Introduction
Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” initially published in August 1954, is a widely distributed, contentious, and oft-reprinted work of science fiction. Science fiction is often defined as the literature of ideas, but the ideas behind “The Cold Equations” depend on one’s assumptions about the genre. If one approaches the story from the perspective of purely hard science fiction, one encounters a world of material determinism in which any moral or ethical obligation is overridden by the laws of nature; however, these natural laws are merely a convenient mask that obscures a systemic blindness to individual responsibility. If one reads “The Cold Equations” against the grain of hard science fiction, one sees the sad story in which people are able to rationalize murder, and reader must decide whether they are willing to be complicit in the death of an innocent.
Synopsis Story
The story’s setting is in the early years of interplanetary exploration and settlement. While interplanetary travel is expensive, it is not overpriced. Large liners visit the core colony planet; planned visits to lesser colonies are expensive and uncommon. Unplanned deliveries by deploying Emergency Dispatch Ship (EDS) are ultra-compact and foldable ships with the absolute minimum configuration (Godwin 1). They are dropped with the bare minimum fuel necessary to land the pilot, cargo, and craft. EDS do not have enough fuel to complete their mission in the case of a stowaway.
The tale begins with the pilot, Barton, discovering a stowaway in the EDS ship’s cargo locker. The pilot coaxes the person out and discovers she is an 18-years-old girl (Godwin 3). He calls the liner that dropped him to see whether there is a way to avoid her being ejected, but there is none. The pilot warns her that she either dies or he lets the other lives perish since the flight cannot make it to Woden to deliver fever serum because of the excess weight. She is granted an hour before course adjustment to send messages to her parents and to call her brother, a colonist on the destination planet. Although the young woman is humanized through her youthful appearance and charming stories about her brother and childhood pet, she ultimately enters the airlock on her own to be ejected by Barton. This literary work is based on the conflict of human feelings and inexorable physical laws. The author presents especially vividly the mechanical details of the device and operation of the spacecraft, which is of undoubted interest.
Strengths of the Story
The story lulls the reader into a false sense of security, but ultimately subverts the reader’s expectation by refusing to provide the anticipated happy ending. The story seems like a conventional pulp story until the very end in which one’s expectation of a happy ending is denied. The first and most trivial aspect is that it might be taken as a story validating a collection of societal values or as a propaganda work. However, this strength does not constitute a guarantee in and of itself. Regardless of the content, history can both find a lively response among readers and go down in history, or be forgotten as empty. Contradictory societal attitudes on the part of readers are at the heart of many debates. Thus, the social conflict that can be found in history is one of the strengths of this work. The story is taken for granted as idle mindless entertainment, and that such texts reinforce social values in subtle and manipulative ways.
The second reason is that it is exceptional in its merits in terms of the plot. The claim is that it meticulously follows pulp fiction conventions up to the typical happy ending. Then, with the reader poised to rescue the deus ex machina, the short story follows harsh logic to a terrible conclusion. The ending, however, forces one to revisit one’s assumptions and question why and how one read the story as one did. A negative or positive perception of the story should also be based on the perception of the temporal context and the cultural features associated with it. Expectations from the narrative, and their potential deception, may lie directly in ignoring significant aspects of the science fiction tradition of that period. Nemesis uncompromisingly dooms the characters via cold calculations. It makes no difference if the final agent is bureaucratic ineptitude; tragedy retains its power.
The most typical response of those disturbed by the narrative is to refute the grim ending by imagining alternatives. For example, people point to all of the other objects that could have been jettisoned instead of the girl. There are writing tablets, a blaster, clothing, and loose equipment clog the scenes shown. Others point out that although the EDS is intended to be compact and foldable, it is represented as vast and airy, with enough room to stroll about and a large cargo closet to accommodate a stowaway. In one gruesome variation, the pilot and girl chop off limbs before jettisoning them! In summary, there is cause to question that there were no alternatives. This is a normal response since acts and outcomes that seem unavoidable often are not. With such examples, one might argue that the story reinforces the ways in which authorities justify their actions. Authorities often excuse their actions by arguing that they are essential, which does not hold up under thorough scrutiny.
