The Cold Equations - A criticial study
Richard Harter
In 1977 I wrote an article criticizing the quality of SF as a
"literature of ideas" which discussed the story, The Cold
Equations. The thrust of the article was that the story has deep
flaws which were ignored by the superficial acceptance of the SF
community. In 1997 I reprinted the article as a web page and
then posted it in usenet discussion groups. This provoked a
lively discussion. In response to the points raised in the
discussion I created a replacement for the original page.
I do not propose to debate the points raised herein. However
comments and suggestions for improvment are welcome.
Introduction
Synopsis of the story
Strengths of the story
Common Reactions
The Thesis of the Story
The Indictment
The Two Sides of Responsibility
It's not about stupidity
The myth of the frontier
A defense to the indictment
Conclusion
Apendix I: Detailed Analysis of Authority
Selected quotations
Immediate inferences
Implied Social Attitudes
Appendix II: It is rocket science
Appendix III: Selected Quotations from the Usenet
Discussion
Introduction
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin was first published in the
August 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, pp 62-84,
and was illustrated by Kelly Freas. It is both popular and
controversial; it is one of the most frequently reprinted stories
in SF.
In The Ascent Of Wonder: The Evolution Of Hard SF (TOR
1994), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer the
editors say:
"Here is one of the most popular and
controversial hard sf stories of the last fifty
years, a story that stacks the deck and then plays
with the reader's emotions with carefully
juxtaposed cliches that imply a deus ex machina -
then frustrates that false expection......Godwin's
story angered many readers when it appeared in
the fifties, nearly all of whom wanted the problem
solved by violating some scientific principle or
law."
The editors go on to quote James Gunn:
"If the reader doesn't understand it or appreciate
what it is trying to say about humanity and its
relationship to its environment, then that reader
isn't likely to appreciate science fiction. If the
reader keeps objecting...then that reader isn't
reading the story correctly."
Science fiction has been described as a literature of ideas, a
literary arena in which the idea is hero. This may well be true.
Too often, however, it is a flawed literature of ideas, marked by
shoddy treatments received with uncritical enthusiasm. The
Cold Equations has been cited an instance of the "literature of
ideas" at its best.
In the original article I argued that the story is no such thing
but rather that it is an example of systemic blindness to morally
obtuse assumptions. This argument is considered in detail
below. Given that, one asks: Why is the story so ardently
defended - and attacked? Why has the story made such an
impression?
Synopsis of the Story
The story is set in the early days of interstellar exploration and
settlement. Interstellar travel is expensive but not prohibitively
so. Large liners make regular scheduled trips to the main
colony worlds; scheduled stops at minor colonies are very
expensive and are not regularly made. Unscheduled deliveries to
colony worlds are made by dropping off EDS (Emergency
Dispatch Ship) vehicles. These are minimum configuration
ships, small and collapsible. They are dropped off with the
minimum amount of fuel necessary for landing pilot, cargo, and
ship. These ships do not carry enough fuel to land if there is a
stowaway. Hence the policy is that stowaways must be jettisoned.
To make sure that no one stows away the EDS compartment is
marked with a sign:
UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
KEEP OUT!
The pilot carries a blaster and is under strict orders to jettison
stowaways.
The story begins with the discovery by an EDS pilot that there is
a stowaway aboard his ship concealed in the cargo closet. He
forces the person out and discovers that she is an 18 year old
woman. If the stowaway had been a man he would have been ready
to shoot on sight; a young woman is a different matter. He calls
the liner which dropped him to see if there is an alternative to
jettisoning her. There isn't. He explains the situation to her;
either she dies or she, he, and a number of colonists will die.
She is granted an hour until course change to write letters to
her parents and to call her brother who is a colonist on the
destination planet. The situation is quite dramatic. The ship is
carrying fever serum for the colonists. The young woman is
appealing; she reminisces about her kitten when she was a
young child. In the end she enters the airlock voluntarily and is
jettisoned. The final lines of the story are:
It was not yet time to resume deceleration and he
waited while the ship dropped endlessly downward
with him and the drives purred softly. He saw that
the white hand of the supplies closet temperature
gauge was on zero. A cold equation had been
balanced and he was alone on the ship. Something
shapeless and ugly was hurrying ahead of him,
going to Woden where its brother was waiting
through the night, but the empty ship still lived
for a little while with the presence of the girl who
had not known about the forces that killed with
neither hatred nor malice. It seemed, almost, that
she still sat small amd bewildered and frightened
on the metal box beside him, her words echoing
hauntingly clear in the void she had left behind
her:
I didn't do anything to die for - I didn't do
anything -
Strengths of the story
The Cold Equations has literary faults; the characters are
cardboard; the writing is wooden; there are holes in the story; it
is contrived; and it is maudlin. None of this matters; the
strength of the story does not rest in its literary qualities. If the
story's fame (and the reactions to it) depended on its literary
qualities it would long ago have gone entirely unremarked.
