SH Comments
Reged: Feb 16 2004
Posts: 1056
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This thread is for comments about The Laws of the Space Frontier, by Michael Underwood.
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Donna Royston
New user
Reged: Jan 25 2005
Posts: 9
Loc: Virginia, USA
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Hi Michael (author) and other readers --
While I enjoyed reading the article -- it's been a long time since I read "The Cold Equations" and so I was remembering it as I read along -- I didn't agree with much of what you say. All this exploration of sexism, gendering, male/female dichotomies, and so on and on is pretty standard university fare. But this is not what the story is about.
You don't have to be a huge admirer of the story to at least admit that sometimes in life a person may be placed in a situation where the options are limited and a happy outcome is just not possible. In a work of literature, this is tragedy. And sometimes an author wants to explore a no-win situation by means of fiction.
As a reader, you have to accept the story's premise that the spaceship is constructed with no non-vital parts, there isn't a lucky slingshot thingy opportunity around, no deus ex machina, and it really, really does boil down to doing something you don't don't want to do. The story isn't about Barton's prejudices blinding him to all the multitudes of other choices that are available. (I would also say that the story is not about, in Hartwell's words, "the beauty of truth.") Barton does not "willingly exclude compassion" -- to be fair to the story, you cannot insert your own choices into a situation where the story has made clear that these choices do not exist. (You might as well argue that the Man in London's "To Build a Fire" should have considered more possibilities for keeping warm.) The story doesn't present reason triuphing over sentiment; it depicts necessity. And necessity answers neither to reason or sentiment.
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Anonymous
Unregistered
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First off, thanks for reading.
As for the 'standard university fare', I think that while the story is not explicitly about gender and sexism, it is a theme that has enough cues to be notable, at least to me. The fact that Barton would have no problem killing a bruising male, but falters at a slim female, the fact that all the characters on the Woden teams and that Barton speaks to on the Stardust are male, and that our one representative of an Earth-centric world view is a female. These elements and others led me to the discussion of gender and sexism in the story. It may not be what the story was intended to be about, but there was something to say.
I accept that "The Cold Equations" is a tragedy. However, I responded negatively to the way in which it was told. I did not feel the world of the story was established sufficiently to totally preclude some kind of heroic action on Barton's part to save Marilyn, who is obviously innocent of everything except being unfortunately ignorant. Sure, I can accept that nothing else on the ship could be jettisoned. But the story doesn't even go to the lengths of saying so, the way I see it. Barton and the crew of the Stardust say they "can't do anything", but the words ring hollow to me. Barton does not explore the options, and the reason I say that he does that is because he is locked into his mindset of reason, of necessity, as you say. If Barton had been a heroic character, he could have re-programmed the shuttle to land with Marilyn's weight on-board instead of his own, and gone out the airlock himself. It would have still been a tragic story, but it would made Barton much more of an endearing character.
And as for no-win situations, as you say, there are always options, even though they may be limited, as you say. Barton, in my opinion, does not sufficiently explore these options, and in doing so, condemns Marilyn to her death.
I would disagree with the notion that "necessity answers neither to reason or sentiment," as I feel that necessity is settled on by reasoning. It was necessary for Barton for survive and save the men on Woden due to the rules of his job, his worldview, and therefore he justifies killing Marilyn.
As for "the beauty" of truth, my reading of the story had it carrying a the tone of reverence towards 'the cold equations', through Barton's rhetoric when referring to them. The truth is "beautiful" in its inhuman, cold perfection.
For me, it comes down to the fact that the story has an anti-humanist stance in my reading, as it embraces the ideals of hard sci-fi. The 'cold equations' are more important than the feelings of Barton, more important than protecting a young person whose only crime was not knowing the severity of the punishment for wanting to visit her brother. The humans are not the important part of hard sci-fi, and in focusing as such, I feel that the genre tends to be vulnerable to losing its appeal to modern audiences. By not establishing dynamic heroic characters, tragic or otherwise, the stories can become little more than thought experiments.
The marvelous thing about stories though is the fact that two people can get two totally different things out of them. I see a anti-humanist parable of physics, and others can see a compelling narration of a no-win situation, emulating real-life situations.
Michael Underwood
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Paul Lucas
Unregistered
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I haven't read the story in question, but what sort of sadistic nutball engineer designs a spacecraft with no reserve fuel? "Hard science" my derriere.