On the other hand, some argue that those who seek alternative endings simply want to read the story as science fiction. For example, Tom Shippey (140) argues that the story serves as a “litmus test for science fiction fans”. If the reader does not comprehend and appreciate the message of science fiction, it is unlikely that he will enjoy it. He states that the story’s message is an unquestionable fact. This is the zealot’s, the genuine believer’s, language. Shippey phrased it bluntly but extremely eloquently when he said that “the narrative had one central point: dumb people perish in space” (Shippey 140). In many respects, it seems as if admirers and defenders view the narrative as a palimpsest, a canvas onto which they project agendas that have nothing to do with the story itself.
The themes highlighted in the narrative are more nuanced and intricate than they seem, which explains much of the disagreement about the story. The story’s apparent premise is that the cosmos is not our friend; it is ruled by impersonal equations that care not whether we live or die (Hamer 153). Within civilization, we have built a protected environment in which we may live by the rules of good and wrong, an environment in which artificial administrative sanctions deal with violations of norms (Shippey 140).
However, we cannot altogether avoid the cold mathematics and amoral judgments of life and death. There will be moments and places when civilization will be unable to shelter us from the cold equations that control our destiny. As is the case with our hero, her death was a tragedy for the pilot, her brother, and all affected by her predicament; the tragedy was made more poignant since she died not because of any moral failing on her part but rather as a result of unwittingly entering the cold equations (Baron 203). Civilization conditioned her to accept punishment for rule violations via discipline that was proportionate to her level of responsibility.
This argument is not incredibly innovative in and of itself. Individuals often make harmless errors and incur unanticipated costs as a result. Such tragic stories are often repeated; they are the fabric of existence. However, this is not a narrative about the cosmos being uncaring. Two aspects of the story distinguish it from that category. The first is that someone is assassinated purposefully; the second is that the authority of physics is claimed to legitimize the assassination (Baron 203). The narrative describes situations of critical choice in favor of abandoning ideals in order to survive.
The tale clarifies and explains the situation. There is no doubt about the girl’s survival; her demise is predetermined. One reason for opposing the narrative is that it pushes for involuntary sacrifice by establishing an obligated scenario. One may argue that this is fiction and that one of the vision’s functions is to clarify difficulties by eliminating the inherent ambiguities of reality. In this situation, the narrative presents a long-term debate between the supporters of scarcity of environment as a driver of human evolution and those who believe in the ideals of “utopian forms of stable societies” (Baxter 16). Although the logic of the story’s ending is often criticized, it is the best of the potentially possible conclusions to the story.
The problem with this narrative is that, according to the internal data, the hero did not die due to nature’s cold equations; she was a victim of criminal bureaucracy. Neither the author, the editor nor the lauding reviewers regarded this as a sign of genre problems. The story’s problem is that a government’s administration failure is implicitly presented as natural law (Godwin 6). It is a widespread error, and one that permeates our culture. Nonetheless, one expects and demands more from self-proclaimed intellectual literature. The crucial issue is that no significant effort is made to prevent stowaways from entering.
Official regulation requires that stowaways be executed, a phrase the narrative avoids, and that any stowaway detected in an EDS is promptly discarded (Godwin 5). The presence of the legislation shows that stowaways are not an uncommon occurrence, and one may infer those substantial efforts are taken to deter persons from stowing away. The pilot does not do a regular check for stowaways and feels no regret for not having done so. Except for an uninformative warning, no attempt is taken to keep stowaways out.
A bureaucrat somewhere along the chain of command formulated this rule and set the processes that enabled this catastrophe. One can counter that these are essentially structural defects, unintentional elements of the story’s structure unrelated to the central argument. This is not the case since the standard sci-fi narrative structure involves making difficult decisions in the face of cosmic threats, which creates the main story drivers (Rey 136). The narrative demands a simple, lethal door; it also requires an innocent, oblivious individual to pass through it. Nature abundantly presents us with such doorways, and they are often traversed. However, humans made this door — the storyline requires it. It must be unlabeled in any meaningful sense and freely accessible to everybody. If the individuals who build that door lack a feeling of responsibility, the tale does not exist.