Indeed, people who object to the story seldom mention its
literary defects. None-the-less, it is a popular story which has
excited attention and interest over the years. The story has some
strengths which may account for its staying power. Four spring
to mind.
The first and least of these is that it can be read as a parable
affirming a suite of social attitudes - in short, a propaganda
piece. In its own right this guarantees nothing. There is no
shortage of stories grinding one axe or another; most such
stories are consumed and discarded like empty mind candy
wrappers. Differing social attitudes on the part of readers are,
however, the root of much of the controversies.
The second is that is a tour de force. The proposition is that it
carefully follows the pulp stories of the time up to the traditional
happy ending and, with the reader prepared for saving deus ex
machina, the story follows grim logic to arrive at an unhappy
ending. In other words it is a SF version of The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd. Too much can be made of this thesis. The pulps
(including ASF) of the 1950's were not nearly as hidebound as
legend would have them being. Even granting the thesis, it is
only a tour de force of violated expectations by the purported
standards of the 50's.
The third is that it is a relatively pure presentation of a thesis.
In this regard the various literary defects are more merits than
faults; neither characterization nor style deflect attention from
the thesis.
The fourth is that it is a true tragedy in the sense of the Greek
tragedy. Nemesis in the form of "the cold equations" implacably
dooms the actors. It scarcely matters that the ultimate agent is
bureaucratic stupidity; the force of tragedy remains the same. I
surmise that this is the root of the enduring vitality of the story.
Perhaps the real tragedy (to use the term loosely) of the story is
that no better story could have been written given the
circumstances of its composition.
Common Reactions
It is well known that Godwin wrote The Cold Equations at John
W. Campbell's behest and that Campbell dictated the ending. It
was commonplace at the time (or at least has been claimed to be
commonplace) for stories to be resolved by a superscience deus
ex machina to produce a happy ending. Campbell wanted to stand
that convention on its head, to print a story which followed the
formulas but didn't cheat on the ending. He wanted to upset
readers by violating their expectations. He succeeded.
The most common reaction of people upset by the story is to
attempt to avoid the ending. In this regard they were assisted by
the author who was quite sloppy about closing the obvious hole,
i.e., if enough mass is jettisoned, the girl doesn't have to be. The
scenes depicted are cluttered with superfluous mass - writing
tablets, a blaster, clothes, and loose equipment. The EDS is
supposed to be small and collapsible, yet it is depicted as being
large and roomy with space for a cargo closet large enough to
hold a stowaway and room enough to walk around. One gory
variant of this has the pilot and girl hacking off limbs with the
blaster and jettisoning them! In short, there are grounds for
reasonable doubt that there were no alternatives.
This reaction is natural. Often enough, actions and results
which are presented as being "inevitable" aren't inevitable at
all. The "impossible" often turns out to be possible if you don't
give up. More than that, authorities often justify their actions
with claims that said actions are necessary - claims which do
not stand up well under close examination.
Sometimes, however, the "impossible" really is impossible. An
object of the story is to drive this truth home; if the details are
not entirely convincing that is a fault of the construction but not
of the thesis.
The reactions of enthusiasts are of more interest. Consider
Gunn's remark. In effect, to him the story is a litmus test for
the SF reader. If the reader doesn't "understand" it and
appreciate its message then SF probably isn't for him. (Ted
Sturgeon supposedly strongly objected to the story - perhaps
Sturgeon didn't "appreciate science fiction".) More than that, if
the reader keeps objecting then the reader isn't reading it
properly. In short, he is saying that the message of the story is a
great truth which is not open to question. This is the language
of the zealot, of the true believer.
