The Cold Equations

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"The Cold Equations" is a science fiction short story by Tom Godwin, first published in Astounding Magazine in 1954. It is widely regarded as one of the most notable stories in the history of science fiction. Allegations have been made, however, that the story was taken from an EC Comics publication from the previous year.

1 Plot
2 Reactions
3 Allegations of borrowing
4 Adaptations
5 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A starship makes the rounds of Earth's colonies, adhering to a schedule from which it cannot deviate. When six people are reported to be dying of a fever on the frontier planet Woden, it drops off an Emergency Dispatch Ship, a space vessel of limited range, with a pilot and the serum that will cure them. The pilot discovers a stowaway, an eighteen-year-old girl who wants to see her brother, a colonist on Woden. The girl believes that she will have to pay a fine, but the situation is vastly more serious. The ship only has enough fuel for the pilot and his cargo. Her additional mass will cause the ship to run out before it can land, dooming not only them but also the sick colonists. The pilot tries frantically to come up with a solution, but there is no way around the "cold equations." The best he can do is to alter the ship's course enough to give her a single hour's delay, before she must be jettisoned. In that time, she writes letters to her parents and her brother, talks with the pilot about death, and in the last few minutes, is able to speak with her brother on the radio, allowing them to say their goodbyes. When the horizon of the planet breaks up the radio contact, the girl enters the airlock and is ejected into space.

[edit] Reactions

Half a century after its publication, "The Cold Equations" is still recognized as one of the classic stories of science fiction; SF writer and critic James Gunn has called it "The touchstone story for hard-core science fiction." In 1970, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted it as one of the fifteen most significant stories published between 1929 and 1964. When Baen Books published an anthology of Godwin's fiction in 2003, the selected title was The Cold Equations & Other Stories, giving the story title prominence above the complete novel The Survivors published in the same volume.

The story has been widely criticized, however, on the grounds that the central situation is artificially constructed to make the end result seem 'inevitable' when it is not. If the problem of stowaways has been foreseen, as indicated by the quoted portion of the "Interstellar Regulations" that orders pilots to jettison stowaways upon discovery, then why isn't the precaution of checking the cargo spaces for stowaways part of the regular pre-flight checklist, and why is the sole protection against stowaways a rope and a sign? How plausible is it that the EDS would have the supplies closet that the girl hides in, but not possibly have enough mass that can be jettisoned to compensate for her? Why does a flight out of contact with any base, and planning to return to orbit, have so little a safety margin in fuel to begin with? If the shuttle has only just enough fuel to land, how is it supposed to lift off again?

Critic Gary Westfahl has said that because the premise depends upon systems that were built without enough margin for error, the story is good physics, but lousy engineering. Writer Don Sakers's short story "The Cold Solution" (Analog, 1991), which debunks the premise, received the 1992 Analog Analytical Laboratory award as the readers' favorite Analog short story of 1991.

It is important, however, to understand the context the story was published in. Science fiction was still a fairly young field and was still working free from its roots in pulp fiction, where science fiction had merely been an alternate setting for sensationalist and shallow tales of adventure. In the story, the girl addresses the distinction, distinguishing between the frontier she imagined, which was "a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows" and the frontier she discovered, where the danger is real and has proved fatal to her. Another trend that "The Cold Equations" reacted to was the science-fiction sub-genre of the puzzle story, where a disaster would seem to loom up but it was only a matter of time before one of the characters would work out an ingenious application of scientific principles that saved the day. Though pleasing to fans, these stories were seen by those outside science fiction as evidence that the genre was all about escapism. By echoing the conventions of the puzzle story, but focusing on the fates of characters trapped by the puzzle instead of the machinations of solving the puzzle, the story showed critics that science fiction would not always be about lesser subjects than other literature.

[edit] Allegations of borrowing

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Some sources, including Kurt Busiek, have alleged that Godwin essentially took the story from a story published in EC Comics' Weird Science #13, May-June 1952, called "A Weighty Decision," scripted by Al Feldstein. In that story there are three astronauts who are intended to be on the flight, not one, and the additional passenger, a girl that one of the astronauts has fallen in love with, is trapped aboard by a mistake rather than stowing away. As in "The Cold Equations", various measures are proposed but the only one which will not lead to worse disaster is for the unwitting passenger to be jettisoned.

Some regard Godwin's story as so similar to Feldstein's that they regard it as "stolen" or at the very least "swiped". Algis Budrys phrased the matter as "'The Cold Equations' was the best short story that Godwin ever wrote and he didn't write it." However, other sources note that the theme of Feldstein's story is itself strikingly similarly to the story "Precedent", published by E.C. Tubb in 1949; in that story, as the others, a stowaway must be ejected from a spaceship because the fuel aboard is only enough for the planned passengers. Viewed in that light, such sources argue, neither Feldstein nor Godwin "swiped" from the stories that came before, but merely produced three similar yet individual variations on a much older theme, that of an individual being sacrificed so that the rest may survive.

[edit] Adaptations

The story has been adapted for television at least three times: as part of the 1962 British anthology series Out of This World; as part of the 1985-1989 revival of The Twilight Zone ("The Cold Equations") and again in 1996 as a made-for-TV movie on the Sci-Fi Channel. This latter adaptation received a great deal of criticism for altering the central premise: instead of tragedy happening because "the cold equations" of physics are inalterable by human beings, the blame is placed on the greedy corporation employing the pilot. The story was also adapted into an episode of the radio program X Minus One in 1955, and for "Faster Than Light" on CBC Radio's Sunday Showcase in September 2002 (hosted by science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer).