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"The Cold Equations" -- context
Nov. 1st, 2013 12:19 pmMy comment at Kalimac's got so long I'm putting it here too.
http://kalimac.livejournal.com/692801.html?style=mine&nc=5#comments
I've seen a good, semi-scholarly page on TCE which I'm too lazy to search for again, and some other good views of it, ditto. I admire it as brilliant in context and wish people would stop falling so deeply into its text. Dudes, it's just a STORY.
As to a concocted scenario, well, yes. The author kept submitting versions where they found a solution and everyone was saved. Upbeat puzzle stories of that kind were popular at that time -- and ALL such puzzles ended upbeat. It was John Campbell who kept shooting down the author's solutions, plugging those loopholes, and insisting on the ending that eventually got published. The patches and re-writes show. So yes, contrived.
In context of those traditional upbeat puzzle stories -- this was a brilliant reply to them, a breaking of the mold. An amazing shock. (Like the first detective story where the narrator done it.) That was one of Campbell's purposes.
More specifically, according to Campbell's preface for it, the purpose was showing that:
“The Frontier is a strange place – and a frontier is not always easy to recognize. It may lie on the other side of a simple door marked ‘No admittance’ – but it is always deadly dangerous.”
I've seen this following a sensible discussion about the difference between a frontier and a ... tenderfoot-safe area. It's not that the frontier is full of outlaws. It's that the frontier is jury-rigged. Things just barely work, because someone made them up in a hurry out in a windstorm with bailing wire and the wrong tools and just for one purpose at a time. Everything was quick and dirty code. There was no time to annotate and re-label and add error-trapping. You had to do work-arounds, if you knew how. Nobody was there to tell you anything. If someone had bothered to put up a 'Danger' sign, it must have been an extreme danger -- because every surviving frontiersman already knew that EVERYTHING is dangerous.
The successive patches to the story are just what you'd expect in a frontier. Nobody had time to re-design the craft for the safety of stowaways. They barely had time to issue a blaster, and put an errata sheet in the regulations.
The craft was contrived. The FRONTIER is contrived.
http://kalimac.livejournal.com/692801.html?style=mine&nc=5#comments
I've seen a good, semi-scholarly page on TCE which I'm too lazy to search for again, and some other good views of it, ditto. I admire it as brilliant in context and wish people would stop falling so deeply into its text. Dudes, it's just a STORY.
As to a concocted scenario, well, yes. The author kept submitting versions where they found a solution and everyone was saved. Upbeat puzzle stories of that kind were popular at that time -- and ALL such puzzles ended upbeat. It was John Campbell who kept shooting down the author's solutions, plugging those loopholes, and insisting on the ending that eventually got published. The patches and re-writes show. So yes, contrived.
In context of those traditional upbeat puzzle stories -- this was a brilliant reply to them, a breaking of the mold. An amazing shock. (Like the first detective story where the narrator done it.) That was one of Campbell's purposes.
More specifically, according to Campbell's preface for it, the purpose was showing that:
“The Frontier is a strange place – and a frontier is not always easy to recognize. It may lie on the other side of a simple door marked ‘No admittance’ – but it is always deadly dangerous.”
I've seen this following a sensible discussion about the difference between a frontier and a ... tenderfoot-safe area. It's not that the frontier is full of outlaws. It's that the frontier is jury-rigged. Things just barely work, because someone made them up in a hurry out in a windstorm with bailing wire and the wrong tools and just for one purpose at a time. Everything was quick and dirty code. There was no time to annotate and re-label and add error-trapping. You had to do work-arounds, if you knew how. Nobody was there to tell you anything. If someone had bothered to put up a 'Danger' sign, it must have been an extreme danger -- because every surviving frontiersman already knew that EVERYTHING is dangerous.
The successive patches to the story are just what you'd expect in a frontier. Nobody had time to re-design the craft for the safety of stowaways. They barely had time to issue a blaster, and put an errata sheet in the regulations.
The craft was contrived. The FRONTIER is contrived.