One of the more common reactions of defenders was put crudely
but quite eloquently by Earl Colby Pottinger who said: "The
story has *ONLY* one main point stupid people die in space!"
Variant of this reaction are common.
Another common reaction is to treat objections as necessarily
being a manifestation of bleeding heart liberalism. Brian
Pickrell's "This, of course, goes against modern doctrine
which states that if you do something stupid and get killed,
someone else is responsible and you are entitled to sue them."
is representative.
In many ways it would seem that, for enthusiasts and defenders,
the story is a palimpest, a canvas on which they project agendas
that do not necessarily have much to do with the story.
The Thesis of the Story
The issues raised in the story are rather more complex and
subtle than they seem which accounts for much of the
controversy about the story. The apparent thesis of this story is
that the universe is not our friend, that it governed by cold
equations that are indifferent as to whether we live or die.
Within civilization we have created a protected environment in
which we can live by right and wrong, an environment where the
violation of regulations is dealt with by man made administrative
punishments. But we cannot escape entirely the cold equations
and their amoral judgements of life and death. There are
inevitably times and places when civilization will not protect us,
when our fate is governed by the cold equations. Respect them
and live; ignore them and die.
Thus it is with our heroine. Her death was a tragedy, to her, to
the pilot, to her brother, and to all those people that her situation
touched, a tragedy made poignant because she died, not for any
moral fault of her own but rather because she had inadvertly
stumbled into the cold equations. Civilization prepared her to
accept punishment for transgression of the rules with
punishment calibrated to culpability. That is the law of
civilization; that is fair; that is just. And the tragedy is that the
universe is neither fair nor just. It does not care. It just is.
There is nothing particularly novel about this thesis in its own
right. People often enough make apparently innocent mistakes
and pay unexpected prices for having done so. The tales of such
fatal errors are recounted often enough; they are the stuff of
life.
This story is not, however, simply about the universe not caring.
There are two features of the story which take it out of that
category. The first is that is someone is deliberately killed; the
second is that the authority of physics is invoked to justify this
slaying.
The story presents a "lifeboat" scenario, a situation in which
someone must die in order that the rest may live. Some
examples: Survivors in a lifeboat without enough food and water,
the Donner party, and arctic explorers short on supplies. In
practice these situations are usually ambiguous in that there is
no certainty about the number of people that must be sacrificed.
Perhaps no sacrifice is necessary; perhaps no sacrifice is
enough - all must die anyway. The inherent ambiguity makes for
a variety of choices, e.g., unity - "we're all in it together",
voluntary sacrifice, triage, and involuntary sacrifice.
The story sharpens and simplifies the situation. There is no
ambiguity about whether the girl can survive; her death is
foreordained. One of the impulses for objecting to the story is
the suspicion that it argues for involuntary sacrifice by setting
up a situation where it is obligatory. A counterpoint is that this
is fiction and that one of the roles of fiction is to sharpen issues
by removing the normal ambiguities of real life.
A key to the story and to the controvesies that swirl around lies
in the phrase "... the law of the frontier, must, of necessity, be as
hard and relentless that gave them birth." In effect, the story is
a fictional argument for "hard and relentless law"; the cold
equations of physics and the cold equations of marginal
existence (the "frontier") dictate cold and harsh law.
The Indictment
The trouble with this story is this: From the internal evidence of
this story the heroine did not die because of the cold equations of
nature; she was the victim of criminal bureaucratic stupidity.
That neither the author nor the editor nor the critics who
praised the story perceived this speaks to flaws in the genre.
The flaw in the story is that a failure in government, in
administration, is tacitly treated as though it were a law of
nature. It is a common fault, one that is pervasive in our society.
But one expects more, one deserves more, from a self professed
"literature of ideas".
The important point is that no serious effort is made to keep
stowaways out. It is official policy that stowaways be killed, a
term that the story avoids. Paragraph L, Section 8 of
Interstellar Regulations:
Any stowaway discovered in an EDS shall be
jettisoned immediately following discovery.
To enforce this policy the pilot is issued a blaster with which to
execute any hapless stowaway in the event that said stowaway
does not voluntarily jettison themselves.