Landing on vapors is a nightmare no aircraft pilot would ever want to contemplate except in an extreme emergency. There are ALWAYS problems and disasters and mechanical failures that can pop up; not having extra fuel on hand to handle these is sheer stupidity. Designing a ship or a flightpath that way means that you pretty much don't care about throwing the vehicle, the cargo, and the pilot away. Even a tiny leak caused by a micrometeroid puncture or a faulty pump means you're dead.
Even if its an unusual case where the destination is on the extreme end of a vehicle's range, there are things you can do. Drop tanks, for instance, or on board collapsible fuel bladders. Or send out two shuttles; one has a cargo of nothing but fuel, and refuels the medicine-carrying ship before it has to turn back. But sending out an aircraft or a spacecraft with a zero margin of error is pretty much a 100% guarantee something is going to go wrong.
And let's not even talk about all the alternatives available to the characters from the decription of the story. Even assuming no redundant systems *rolleyes*, the pilot could still have jettisoned his food, all but the bare minimum of water needed for survival, and enough air to reduce the atmosphere from sea-level to high-altitude pressures. There's also tricks you can do with orbital mechanics I won't go into here. Or the most obvious solution: dump the rest of the cargo in space (it won't go anywhere!), land with the girl, refuel, then go back up to retrieve it.
yes, I realize the author set up an extreme situation so he could produce a dramatic situation. But a story labelled "hard science fiction" does not necessarily make it a believable one. The author here used a "hard science" premise for the story but apparently completely ignored the "hard engineering" premises required for practical spaceflight.
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Jed Hartman
Fiction Editor
Reged: Oct 15 2003
Posts: 151
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There's been a great deal of discussion and argument about "The Cold Equations" over the years. People interested in such discussion might find it worth taking a look at Richard Harter's "The Cold Equations: A Critical Study," originally written in 1977 and updated in 1999 after some discussion on Usenet. Harter definitely has (and expresses) a particular point of view about the story, but he also quotes and discusses some of the various other points of view that other readers have about it.
Here are a couple comments of my own:
1. The no-win situation presented in the story is deeply flawed, for a wide variety of reasons, including those mentioned here and those mentioned in the Harter article. The situation was constructed very artificially by the author; as written, it's not a particularly plausible portrayal of a no-win situation.
2. However, I think the people who are fans of the story are often fans of a sort of ur-story that lies behind what Godwin wrote. Imagine a story in which there really is a plausible no-win scenario, in which all the valid objections raised to the scenario in this story don't apply. I think a lot of people find that story really compelling.
3. If you think that there really is such a thing as a no-win situation in the real world, a situation in which physical laws inevitably lead to tragedy with no chance of avoiding it, you're probably more likely to appreciate "The Cold Equations," either as written or in its idealized form in which critics' objections are addressed. If you think that no-win situations are rare and possibly nonexistent in the real world, you're probably more likely to feel that the idealized version of the story couldn't exist -- that it would be impossible to fix the flaws in the story in a plausible way.
4. As others have noted, Campbell and Godwin put together the ending of this story as an intentional attempt to violate reader expectations. In a sense, the meta-story here is a critique of the hard science fiction genre, in which you can generally expect that the protagonists will, generally through cleverness, know-how, ingenuity, and pluck, successfully find a scientifically plausible solution to the apparently unsolvable problem.
By the way, the story is available on at least one web page, but since I suspect it's there in violation of copyright, I'm not gonna link to it.
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David Moles
Regular reader
Reged: Jan 07 2004
Posts: 65
Loc: Basel, Switzerland
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As a reader, you have to accept the story's premise that the spaceship is constructed with no non-vital parts, there isn't a lucky slingshot thingy opportunity around, no deus ex machina, and it really, really does boil down to doing something you don't want to do.
I'm not sure that I do. Maybe in 1954, but certainly by, at the very latest, 1970, the reader ought to know better.
In a sense, what a story like "The Cold Equations" does is raise the Idiot Plot -- perhaps even the Second-Order Idiot Plot -- to the level of an art form. It might claim to be forcing the reader (and the characters) to face reality -- To Face Up To The Hard Truths Of An Uncaring Universe -- but it can only do that at the sacrifice of realism. In the end, despite its pretensions, Hard SF is a kind of allegory.
