve girl who was guided into a deadly situation.
But no, Campbell wanted something to justify killing other people.
Interesting set of comments, many of which I do not agree with.
I don’t see how the girl having to die is Campbell’s miscegenation. The girl did something stupid, in an utterly unforgiving environment.
Let’s see, we’ve never done that in real life… ignore the square and round air filters in Apollo 13, that someone actually had duct tape in the capsule to make them work.
Not one person here has pointed to the elephant in the room: this is precisely the eternally brought up “trolley problem”. That’s what the story is…. “Cut off their legs”? Really? A pilot’s going to do that, and has the a) edged weaponry to perform that operation, and b) able to keep both of them from dying from the amputations? And he’ll be able to pilot the ship?
Anyone remember all the Heroic Stuff being done at the time in stories… and consider this as intended as an in-your-face reality check? That most of the stories written back then all succeeded?
And for a 16 yr old girl to die is something – maybe no one has this reaction these days, after decades of mass murders at schools, but it was utterly shocking back then.
Sorry, yes, that limited fuel is hard to believe… but then, The Pill won the Locus award, and was up for a Hugo, and if you think The Cold Equations were miserably set up, go read The Pill, and tell me that’s not an order of magnitude worse.
I read this as an early teen, I guess. And at the time I didn’t see any of the clever solutions people have given. I accepted the sacrifice as necessary (and the lack of safety margin as something tolerated in emergency response).
And it did affect my thinking, or at least support something I already thought: The universe is uncaring, and makes no allowance for human feelings. That’s actually an important thing to know (and helped prepare me for the modern addendum “That’s why humans have to care.”). And another: Acting in ignorance can have monstrous consequences to you or to others. I still believe that.
The thumb on the scales to get the result certainly is a flaw; though as I say it was decades before anybody I heard ever pointed out those flaws, so those flaws didn’t affect people’s reaction to the story at the time or for decades after, much (I’m sure there were exceptions, but they didn’t enter the general discussion).
mark – in Sakers’ story, the pilot had a laser (or equivalent) which both amputated the legs (messily) and cauterized the wounds. And even then, it barely worked; she and the stowaway had both lost consciousness by the time they were rescued.
That said, it is amazing that people are missing the point of the essay, which I thought I had made reasonably explicit, and are instead rehashing the basic Cold Equations arguments.
Yes, the situation in the story should not have happened, and if one follows the logical implications even just a little, the worldbuilding runs headlong into a wall. LEAVING ASIDE ALL THAT:
Campbell’s intention was that the story be perceived as “sometimes there is no solution and therefore a person has to die.”
I perceived it as “sometimes there is a solution, but the characters don’t think of it in time, and therefore a person dies even though they didn’t have to.” I perceived that we-the-readers were supposed to be able to infer the solution from outside the story, but that inside the story, with time running out, Barton could not, due to flaws in his personality. I perceived that this was why the story had been included in schoolbooks (which is where I first read it): for its literary merits.
This alternate interpretation, which I feel is superior to Campbell’s stated intention, would not have been possible without his interference. Introducing this alternate interpretation was my reason for writing the essay in the first place.
Would it have been superior to Godwin’s original version – we’ll never know unless one of the earlier drafts (despite Joe Green saying Campbell sent it back for rewrites 3 times, there’s a 1969 letter from Campbell to an Australian fan saying he sent it back 6 times) is in Godwin’s papers.
The problem with The Cold Equations is that it’s a pastiche on Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” that does not understand what made the original so good.
In London’s story, the protagonist dies (spoiler alert) because he’s unable to build a fire and so freezes to death in the Yukon. But in London’s story, the protagonist was specifically warned 3 times not to do what he was doing (going on a hike alone in extreme cold weather). There was a moral element to London’s story that is completely missing from Godwin’s.
I loved the original story as published in Astounding. I first read it more the than two decades after it was published.
My biggest gripe is that no way in hell could a stowaway get on board a spacecraft. I had to get past that Security Idiocy in order to enjoy the horrific story.
Heck of a lot of a lot of smart comments here, wow.
@mark–
Certainly not miscegenation. It was his misogyny.
The girl went through a door with a sign that said, “No Unauthorized Personnel Beyond This Point,” or some version of that. It’d didn’t say “Danger.” That’s a choice someone made, and not the girl. “No unauthorized personnel” often goes on janitor’s closets, and similar places. It’s not what you put on a door where there is actual, serious, “you will probably die” danger on the other side. Especially if the danger won’t be immediately obvious.
Note that they did have the duct tape, and that it wasn’t weird that they did. It’s extremely useful in all kinds of situations, and is very popular with people who have fix things quickly.