This is serious business. The very existence of the regulation
implies that stowaways are not an unheard of problem. You
might suppose that a serious effort is made to avoid the
possibility of people stowing away. You would be wrong. The pilot
does not make a routine check for stowaways and feels no
remorse for not having done so. No effort is made to keep
stowaways out except for an uninformative sign. Nothing stops
the young woman from just wandering on board. (A detailed
analysis is given below.)
Somewhere in the chain of command there is a bureaucracy that
framed this regulation and established the procedures that
allowed this tragedy to happen. The procedures are, to put it
bluntly, preposterous. But how is it that the author produces
this preposterous situation? How is it that the editor, arguably
one of the best in the history field does not notice this? How is it
that this story is widely praised, widely reprinted, and widely
cited as making a fundamental point with no-one noticing this
rather glaring flaw?
One might raise the objection that these are merely flaws of
construction, accidental features in the writing of the story that
are irrelevant to the main point. This is not so.
The theme of the story is not merely the dangers of space or
even that hard decisions sometimes have to be made John
Campbell prefaced the story with the blurb:
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.
The story requires that there be a simple deadly door; it
requires that an innocent, ignorant person walk through that
door. Nature provides us such "doors" in abundance and people
walk through them all the time. This door, however, is a door
created by human beings - the plot demands it. More than that it
has to be unmarked in any meaningful way and open for anyone
who ignorantly walks through. The story does not exist if the
people who create that door have a sense of responsibility.
There are dramatic reasons for setting things up the way they
were. If the pilot does not have a pistol and there is no standard
policy then the situation becomes very sticky. The pilot has to
force the girl into the airlock (er, we have an airlock in this
minimum configuration vehicle - my goodness) either by force
or by coercive persuasion. Without a policy and orders the onus
of moral responsibility for killing her falls on the pilot. They
provide a necessary distancing for the pilot - he can kill, not as
an individual making a personal and hard decision, but as an
agent of the cold equations.
There is another dramatic issue. If precautions are taken and
the girl gets on board by cleverly evading them then the onus
shifts from the cold equations to the girl. The dramatic force
comes from the fact that she is innocent in an ordinary sense;
society has failed her by not teaching her about the cold
equations but rather teaching her that crime and punishment
are strictly a human cultural affair.
The Two Sides of Responsibility
Many people have difficulty with the concept that an event may
have more than one cause and that more than one person may be
responsible for a result. The history of the working conditions
in factories provides an illuminating example.
Early in this century factories were gruesomely unsafe places
to work. People worked for low wages in unsafe conditions.
Hours were long and the pressures to produce were high. There
were a lot of accidents. People lost hands and worse. If one
suffered a severe accident, that was your problem. You were
careless and you paid the price.
The factory owners were not heartless (at least not all of them.)
They didn't want their workers to lose limbs. They did
something about the problem. They put up posters telling
workers to be careful. They had supervisors give lectures on
safety. These safety campaigns were cheap and almost totally
ineffective.
It was foreseeable that they would be ineffective. They did
nothing of substance towards solving the problem. They did not
alter the working conditions, either the dangerous equipment or
the long working hours.
Things changed for two reasons. Laws were passed to make safe
equipment obligatory; workmen's compensation laws were
passed. When the factory owner had to pay for accidents ways
were quickly found to reduce the rate of industrial accidents.
The industrialists of the times took the position that accidents
were the fault of the individual worker and that he should
therefore bear the responsibility. In one sense they were right.
In each individual accident you could go back and point out
where the person involved had been careless. And yet their
position was false. The responsibility was shared. The individual
workers were careless; the industrialist created the unsafe
conditions.
The factory owners were not wicked; from their viewpoint it was
the fault of the workers that they had accidents. But they was
morally obtuse because they did not recognize, did not admit
their share of the responsibility. They could be morally obtuse,
almost had to be because factories were run by companies with
stockholders. Organizations have no intrinsic morality; people
can do dreadful things in the name of a company, a state, a
church, or an organization that they could not justify if they
were doing it in their own name.
The attitude of the administrators and the pilot as portrayed in
this story are similar to the attitudes of theose early
industrialists. They are responsible for administering a
dangerous situation. Yet they feel no obligation, accept no
responsibility beyond putting up a sign and issuing a blaster
with orders to kill. The pilot is prepared to do something
dreadful, to kill somebody, because his employers demand it of
him. His employers demand it of him because they don't care,
presumably because it doesn't occur to them to do something
constructive.
