The Cold Equations and Other Stories

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TLDR: Tom Godwin kills a young woman because Campbell wanted a story to tug at 1950's America's mawkish heartstrings.

A ridiculously contrived and improbable set of circumstances lead to a shuttle pilot having to choose between saving a stowaway and completing his mission.

This is a world where the punishment for stowing away is death, yet the public and passengers on interstellar spacecraft are never informed of this, and the doors to shuttle craft are left unlocked and unguarded.

This is a world where every ounce is at a premium on spacecraft, yet shuttle craft are build with enough space in their cabins for someone to hide away, including several comfortably large lockers, yet these shuttles are not searched before launch. Did I show more mention these craft where every ounce is at a premium also have air locks?

This is a world where these craft are provided with exactly enough fuel margin for the pilot to notice he is burning too fast, discover stowaways and dispose of them, but not enough to complete the mission with a stowaway.

This is a world where the pilot is provided with a gun, but no tool with which to dismantle all the dead weight in the cabin, which he could then throw out the airlock.

Finally, this is a world where the shuttle craft sent on an emergency mission, too small for a nuclear reactor so powered by chemical rockets is provided with artificial gravity. Yet no-one has thought of adapting the amazing and lightweight gizmotron providing the artificial gravity or even more amazing mcguffin powering it as a means of propulsion.

And did I mention the moral of this story is that you should take personal responsibility for your actions, not that gross corporate and governmental malfeasance causes avoidable deaths?

EDIT: Reread for some bizarre reason and noticed the bit about artificial gravity. It just makes the story even more outrageously bad. show less

The characterisation is simplistic but this story (first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1954) still affects the reader as a version of a hoary old problem in moral philosophy about making choices when the death of one will save many others although the one has committed no fault.

Well, not exactly. The one is a pretty teenage girl, ordinary but bright, who stowed away on a space ship where the precise calculations required to land a rescue mission safely means that any stowaway must be jettisoned to their death within a very short time frame.

That is a fault, of course -stowing away. The pilot who has to jettison her is certainly not at fault and her fault is only that of naivete, sentiment or ignorance, little more than show more that. Those are qualities that most teenagers have to have as they move towards adulthood.

We might place some fault in the fleet system that makes such tight calculations on rocket fuel although there may be very significant cost reasons involved and there may be considerable fault in the failure of the fleet to mount sufficient security and checks before the ship departed.

So, there may be cost-cutting or negligence involved (standard aspects of big bureaucratic systems) but the blame game changes nothing. There she is. The ship cannot turn back and the pilot will destroy both of them and the scientific group he is helping if he fails to jettison her.

And there we have it ... an extreme but oddly credible acount of moral choice that is no choice at all at the frontier of space. It is a story that undoubtedly reflects the much messier moral choices made all the time in a world war only a decade earlier which haunted the post-war generation.

The inherent message seems to be that highly risky grand enterprises are no places for the naive, ignorant or sentimental and that the innocent are likely to be their victims simply because (and this is the central message) iron laws, scientific laws, dictate the terms of survival at any frontier. show less

Structurally it's a very well written story, but it never questions beyond its own belief system. Why is the system built without safeguards for the "cold equations"? Money. The equation is that we put money over human life and then use "the cold laws of nature" to excuse our behavior. As propaganda, it is 5 stars, one of the best of its kind.

Thought experiment

Imagine that you, your toddler, and your best friend’s toddler are alone at your home.
You suddenly have to take them both in the car - but you have only one toddler car seat.
Which child do you put in it?
(The children are very close in age, height, and weight.)
Don’t argue the “rules”. The point is to force a hypothetical choice, not to list the obvious ways to avoid making it.

I’ve asked many people over the years, parents and non-parents, and almost all have given the same answer: They’d put their friend’s child in the car seat because of the trust and responsibility given to them. Not me. I wouldn’t hesitate to put my child in the car seat. I’d feel guilty and anxious, and drive extra carefully, but show more the love and safety of my child trumps everything else. In a trivial situation (the last cookie in the tin), then yes, the friend’s child may get preferential treatment, but not where safety is concerned.
Moral: You may not want me to babysit your child!

Trolley problem

The car seat dilemma is about potential danger. This short story explores the Trolley Problem, aka Bystander at the Switch, where death is guaranteed. It’s a question of weighing the options: actively causing one death to save several, or doing nothing, and indirectly letting the others die.

“He was not alone.”
It’s a good opening line.

Image: “Unexpected item in the bagging area” (Simpsons version) (Source)

The story is nearly 70 years old, so attitudes to gender characteristics and roles are rather different, but the basic premise of difficult choices when supplies are limited is a staple of sci-fi and other survival stories. This is an early, but unremarkable example: the handwringing is rather drawn out, and the girl is annoying and seems more like eight than eighteen.

“To him and her brother and parents she was a sweet-faced girl in her teens; to the laws of nature she was x, the unwanted factor in a cold equation.”

It’s out of copyright and widely available to read free, online, for example, HERE. show less

'The Cold Equations' - 5 stars, no doubt about that. Best thing the author ever did. A well done short story about morality in the face of unbending necessity. Made into several video treatments, none of them worth a damn, alas.
The rest of his stuff? Decently done, and quite readable, but closer to a solid 3-star rating (ie. good but not great.

Taut and clinical. No sermonising, no moralising yet it really twangs those heartstrings. Ngl, it brought a tear to my eye.

The short story 'The Cold Equations' itself is well written and certainly packs a punch. The end is not what you might expect. Some sources say that the author originally wrote a standard ending, but that the publisher made him change it. The other stories in the book are completely different in style and content. The story The Cold Equations is definitely worth five stars, whereas the other stories are probably around three.