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-- David
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Donna Royston
New user
Reged: Jan 25 2005
Posts: 9
Loc: Virginia, USA
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"what sort of sadistic nutball engineer designs a spacecraft with no reserve fuel?"
Yes, I agree, actually -- that premise is extremely implausible without some kind of further explanation. In fact, I would say the idea of someone being able to stow away without being detected is implausible. And also, if people had actually considered the necessity of dealing with stowaways so thoroughly (and in an apparently official way) that there was a regulation that stowaways would have to be jettisoned, that seems to beg the question of why more options weren't considered. I am not a huge admirer of the story.
But, without elevating the story to being some kind of ultimate & perfect hard-SF story, I do think the story is admirable for showing a situation in which cleverness, know-how, ingenuity and pluck can't pull a happy ending out of a hat.
Donna
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Donna Royston
New user
Reged: Jan 25 2005
Posts: 9
Loc: Virginia, USA
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Just wanted to add some thoughts regarding implausibility in fiction, which I didn't have time to write yesterday. It is very common for me -- and I imagine for others -- to have to forgive some implausibility in SF stories, and other genres too, for that matter. As an example, take Asimov's "Nightfall," an SF classic about a planet where night never falls (it has more than one sun) except once a millenium when all the suns are hidden or eclipsed at once. Archeological records suggest that civilization on this planet comes to an abrupt end every time this happens. In the course of the story, it happens again: it grows dark and everyone goes insane with fear, rioting and rampaging and burning, and there goes the cycle again.
Now I have an extremely hard time believing that everyone would go insane with fear at the fall of darkness, even when it's something they've never experienced before.
I don't think it's unique to "Cold Equations" that a reader has to accept the story's premise -- or, if you don't, seems like there's an awful lot of SF that you aren't going to accept.
I'll also point out, re "Cold Equations," that if you remember the Apollo missions (and lots of younger people won't) the suspenseful newscasts were always pointing out, as viewers waited for the returning capsule to splash down, that the astronauts had to hit a very small "window" in the earth's atmosphere in order to return safely: if the capsule hit it at too great an angle it would enter too fast and burn up or hit land (or something horrific, I don't remember in detail), and if the capsule hit the atmosphere at too shallow an angle it would travel away from the earth again and there would not be the means or enough fuel or oxygen for the astronauts to correct course and return. So I think it seemed perfectly logical for "Cold Equations" to take place in a space-travel world of small safety margins rather than a world similar to jet travel and the space shuttle. Very likely no one at that time would say "What!? No fuel reserve? That's crazy!" That's what everyone was seeing as the reality of space travel.
Donna
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Susan Marie Groppi
Editor-in-Chief, Fiction Editor
Reged: Jun 04 2003
Posts: 52
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Donna, the point you're making here is similar to something I was thinking about this thread, so thank you for saying it articulately. I love "The Cold Equations", I think it's a great story, but at the same time it's a story that, if it were submitted to me as a new story today, I wouldn't even consider buying. Part of what I love about it is that it uses a technological problem as a framework for a human situation, but in order for that to work, the technological problem has to stay in the background. If you're putting all this effort into evaluating the plausibility of the technological problem, then the story isn't doing what it's supposed to do.
This is why the historical context is so important. The captain says there's nothing to be done, and the girl doesn't believe him, and he says no, really, there's nothing to be done. And as the reader, I believe him that he -wants- there to be a way to solve the problem, so when he can't find one, that's all I need to know, and I can move on to the real emotional core of the story. At the time the story was written, the audience would have no trouble believing that spaceflight (especially of the military rescue mission type depicted in the piece) was something dangerous, done close to the operational margins, as it were. So that part of the story can be filed into the background. It's not how we think about it anymore, so the technological problem gets foregrounded for us, and sure, the story doesn't work anymore if that's what you're paying attention to. But my feeling on it is that if you read the story outside of that historical context, you're probably reading it wrong.
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Allen Smith
Unregistered
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I read this essay with great interest. "The Cold Equations" has been one of my favorite stories ever since I read in one of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes over thirty years ago. I admit that Mr. Underwood's essay has me rethinking my opinion. For example, wasn't there anything that the pilot could have jettisoned to make up for the girl's additional weight? Another thing, I did find it odd that a ship on such a vital mission would not have fuel in reserve. "The Cold Equations" remains a fine story, but flawed.
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