The Cold Equations

What Hacker News says

1. tombertOct 2024
   Not a "book", but a short story: The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin.

   I read that story when I was pretty young, and it's shaped my opinion on cold, uncaring bureaucracies in a way that I'm not sure anything else could.

   thread
2. fractallyteJun 2020
   Then definitely track down Macmillan's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series:

   https://www.librarything.com/publisherseries/Macmillan%27s+B...

   and:

   http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?1107

   Think Roadside Picnic x 100, because that's the quantity of really excellent science fiction stories and ideas you can expect.

   A free (but bad) translation of 'Self Discovery' by Vladimir Savchenko is available if you search. I used this, together with my own physical copy, to make a proper ebook - let me know if you want a copy; I can't locate it at this moment...

   And, in my opinion, the finest science fiction short story ever written (apologies to Asimov's Nightfall and Godwin's The Cold Equations): Nine Minutes, by Genrikh Altov https://www.altshuller.ru/world/eng/science-fiction4.asp

   Show morethread
3. RetricOct 2020
   I find it odd that people tend to think that way about A Fire Upon the Deep. I rank it as some of the softest science fiction I have ever read. It’s a decent story, but falls heavily into the science as magic trap.

   Contrast it with say The Cold Equations which as I recall has FTL and everything else is bog standard physics and yet it was still criticized as unrealistic from an engendering standpoint. You can’t make that kind of criticism of A Fire Upon the Deep because everything is handwaved.

   Show morethread
4. dsr_Oct 2020
   /The Cold Equations/ is lambasted for being a story that's set up to make a point in ways that completely contradict any sort of good engineering practice. Given the situation as described, the simplest ordinary precautions would prevent the problem from happening.

   0th level obviousness: weight is at a premium on the ship, yet there is a closet with space for a small person and a solid closet door that makes it a hiding location. If there is a need for storage space, netting is a much more sensible protection mechanism than a door.

   There are literally dozens of similar objections, including those made by Tom Goddard, the author, who explained that he was writing specifically at the direction of John W. Campbell, the editor.

   Show morethread
5. rsynnottOct 2020
   > The Cold Equations

   I never liked this very much, because the whole "we can only take exactly this mass, and an extra 60kg or whatever will doom us" thing is such an obvious design and/or process flaw. If you really are dependent on that (though I don't think the author made the case that they were, convincingly), you need to ensure it (by, for instance, weighing the craft); it's ridiculously optimistic to think that someone never accidentally leaves a piece of equipment lying around, say.

   And even if you accept the absurd premise, it still doesn't work; the stowaway would presumably have used consumables (oxygen, if nothing else), and if you're that weight constrained you won't be carrying excess consumables anyway, so you're still doomed even if you lose the stowaway.

   If anything, it's the same thing that bothers me about some 'softer' sci-fi; take a story you want to tell, and construct some completely implausible rules to make it work. To add insult to injury here, it's... not a very good story, IMO. Also, I believe Clarke hinted at a similar scenario in Islands in the Sky, published two years previously, though it didn't actually _happen_ there.

   Show morethread
6. svieiraAug 2020
   You should really read The Count to the Eschaton Sequence by John C. Wright. The Cold Equations is another answer to the question you pose.
   thread