There are two sides to responsibility. Many of the defenders of
the story in the usenet discussion pointed out that there are
limits to how far we go, how far we can go, in protecting people
from the consequences of their actions. Lorenzo Love put it
eloquently as follows:
... How many people are killed at railroad
crossing? We fail to provide any effective means
of preventing people from driving in front of an
oncoming train. Some crossing have an arm that
drops down but as many people simply drive
around these arms they are ineffective. Posting a
guard at every railroad crossing would save many
lives but we fail to do so. Instead we put up a
simple sign. Does this make us a society which
puts a low value on human life? Are we callous?
Is it too much bother to avoid killing when the
problem can easily be solved? No, no and no. We
expect people to have the common sense to obey
warning signs. Those who are too stupid or too
unthinking to obey the signs sometimes die. Can
we expect it to be any different in the future?
Mr. Love is quite right in pointing out that there are limits to
what society can be reasonably expected to do to protect people
from their own folly. It is not callous on the part of society to
take every conceivable action to protect people; it is not even
possible. On the other hand it would be callous if we do not ask
"have we done all that we can reasonably be expected to do?"
It is worse that callous to presume that people will never be
stupid and unthinking from time to time - it is bad engineering
and bad management. It is a simple fact of life that people are
stupid and unthinking from time to time. One has to expect that
they will be and plan accordingly. When I was in the Marine
Corps we had a saying for this - "There is always 10% that
doesn't get the word." Good officers and good sargeants make
sure that that 10% does get the word; they don't take it for
granted.
All of these instances, however, of dangers which are not
maximally guarded against (and which people stumble into from
time to time) are not quite to the point. If we do not post guards at
railroad crossings to prevent people from crossing when they
should, neither do we post sharpshooters there with orders to
shoot to kill anyone who happens to cross when they shouldn't.
It's not about stupidity
One of the common misreadings of the story is to read as saying
that the girl dies because she is stupid. This is clearly wrong.
She is portrayed as being a person of normal intelligence. Nor
does she do anything that would be obviously stupid and
dangerous, given the knowledge of the world that she is
specified as having. Stowing away was, of course, fatal but she
did not know that and was not expected to know that. She was
naively ignorant in a situation where naive ignorance was fatal.
Naive ignorance is not stupidity.
It is clear from the commentary (see appendix III) that many
people want to cast this as a morality play of sorts with the moral
being that stupid people deserve what they get. If they die that's
their fault and they don't deserve any sympathy (or proceeds
from large lawsuits.) Whatever the merits of this view might be
it rather makes a hash of the story.
The point of the situation and the force of the tragedy lies in the
fact that she behaved quite naturally for someone like her - a
young, rather innocent person unaware of the dangers that
surrounded her, a person who, in the nature of things, could not
be expected to realize her peril.
The role of the frontier
The myth of the frontier, a familiar element in our culture, is an
unremarked background in the story. According to the myth the
world is divided into two great arenas, the civilized world and the
frontier. In the civilized world the resources of society are
great; on the frontier they are sparse. The frontier is a
dangerous place; its inhabitants must be acutely aware of its
dangers and must be self reliant. The inhabitants must live by
harsh laws of necessity; their actions cannot be judged by the
criteria used in the civilized world. They must be competent;
incompetence, though not a crime, is ruthlessly punished.
The frontier is a place of risk. In the civilized world there are
police, courts, and lawyers. The civilized world has resources; it
can afford these things. On the frontier these niceties go
missing; in consequence the frontier is a haven for "warped
men, mean and selfish men, brutal and dangerous men". On the
frontier such men have scope for their evil. Justice must be
rough and ready and needs must be bound by the same harsh
laws of necessity imposed by the environment itself.
So goes the myth. Like all good myths there is much truth in it
and much that is comforting illusion.
A defense to the indictment
It is doubtful that either Godwin or Campbell (although one
never knew with Campbell) thought about the issues spelled out
in the indictment. This does not matter; it is a commonplace of
criticism that a work, once it has been written and published,
stands on its own. It can contain ideas and raise issues that did
not occur to the author. Such is the case here.