There are some unexpected explanations for how things were put up in the first place. If the pilot does not own a weapon and has no standard policy, the issue gets very complicated. The pilot must coerce the female into the airlock. Without a policy and directives, the pilot has moral responsibility for her death (Baron 203). They act as tools that relieve the pilot of responsibility for personal choice and attributed it to the cold equations (Rey 137). Additionally, there is a severe difficulty if measures are implemented, and the girl joins by deftly dodging them; the onus is shifted away from the cold equations and onto the girl. The dramatic impact stems from the fact that she is innocent in every other way; society has failed her by failing to educate her about cold equations instead of teaching her that crime and punishment are exclusively human cultural matters.
As shown in this narrative, the administrators’ and pilots’ attitudes are responsible for handling a difficult situation safely. On the other hand, they feel no commitment or take no responsibility beyond erecting a sign and issuing a blaster with instructions to kill (Baron 203). The pilot is willing to do heinous acts, such as murder if his bosses require it. His bosses need it of him because they are unconcerned, probably because doing anything useful does not occur to them.
It is unlikely that Godwin considered the problems raised in the indictment. This is irrelevant; it is a well-established tenet of criticism that work should stand on its own once created and published. It may include ideas and pose concerns that the author did not consider. According to the accusation, the authorities in the scenario were tacitly guilty of fundamental moral obtusenes. One must think if this is a flaw in the plot, which one may say it is not; instead, it is a strength rather than a weakness. No individual or organization is without flaws. It is a cliché, a part of the human condition, that individuals behave in ways and make judgments that do not hold up to scrutiny.
Individuals might have the best of intentions and yet make grave errors. The story’s situation seemingly demonstrates how bureaucracies make poor judgments (Shippey 140). The critical point is that policies are determined at a remove from their execution in bureaucracies. As a result, those who enforce those policies are absolved of moral responsibility for their actions due to their adherence to standard operating procedures. Thus, concisely, the argument is about how decent people with good intentions can bring about poor outcomes unwittingly.
Conclusion
When “The Cold Equations” was published, the realm of genre pulp fiction was severely confined. To earn a livelihood, authors had to write a lot rapidly. The audience sought straightforward, dramatic narratives. Such situations do not lend themselves to psychological and intellectual profundity. Due to the profusion of ideas, they were often treated schematically and suggestively rather than examined in detail. Similarly, that was the case with “The Cold Equations.” Shortcuts, allusions to unarticulated norms, are ubiquitous. The hyperspace cruiser resembles a late-nineteenth-century steamer traversing the equivalent of England to India, replete with Indian staff.
In golden age science fiction, the conventions of a thousand Westerns are wholesale imported and repackaged under new labels. The concept of pilots equipped with handguns to assassinate stowaways is ludicrous, explicable only if one accepts that the powers that be are morally obtuse and not very clever – an assumption that is unfortunately all too conceivable. The narrative reaffirms preconceived notions and ideas, which is not a negative attribute. The narrative makes the case that killing one’s fellow human beings is necessary and unavoidable. This is a fiction we need since one of the things those human beings sometimes do is murder one another.
While the girl is the story’s apparent tragic hero, the true sad hero is the pilot who is forced to murder someone he would prefer not to kill. The tragedy is that he sees no problem in his assumptions or those he serves until the defect is disclosed, at which point he is genuinely powerless. More sadly, there are no reflections; he knows something has gone wrong but cannot articulate why. Although some argue the cold logical death is an appropriate lesson, it is rather something that reinforces blind acceptance of authority and absolution from evil action.
Works Cited
Baron, Christian. “The Final Frontier: Survival Ethics in Extreme Living Conditions as Portrayed in Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations and Ridley Scott’s Alien.” Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition, Edited by Christian Baron, Peter Nicolai Halvorsen, and Christine Cornea, Springer, 2017, pp. 195-205.
Baxter, S. “The Cold Equations: Extraterrestrial Liberty in Science Fiction.” The Meaning of Liberty Beyond Earth, Edited by Charles S. Cockell, Springer, 2015, pp. 13-31.
Godwin, Tom. The Cold Equations & Other Stories. Baen Books, 2003.
Hamer, Russ. “Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition.” Science Fiction Film and Television, Edited by Christian Baron, Peter Halvorsen and Christine Cornea, Liverpool University Press, 2020, pp. 152-154.
Rey, Lester. The World of Science Fiction, 1926-1976: The History of a Subculture. Taylor & Francis, 2021.
Shippey, T A. Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2019.