| Why "The Cold Equations" |
[Mar. 7th, 2015|11:59 am]
houseboatonstyx
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Campbell's preface:
“The Frontier is a strange place – and a frontier is not always easy to recognize. It may lie on the other side of a simple door marked ‘No admittance’ – but it is always deadly dangerous.”
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A related trope at the bottom of the tvtropes entry:
No OSHA Compliance: While the Rocket Equation does limit the amount of fuel to be used in the shuttle, the idea that a futuristic space shuttle would have fewer fail-safes or backups than a 20th century airplane (modern aircraft are always given a large enough fuel supply that, even if there's a delay due to weather or problems at the landing site, they can typically circle the runway for several minutes, or possibly even hours, regardless of the distance of the trip) is more than a little strange. Either the OSHA does not exist in the future, or someone decided that a shuttle that can literally hold only one person and a small amount of cargo, and just barely enough fuel to get them from point A to point B, is a good idea, something that in the 20th and 21st century would never leave the design phase.
Er, that WAS Campbell's fucking point! On the Frontier there IS no OSHA. Fronteirsmen are just making it all up as they go.
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For the younger generations, here's the literary great point, nicked from StClair via a link ///insert link/// at tvtropes in their article on "The Cold Equations":
Next time you feel like poking holes in Tom Godwin's 'The Cold Equations', sit down and read a stack of SF published between 1950 and 1953. A recurring theme from that era was that the dashing hero is presented with an impossible situation which he could not possibly escape from but at the last minute comes up with a brilliant solution which saves everyone, including the dog, and also provides them all with hot coffee and cigars.
THEN read 'The Cold Equations', in which our dashing hero is presented with an impossible situation from which he cannot possibly escape. Period. Godwin wasn't trying to bludgeon you over the head with how clever he was at screwing his characters, he was just turning an over-used story idea on its head. According to John Campbell, legendary editor of 'Astounding' magazine, he rejected the story several times because Godwin kept sticking to the familiar pattern and having his hero find a way to save everyone. It wasn't until Campbell insisted on the final ending that Godwin finally agreed to write it.
So, yeah, if you look at the story you can find "real world" issues with it. And if you could ask Tom Godwin to show you one of the original endings I'm sure that at least one of those issues would have led to the happy ending that many readers seem to have wanted. But the untwisted ending, in which everything ends exactly the way it was laid out in the beginning, isn't there to give the story some kind of heavy-handed moral, but rather to shock the readers by _not_ ending with the expected twist.
When readers picked up the August 1954 issue of 'Astounding', they knew exactly what to expect because every story ended the same way. What made 'The Cold Equations' significant wasn't some heavy-handed moral about how important it was to read 'No Admittance' signs, but rather that it refused to pull a Deus out of its Machina to provide the expected happy ending. It was the same kind of shock that modern fantasy readers, raised on book after book in which no central character ever dies without coming back to life at least once, felt half way through 'A Game of Thrones' when they suddenly realized that a beloved, central character had been led into an impossible situation from which he could not possibly escape, and didn't.
And _that_ was the point of 'The Cold Equations'. You can argue technical details, pre-flight checklists, security checkpoints and the air speed velocity of an unladen Emergency Dispatch Ship all you like, and even offer your own rewrite of the story which adds twenty pages of explanation for all of those issues, but you'd be missing the point. Instead of being about the mortality of girls in space ships, the story pointed out the immortality of characters in science fiction stories. Because that was something which needed to change.
And now, I'm going to put down the baseball bat and stop screaming at you for daring to suggest that there might be anything wrong with something that I liked.
Well, I didn't exactly LIKE it, and don't want to read it again, but I greatly ADMIRE what it/Campbell was doing in the 'conversation' of 1940-50s SF |
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On the other hand, the story where the hero doesn't win the conflict have a -- strictly limited audience.
It's not the only one, but it's probably the only one that could be written in that arena.
Like Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Came Too Early," about an American soldier thrown back into medieval Iceland, just before Christianity arrives. A Connecticut Yankee story? Hardly. He can't bring his technical expertise to bear effectively, and cultural clash means -- it ends badly.
That one probably covered the depressing ending of that trope.
Here are some SF stories published between 1950 and 1953.
"Not With a Bang" by Damon Knight
"To Serve Man" also by Damon Knight
"Coming Attraction" by Fritz Leiber
"The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth
"A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury
"The Liberation of Earth" by William Tenn
"It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby
"The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke
I won't deny that there were stories in which the happy ending was pulled out of a hat - even some good ones, like "Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith, have happy endings that make no sense in the story's context - but the failure to provide one was hardly a big surprise in "The Cold Equations," and if one's minded to take the story at face value, it's still touching today even though we're no longer facing some "engineer always wins" context. In some of these stories, indeed, it's the unhappy ending which is the surprise.
What's touching about "The Cold Equations" is, as the pilot says, it's nobody's fault; nobody wants the girl to die. (An amazing number of readers fail to notice that.) But it's also the story's flaw, because it is somebody's fault. Contrary to the story's premise, it isn't the impersonal cold equations that doomed the girl. OSHA or no OSHA, it's the fault of those who employed those equations to design a system with no security, no fail-safe, no backup. It's their fault, the same way that it was the engineers' fault who designed those cars that suffer repeated brake failures.
When readers picked up the August 1954 issue of 'Astounding', they knew exactly what to expect because every story ended the same way.
StClair's was a casual blog comment, somewhat off topic in its original comment string. His first paragraph didn't specify Astounding magazine, but did specify the sub-genre 'engineer pulls techy happy solution'.
So I'm not sure your list of counter-examples were from that target sub-genre.
Edited at 2015-03-08 07:45 am (UTC)
It is certainly undeniable that all stories in the "engineer pulls techy happy solution" sub-genre have techy happy solutions. It is also a trivial and meaningless observation.
What's significant is how pervasive that sub-genre was. I think it's pretty clear it was not so much. Let's limit it to Astounding, then. Between 1950 and 1953 Astounding published, two pick two I know offhand, Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag" and Phil Dick's "Impostor", two stories in which intrepid heroes, no less competent engineers than Godwin's two characters, suffer colossal failures at the end. Kornbluth's accidentally kills herself using her tech savvy, and Dick's manages inadvertently to blow up the Earth.
So no, the readers did not pick up the issue with "The Cold Equations" knowing what to expect.
It's not the only one, but it's probably the only one that could be written in that arena.
Yep. Like _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_. The point of the story isn't within the story, it's between the story and previous stories, genre expectations. So it only works once per genre and per reader.
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