The indictment argues that the authorities in the story were
implicitly guilty of a basic moral obtuseness. One has to ask,
though, whether this is a fault in the story and one can argue
that it is not, that it is a strength rather than a weakness. No
person and no institution is perfect. It part of that cliche, the
human condition, that people act in ways and make decisions
that do not stand up under close examination. People can be well
intentioned and still make serious mistakes.
The scenario depicted in the story is (arguably) illustrates the
way bureaucracies make bad decisions. Why a blaster?
Presumably because at some point an EDS was lost because of a
stowaway. Somebody said that pilots should be equipped to
handle the situation if it came up again. Why not strict
procedures to ensure that there were no stowaways? It didn't
occur to anyone; the problem was already solved by issuing the
pilot a blaster. To be sure the decision process required a
certain amount of indifference to human life but that, too, is
common enough in bureaucracies. The key is that is that, in
bureaurcracies, policies are decided at a distant remove from
their implementation. In turn those who enforce those policies
are insulated from moral responsibility for their actions
because they are following standard procedures.
The defense, then, is that this is (among other things) a case
study in how good people with good intentions can make bad
things happen. I doubt that it is a defense that proponents of the
story will be happy with.
Conclusion
Science fiction has been touted as a literature of ideas. So it is,
at least in part. At the time The Cold Equation was written the
field was strongly constrained by the circumstances of genre
pulp fiction. Authors had to write a great deal quickly in order
to make a living. The audience demanded simple, strong stories.
Such circumstances do not make for psychological and
intellectual depth. Of necessity ideas (of which there were a
plenitude) were usually given schematic, suggestive treatment
rather than being explored in depth. So it was with The Cold
Equations.
The shortcuts, the appeals to unarticulated conventions, are
omnipresent. The hyperspace cruiser is recognizable as a late
nineteenth steamship doing the equivalent of traveling from
England to India, complete with native servants. The conventions
of a thousand Westerns are imported wholesale with new labels
slapped on. The scenario, pilots armed with pistols to kill
stowaways, is preposterous, explicable only if one assumes that
the Powers That Be are morally obtuse and none too bright - an
assumption, admittedly, that is all too plausible.
Why, then, is the story so popular and so enduring? Why are its
faults ignored, nay, vehemently denied? An obvious reason is
that it confirms attitudes and beliefs. That is no bad thing. One
of the functions of myth is to create stories and settings in
which beliefs are true. One of the things that the story
propounds is that it is necessary and inevitable that people kill
their fellow human beings. This is a myth we need, for one of the
things that human beings do from time to time is kill their
fellow human beings.
Therein, I think lies the strength of the story. The girl is the
obvious tragic hero of the story but the real tragic hero is the
pilot who must kill someone he would very much rather not kill.
The tragedy is that he doesn't see anything wrong with his
assumptions (and those of those he served) until the flaw is
exposed and he truly has no choice. More tragically, in the story
there are no "I only I had" reflections; he knows that something
has gone very wrong but he doesn't understand why.
Appendix I: Detailed Analysis of the
Implicit Social Attitudes
It would be tedious (and a violation of copyright) to type in the
whole story. However most of the critical points of the
discussion at hand are covered in the following quoted text. All
page numbers are from ASF, August 1954.
Selected quotations
(1) p63 It was the law, stated very bluntly and definitely in grim
Paragraph L, Section 8, of Interstellar Regulations: Any
stowaway discovered in an EDS shall be jettisoned immediately
following discovery.
(2) p63 The [huge hyperspace] cruisers carried the colonists to
their new worlds and made periodic visits, running on tight
schedules, but they could not stop and turn aside to visit colonies
scheduled to be visited at another time; such a delay would
destroy their schedule and produce a confusion and uncertainty
that would wreck the complex interdependence between old
Earth and the new worlds of the frontier.
(3) p64 He let his eyes rest on the narrow white door of the
closet. There, just inside, another man lived and breathed and
was beginning to feel assured that discovery of his presence
would now be too late for the pilot to alter the situation. It was too
late - for the man behind the door it was far later than he
thought and in a way he would find terrible to believe.
(4) p65 It was a girl. ... The stowaway was not a man - she was a
girl in her teens ... Now what? Had been it asked in the deep,
defiant voice of a man he would have answered it with action,
quick and efficient. He would have taken the stowaway's
identification disk and ordered him in the air lock. Had the
stowaway refused to obey, he would have used the blaster. It
would not have taken long; within a minute the body would have
been ejected into space - had the stowaway been a man.
