Archive for the ‘Tom Godwin’ Category
- In: Tom Godwin
- 6 Comments
Hey, so sorry to tell you, but it already looks like 2020 is going to be a thinky year for me. Thought experiments, taking things apart to see how they work and then trying to put them back together, connecting things that are really obscurely connected, asking questions and not caring about the answer, and then getting bored and moving onto the next thinky thing.
Let’s start with a famous short story called “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin, published in 1954. The story is available to read free online, at Lightspeed Magazine.
If you’re not familiar with this story, you’ll want to go read it at Lightspeed before reading the rest of this post, because there are major spoilers ahead. If you liked it so much you want to own it in print, Baen Books published a nice collection of Godwin’s short fiction*. I’m not at all ashamed to admit that “The Cold Equations” is the only short story in the collection that I’ve read.
“The Cold Equations” gets a lot of discussion because of how cruel the physics of the story is, does the stowaway deserve what happened to her, engineering that’s too stupid to be negligent, etc. Those reasons, and plenty more, is why we still enjoy talking about this story more than 60 years after it was written.
If any of that sounds interesting, I recommend this excellent post (warning, major spoilers) on Tor.com by James Davis Nicoll. The Wikipedia page for “The Cold Equations” also has some interesting material about how when editor John Campbell bought the story in the early 50s, he pushed the author to change the story so that it didn’t have a happy ending.
Many articles and think pieces online like to take this story apart because of, to misquote Derek Kunsken’s The Quantum Magician completely out of context, “the math was inescapable”. (damn do I love that line)
To me, “The Cold Equations” is nothing more than The Trolley Problem thought experiment with very thin veneer of a plot. What’s the trolley problem? To steal directly from Wikipedia:
And since you are barreling down the tracks at the speed of a well, speeding train, you only have a few seconds to make your decision. nice, huh?
For a more entertaining introduction to The Trolley Problem, I recommend you watch season 1 and 2 of The Good Place**. they have a little too much fun visualizing that you have a split second to make your decision.
Anyway, what does any of this have to do with “The Cold Equations”?
SPOILERS , if you haven’t already read the short story:
the Little Red Reviewer 
Recent Comments