But more to the point: In every space program emergency, USA and Russia, if it isn’t immediately fatal, if they have time to react, the reaction isn’t, oh, gee, we’re going to die. It’s to pull out all the stops finding a fix. Not, “oops, time to shove someone out the airlock.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we’ve lost anyone in space where there was time for the astronauts or cosmonauts to respond.
Yeah, sf tends to glorify competence.
This story features systemic incompetence and indifference to human life, and the story isn’t about incompetence being deadly, or killing innocents because you don’t value the lives of civilians and children being bad.
It’s supposed to be about the girl causing her own death by making a stupid mistake, but that’s not what it really shows. She wouldn’t be dead if there were a real warning sign, if doors that need to stay closed were locked, if there were a pre-launch check to make sure everything was in order–including no unplanned passengers or significantly excess weight.
The girl just did what bright, adventurous kids do, and an authority launching emergency response vessels off a luxury passenger ship didn’t take any precautions at all.
I hadn’t read that before, but now I have. Thanks.
The pill itself is impossible, of course, but they do get one impossible thing so we can see what they do with it.
The FDA approving something that has a 10% fatality rate, but we are living in a period where the FDA is under pressure to value profits more highly, and a working fat pill would be real popular (a very high percentage of people would be willing to take the risk, if it were available and legal), and yes, humans, especially in relatively safe surroundings, love the exotic. Heck, we know Sapiens interbred with both Neanderthals and Denisovans, and there’s hints of a possible third Homo species they have have interbred with. (Some have suggested Erectus; there’s not enough DNA to be sure.)
So, nope, sorry, “The Pill” doesn’t have anything like the problems “The Cold Equations” does.
I think the story stands as published. People, especially young people, die because because they go through life ignoring warning signs. Don’t drink and drive. People go around the gate at railroad tracks when a train is coming. Sure, in real life, a emergency delivery rocket carrying medicine would not have a pilot or room for one, let alone a stowaway. But that was not the point of the story. This is the trolley problem, except the one person has placed themselves in harms way. A hard decision has to be made. Campbell couldn’t write stories and publish them in his magazine, or another place. So he gave the plots to other authors, and let them write the stories. This was John Campbell’s story.
I agree with @mark.
While Campbell in real life was a misogynist and worse, you don’t need to invoke that to claim that he “wanted” to kill a teen girl. I think an editor without such bias would still have wanted to move the story in that direction, just to make a compelling story that takes the reader into new territory, wrestling with problems that most stories find a way to finesse. Part of the effectiveness of the story is that it engages the reader in concocting solutions to the story’s problems that the protagonist did not devise, precisely because the written outcome is so genuinely horrifying. Generally, her survival requires inventing technologies or opportunities that either don’t exist in the story’s setup or that the pilot did not think of. And Campbell made the right choice, literarily, because here we are 70 years later, still chewing on this story and wrestling with the moral pain it causes. For any given science fiction fan, there are plenty of stories that are completely forgotten or where it is reasonable to accept that the person has not read it. But even though it is not as well written as stories like The Lottery, A Pail of Air, The Most Dangerous Game, and many others, absolutely everyone participating in the science fiction genre is aware of this story, probably has read it, and has certainly encountered stories that react to it. That’s a damned respectable mark for a writer.
It is definitely not accurate to decry the story as assuming (even favoring) a society in which human life has no value. Right there on the ship there are two human lives at stake, Marilyn’s and Hawkeye’s. I mean, Barton. Only one can survive, and Barton notes in the story that only he has the training to accomplish that goal. The setup is that this is a terribly rare extension of costly resources to save the lives of an entire colony from disease. With the perspective of 70 years, we could argue that they should have transmitted data on how to create medication, but that was an unimaginable capability in 1954. Barton successfully landing the vehicle is the only path to survival for thousands. It’s the trolley problem, as mark noted.
The original essay here makes the literary case really well. There had been lots of puzzle stories up until then, in which the hero saves the day, invents a new solution with bubblegum and duct tape, and miraculously rescues everyone. When Jules Verne invented the Capable Man protagonist in the 1870s, it was new and different — the idea that the hero succeeds by intellect and knowledge, solving the puzzles posed by the natural world and by the human world in new and ingenious ways. 80 years later, we had seen a lot of that kind of story, and we still see it — it is the entire basis for the TV show McGyver. and most episodes of Star Trek, Stargate, etc. Campbell demanded that Godwin write a different kind of story, one in which the Most Capable of Capable Men runs into his limits and fails. I don’t know if it was new in the genre, but it’s clear that any earlier renditions did not succeed so well in getting under the skin of readers.
