A review by goosemixtapes
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin

4.0

“How did it happen to me so terribly quickly? An hour ago I was on the Stardust, going to Mimir. Now the Stardust is going on without me and I’m going to die and I’ll never see Gerry and Mama and Daddy again—I’ll never see anything again.”

things i read in sophomore year of high school that i maybe should not have been reading in sophomore year of high school when my mental health teetered like a too-tall lego tower, part 4896837484823908

there's a lot to say about the gender politics here (the lines drawn between "man" and "girl" on an age level but also on a gender level; the infantilization of Marilyn) but i'm sure people have written at length about that and it's not what i'm thinking about most. what bugs me about this story is that this

She had violated a man-made law that said KEEP OUT, but the penalty was not for men’s making or desire and it was a penalty men could not revoke. A physical law had decreed: h amount of fuel will power an EDS with a mass of m safely to its destination; and a second physical law had decreed: h amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination.

EDSs obeyed only physical laws, and no amount of human sympathy for her could alter the second law.

isn’t even true. for all this story goes on about nature being cold and uncaring and inevitable, nature didn’t force this society to build an EDS without an error margin of fuel for emergencies, even if that might cost a little extra and reduce a little efficiency, and the fact that this society doesn’t work that way feels like a reflection—intentional or not—of a society determined to cut costs at every corner. this review puts it very well; i'd like to add that i think this story COULD have been a very effective critique of capitalist greed leading to ignorance of regulations, but godwin doesn't really seem interested in that. mostly just interested in talking about how inevitable and cold all of it is and how little nature cares about human lives.

and yet this story STILL gets me. because everything i just said is a societal-level solution. in this specific circumstance, in the world godwin has set up, on this specific spaceship for these 10000 words, there is NOTHING the pilot can do to avert the thing coming. and god that makes me want to rip my hair out