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A cold look at The Cold Equations
01/06/2008 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
One of the best-remembered and often-discussed science fiction stories, says Mark, is The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin from the August, 1954 issue of Astounding Stories. In itself it is a poignant little short story that simply presents a lamentable and unromantic fact. Buy The Cold Equations in the USA - or Buy The Cold Equations in the UK  As Scotty would later say in Star Trek: "Och, ya canno' change the laws o' physics." And that fact has been frustrating science fiction fans ever since 1954.
In the Godwin story a ship is sent into space on a mission of mercy. It has to deliver some serum that is desperately needed to save some lives. If the ship does not reach its destination people will die. So a rocket jockey is sent to deliver the serum. His rocket is stripped down to its essentials. Any more weight and it will crash. But early in the flight the pilot finds that something is wrong. His instruments tell him that there is something un-accounted for on the spaceship.
It turns out to be an eighteen-year-old girl. She has stowed away on the ship for a chance to see her brother. But she did not know that the exacting laws of physics would not let this stripped-down ship get to its destination with her mass on board. That mass has to be removed. After earnest searching for some solution to the problem that will let her live nothing can be found. She has to go to her death. The physics did not allow for any way to rescue her. She has to be released into the vacuum of space.
Apparently even the author wanted to put a happy ending on the story. The hard-nosed editor John Campbell insisted that only a realistic and fatalistic ending would do. The 1950 film Destination Moon has a similar situation, but there the writer gave the first astronauts an out. What if there is no out?
The efforts to save our unfortunate teenage stowaway have gone on for more than half a century. Almost immediately readers wrote in to the magazine with suggestions how to save her. There were all sorts of workarounds that were suggested. Maybe pieces of the ship's structure could be removed to save the weight. That sort of thing. Someone else suggested that the mathematics and the physics was actually not correct and there would have been a way to save her. Many of the suggestions have a ring of desperation. People want to save that one life.
Deborah Wassell wrote a commenting story called "The Cool Equations." Here a way is found to work around the laws of physics. So did Donald Saker in "The Cold Solution." I heard a radio production of the story where they changed the young woman in question to an older one trying to reach her husband. This was apparently used to lessen the poignancy. I suspect the idea was that the marriage had been consummated so somehow it seemed like she was not missing so much.
There was a Sci-Fi Channel adaptation of the story where after all the poignancy it is discovered that the tightness of the situation is somehow the plot of a big, greedy corporation, and things are set up so the girl lives and the corporation is punished for its greed instead. You can definitely see where the filmmakers' prejudices lie. (I have not watched Sci-Fi Channel's since then, but I am told second-hand that their movies have gotten even worse. Is that really conceivable?)
Well, perhaps the physics of the story was faulty. Godwin might not have been sufficiently adept scientifically to execute his premise. Maybe the ship would have been engineered with more of a margin for error, but it is clear what Godwin's and Campbell's premise was intended to be. There is a dilemma when the lesser of two evils is to send a nearly innocent young woman to her death. Whether Godwin's physics was right or not is really beside the point. Any revisionism on the story is really an attempt to dodge the idea of the story. Finding ways to save the hapless teenager is really an evasion of the premise and a quibble rather than a clever solution. The truth is that life is hard and bad things happen. The writers of STAR TREK who refuse to accept that no-win situations actually exist are in denial.
The whole idea behind the Kobayashi Maru subplot of Star Trek II is that Kirk can always find a way to win in any no-win situation. He just needs some good (or bad) writers to get him around no-win situations. It is an idea that cheapened the series in exactly the way that John Campbell refused to let Tom Godwin cheapen Astounding with a happy ending where it did not belong.
The response that the story has gotten may be more revealing than was intended. I think there is a certain degree of crypto-sexism in the reaction to the story. Before, during, and after 1954, men have been dying in science fiction stories. I cannot think of any man who has died in a story who has gotten anywhere near the same sympathetic reaction the teen gets in this story. The fact that the person in question is female and young (and presumably in a 1954 story an eighteen-year-old would be a virgin) is what makes the story so poignant for readers. And I wonder how many readers of the story pictured a less attractive eighteen-year-old.
There are not too many, I would guess. Few readers even care that the situation was of her own making in a setting where she presumably should have known better. How much reaction would there have been if the stowaway had been a 44-year-old male? We like to pretend that we have egalitarian values in our society, but this too is denial. If a seven-year-old blond girl is kidnapped it is a national news story. If it were a 37-year-old Hispanic male nobody would care.
Mark R. Leeper
(c) Mark R. Leeper 2008
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