I “do” have problems with the story’s engineering. These people have not heard of locking doors to keep unauthorized personnel out of sensitive areas? They have storage lockers large enough to fit a human body that are empty because they might have wanted to store something there, even though the ship has no margin? How will her corpse be dislodged from the airlock? And why does a single-person ship even have an airlock? Either Barton has a suit, which means he has spare mass to eject, or he doesn’t have a suit. Either way, there’s no reason for an airlock to exist, just a simple airtight door. If anyone has to leave (in a suit!), then open the door and evacuate the whole vehicle. So there are problems with the story, but those problems stem from insufficient attention to detail in setting up the stage. The story remains compelling only because the outcome is so terrible.
Danny, thanks for the essay — it lead me to “The Coldest Equations Yet” which I loved!
The lasting impact of the original story might be that it has so frustrated generations of SF readers that many have been inspired to essentially fanfic it.
@Danny Sichel,
That sounds a lot like “Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?” – you want people to disregard the obvious failings in the story. I don’t think we should.
His intentions seem more along the lines of justifying sacrificing other people. There are many, many stories about situations where there is no solution that leads to a good outcome, but where nevertheless, there is no need for such a contrived setting.
So now we’re supposed to ignore not only the clearly visible flaws in the story, but also the stated intentions of the author and editor … and because you can construct something that you consider positive from all this ignoring-and-reinterpreting, you say that the story is a good or successful one?
That’s incredibly far-fetched, and really seems like you are trying really hard to put a positive spin on something that is just fundamentally bad.
The flaws in the story are there because of Campbell’s insistence in pushing his political agenda. The story fails in so many ways to achieve its goals, as a story, as believable science fiction – and, ironically, at pushing the political agenda, precisely because its failures are so clear, and so clearly tied to the agenda being pushed.
“If I squint and look at it like this” does not, however, actually make it objectively any better.
Regarding the sign issue, in Niven and Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty where there’s a similar need to keep people out of an area that is vital to the continued life of a large number of people, the safety measures are different than in “Cold Equations”:
“There was a sign on the door. Below a large death’s head it said:
IF YOU GO THROUGH THIS DOOR, YOU WILL BE KILLED.
It was repeated in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.”
I came across the cold equations this last year reading the hall of fame classics. Of the short stories in the anthology, it was the most memorable. I think many of the stories from that era were short on technical accuracy, like Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit…, Asimov’s Robot series, etc. but they painted a future and made a point. Biographies about Campbell make it hard to see him positively now, but he influenced many writers along the way.
@mark @David Levine: It is not equivalent to the trolley problem: that is an ethical thought experiment set in a world that is not designed to routinely place people on the tracks in front of runaway trolleys.
@Lis: I just looked it up: the oh-so-terrifying warning sign reads, in its entirety: UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL KEEP OUT!
David Levine – actually, per the letter reprinted in the Tribute to Campbell (linked above):
so, not actually Campbell’s story.
It’s not the trolley problem.
In the trolley problem, you don’t have hours in which to come up with alternative solutions. There’s only flip that switch, or don’t flip it.
Also in the version in which the fat man whose body might stop or derail the trolley is not already on the tracks, but instead he had to be pushed, most people say no, they wouldn’t push the man into the path of the trolley.
I guess Campbell would have? Or at least would have liked to think he would have?
The story was all Godwin’s–originally, sure. But in Godwin’s original, the girl lived. Campbell refused to publish it that way. The multiple rewrites weren’t because Godwin was struggling with the story, but because he was struggling with Campbell’s insistence that she had to die. He tried to come with a version of that, that Campbell would accept.
The no safety margin is because the girl had to die. The excess storage is because Godwin wasn’t writing a story in which there was no safety margin until Campbell insisted on it.
The flaws are Campbell insisting on making the story something the author never intended, and which doesn’t quite fit the original story.
As I perceived it when I first read it in the early ’90s, when I had no access to the Internet and could only rely on what was in the text, I thought we were supposed to interpret it this way, yes. The story is still a tragic waste of human life, but for a different reason.
This interpretation is absolutely not one that Campbell would have thought of, and I’m pretty sure it would have frustrated the hell out of Godwin, but I feel that it’s an interesting one.
If the stowaway lived, there wouldn’t have been much of a story, perhaps not enough to make it worth publishing even in Astounding. Certainly, if there was enough security to prevent a stowaway from getting on board, then there would have been no story.
I see many stories, books, or even series that if things had proceeded in a manner that actually made sense, the literary work wouldn’t have existed.
@David Levine–If the story would make no sense if the characters behaved like real people, or if the company/government made mistakes that didn’t make sense in the context of the company or government’s plausible interests and perspective, it’s a badly written story.
And if the girl survived because the pilot or the girl, or the two of them working together, came up with a solution that was clever, and exciting/fascinating to read about, it would be not only a story, but a really fun story to read
Isn’t the International Space Station currently facing a potential
“Cold Equations” situation? There are currently seven people on
the ISS. Three were brought up by a Russian Soyuz spacecraft,
four were brought up by a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. The two
spacecraft are left docked to the ISS to act as lifeboats in case
of an emergency that would require the immediate evacuation of
the space station.
The current problem is that the Soyuz has had some kind of
coolant leak that has probably left it unusable. If something
happened RIGHT NOW that required an immediate evacuation
of the ISS, then you have the problem of trying to fit seven crew
in a lifeboat that can only carry four. Should the seven crew start
sawing off their legs in order to fit seven legless torsos into a
Dragon spacecraft designed to have a crew of four?
@David Levine: I see many stories, books, or even series that if things had proceeded in a manner that actually made sense, the literary work wouldn’t have existed.
That isn’t an excuse for writing a story entirely driven by its ridiculously contrived scenario and then claiming it’s about something other than its ridiculously contrived scenario.
@Joseph Groene–One big difference between the ISS situation and The Cold Equations, is that they know about the risk now, and are working on solutions–both looking for a fix for the Soyuz, and looking for solutions to get them back without it.
They might not find an adequate solution, but it won’t be because they deliberately set the situation up that way. It won’t be because they decided saving all of them was setting a bad precedent.
And see what half a second of Googling found me!
NASA asks SpaceX about International Space Station rescue options
Both the Russians and NASA are reviewing available options and equipment. They’re not just saying, sorry, cosmonauts, your trip home is broken, so you have to step out the airlock.
I just realized that there are a lot of people saying that Marilyn (or “the girl”) is “too stupid to live.” But there are not as many people pointing out that Barton was stupid for not checking his ESD more carefully before leaving. Or that the other staff members were stupid for not having better safety features.
I do remember that the girl (I mean Marilyn) came from Earth, so she didn’t know about all the regulations. So they don’t tell the people on Earth about these regulations before they go into space? When people come on the Stardust for the first time, don’t they t think that perhaps they should go through an orientation? (I’d love to see an analysis of this story in an engineering trade journal.)
Also… It’s a famous and influential story, but I have to look it up each time to remember the names of the characters. Even though I have read it more than once and read numerous responses and reactions to it. I don’t know if that says more about my brain or how memorable the characters are.
I wonder how different this story might have been if it had been published in another digest, perhaps If or Galaxy.
I still find Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” to be useful (and therefore classic) precisely because it prompts these kinds of discussions. As with any trolley problem, it forces people to look at the options actually available in the moment. (and yes, this qualifies as a trolley problem IMO) At least, my thoughts on the utility of the story haven’t changed over the last few years.
For those that prefer stories where there are options yet undiscovered, I recommend “The Last Dance” by Martin L. Shoemaker. Several plot lines start from the premise that there aren’t any good options in the event of a disaster and people put in the work to create better options. Bad things still happen, but they are the result of purposeful human arrogance rather than purposeful human ignorance as is the case in “The Cold Equations”.
In the not-too-distant past, the US Navy trained for “cold equation” events where a damaged (either in combat or by accident) ship would close all of the watertight doors to prevent the ship from sinking. Sometimes shipmates and friends can end up on the wrong side of those doors. Delays can end up causing the ship to sink taking even more lives.
The question is real even if the answers are not comfortable.
Regards,
Dann
Insert tag filled with wit, wisdom, and humour here…
The funny thing is that the theme had already been tackled several years previously by Ted Tubb, but because it was relatively obscure, no one really talks about it. So it goes.
Arthur C. Clarke’s “Breaking Strain” from 1949 also presents a very similar scenario and is actually a better story IMO.
@Anne Marble: Oh, come on – they put up a sign saying “Keep out!” In italics! They even used the Exclamation Point of Death! What more could you expect?
The story is explicit that as a denizen of Earth, Marilyn is expected to be ignorant of the lethal consequences of stowing away, and that the sign – which does not say, oh, “STOWAWAYS WILL BE PUT OUT THE AIRLOCK. NO EXCEPTIONS”, for example, is the only warning provided.
I confess, I must live in a different world than most readers. I live in Kentucky and am a progressive but my perspective is “The Cold Equations” is a better and more realistic story and all of the “a REAL engineered spaceship wouldn’t be so dangerous.” Which is painfully ridiculously naive. I grew up in an area where coal miners, steel workers, and others work in horrifically unfsafe environments and when something goes wrong–you don’t have any good answers. If people live in a world where they can’t imagine someone cutting costs until the “ideal” scenario is the only one allowed–then I envy you.
C.T.: The criticism isn’t that the story portrays a society that is careless of human life – that’s something that you can see in the newspaper. The criticism is that the story portrays a society which is careless of human lives – but the story then implies that it is the universe, not the society that is responsible (or irresponsible). The very title carries that message.(it’s not called “The Cold Corporation”).
@C.T. Phipps: If people live in a world where they can’t imagine someone cutting costs until the “ideal” scenario is the only one allowed–then I envy you.
That’s not what people are complaining about – it’s that “The Cold Equations” is claimed to demonstrate that the laws of physics demand sacrifices, when what it actually shows is that systems that place no value on human life – which is pretty much the entire history of the coal industry – produce terrible results.
ETA: Andrew (not Werdna) beat me to it.
The Twilight Zone adaptation of the story from the 80’s has the protagonists assiduously look for a solution (like chucking stuff out of the airlock) but can’t quite make it work, so out the airlock she has to go.
I think for me the tension of the contrivance of the story is that it is framed in the story as the Cold Equations of the universe, whereas it is, to my eye, the Cold Equations of accountants and a corporation or government. We can’t ask him but I think Campbell would be pissed off by my argument as to where the fault and blame should be placed.
@Lis, Sorry, but The Pill is far more unbelievable. A 10% fatality rate? Look at the news now, and show me where there isn’t a “movement” of millions attacking all vaccinations.
And for everyone to come out looking perfect… and the same? And the only “solution” the PoV character is to go to fat porn? Really? Nothing else? The ADA doesn’t exist?
No, it was so artificial my suspenders of disbelief broke early on.
ObDisclosure: I worked for the National Board of Medical Examiners (the Boards that doctors take), and at the NIH. Reading this, I wanted to scream and throw things, it was so Not A Fucking Chance.
@mark–The pill in the story appeals to both greed and vanity, and you know there are attempts to pressure FDA to ease up on regulation for the sake of profits.
There’s a whole separate industry geared to stoking fears of vaccines–and vaccines are at best marginally profitable. The government pushes back, and Big Pharma execs have families, too.
The Pill is a dystopia. That something with a 10% fatality rate will get approved is not bloody likely, but it does have greed and visions of profit on its side. The same people who don’t understand statistics around vaccines are exactly the people who, if it somehow got approved, would be saying, as Andrew does in the story, “90% is still an A.”
It’s not going to happen, because no, the FDA isn’t to cave on something with a 10% fatality rate. But the story is premised on exactly what it claims to be premised on–greed, vanity, and corruption.
The problem with The Cold Equations isn’t that people aren’t that lazy and cheap and careless. It’s that it claims to be premised on cold, hard, objective science, when what really kills Marilyn is short-sighted bean-counting, laziness, and greed. We are supposed to admire the story for being one thing, when it’s really something else.
All I will say is Campbell certainly knew his readership back in the day, and when I read “The Cold Equations” years later, it was still effective (with me), even if it isn’t to others.
Some of you are arguing as if you believe your personal POV outranks all others. That seems a bit demonic to me. A human would acknowledge other POV and a deity would delight in seeing one. What do you want to be?
@Jeff Jones–Yes, Campbell certainly knew his audience, back then. He was in many ways a very impressive editor, and he did a lot for sf. But,
No, sorry, there’s nothing “demonic” about pointing out the very real flaws in this story. Are we supposed to be intimidated by the word? Abashed?
Campbell wanted it to be about how the cold realities of the universe don’t care about human lives, or human sentimentality. But that wasn’t the story the actual author wanted to write, and that’s why after multiple revisions, we get this mishmash.
In the story actually published, it’s people who don’t care about human life.
They need to get rid of 50 kilos of weight, and the story mentions quite a few things that could be tossed out the airlock to at least try to get there–without going to the extreme of cutting off legs, a step that yes, unlike in Don Sakers’ story, they may well not have the tools to accomplish.
Or, it may already be too late, if margins are that inexcusably tight. Focusing on that could have given us a story that really does make the point Campbell wanted: By the time she’s discovered, it’s already too late to change the outcome, and frantically throwing nonessential items out the airlock, or even Marilyn, can’t change the outcome. The ship, the mission, and the men waiting for the vaccine are already doomed.
We’ll never know what Godwin’s original version looked like, or the revisions prior to the final one, but the story that finally got published is not well-constructed. It doesn’t do what it says on the tin