(5) p66 "What was your destination on the Stardust?"
"Mimir. I have a position waiting for me there... I graduated
sooner than expected and I was offered this job on Mimir...."
(6) p66 I knew I would be breaking some of a regulation - In a
way she could not be blamed for her ignorance of the law; she
was of Earth and had not realized that the laws of the space
frontier must, of necessity, be as hard and relentless as the
environment that gave them birth. Yet, to protect such as her
from the results of their own ignorance of the frontier, there
had been a sign over the door that led to the section of the
Stardust that housed the EDS's; a sign that was plain for all to
see and heed:
UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. KEEP OUT!
(7) p67 "How did you manage to stow away?"
"I just sort of walked in when no one was looking my way," she
said. "I was practicing my Gelanese on the native girl who does
the cleaning in the Ship's Supply office when someone came in
with an order for supplies for the survey crew on Woden. I
slipped into the closet there after the ship was ready to go and
just before you came in. It was the impulse of the moment to stow
away..."
(8) p67 Why couldn't she have been a man with some ulterior
motive? A fugitive from justice, hoping to lose himself on a new
world; an opportunist seeking transportation to the new
colonies where he might find golden fleece for the taking; a
crackpot, with a mission --
Perhaps once in his lifetime an EDS pilot would find such a
stowaway on his ship; warped men, mean and selfish men, brutal
and dangerous men - but never, before, a smiling blue-eyed
girl...
(9) p75 "I was going to Mimir," she said. "I didn't know about
the frontier; I was only going to Mimir and it's safe."
"Mimir is safe but you left the cruiser that was taking you
there."
Immediate Inferences
Let us consider some inferences that can be drawn from the
quoted material. I shall suppose familiarity with the rest of the
story.
[1] Stowaways in EDS ships are a regular albeit infrequent
occurrence (1,8). There is a standard procedure for handling
stowaways (4). The pilot extracts the stowaway's identification,
forces the stowaway into the airlock, and jettisons the stowaway,
using as much force as needed. The next of kin, if any, are
notified.
In short the pilot has the authority and duty to kill stowaways.
[2] The cruisers are huge; they carry a wide variety of
personnel. They carry colonists (2), 18 year old girls going
from one safe world to another (5,9), native cleaning women (7),
potential criminals and crackpots (8), and a wide variety of ships
personnel.
[3] Passengers are not informed of the jettisoning law. The
provision made for keeping out uninformed stowaways is the
"keep out" sign (6). It is expected that stowaways are not aware
of paragraph L, section 8. The pilot does not expect the stowaway
to be aware (3) of the jettisoning rule.
It has been argued that a sign ought to have been sufficient or
that the culture might have been one in which a simple sign was
sufficient. This is clearly wrong; if the sign were sufficient
there would be no stowaways.
It has been argued that people aboard a cruiser ought to know
better. This is also clearly wrong. The cruiser carries
passengers who do not know better, who cannot reasonably be
expected to know better.
[4] The EDS area is not effectively secured. There is a single
point of entry: the door that led to the section (6). The girl
simply walks on when no one is looking (7).
It has been argued that posting a guard while the EDS was being
prepared for launch would be inordinately expensive. This
argument is inconsistent with the information given about the
cruiser - it is huge and carries a wide variety of supernumerary
personnel. Putting a lock on the door would be cheap. Posting a
guard for the period of the launch preparation would be
relatively cheap.
[5] A check of the supply closet is not part of the pilot's
preflight checklist. All that would be required is for the pilot to
walk over, open the door and look inside. This is, from the story,
a task of a few seconds.
It has been suggested that this step might have been skipped
because the launch was an unforeseen emergency. It was not.
The need for launching an EDS is known well in advance (7).
There is a well known term for pilots who short cut their
preflight checklist. They are called dead.
It is the combination not informing passengers of the policy [3],
the lack of effective security [4], and the lack of an adequate
checklist [5] that makes it possible for the girl to stowaway on
an impulse (7).
Implied Attitudes
Points [1-5] are quite straightforward and, I would suppose,
quite obvious. However they have some immediate implications.
(a) Stowaways are presumed to be people whom it is all right to
kill. The pilot categorizes them as "warped men, mean and
selfish men, brutal and dangerous men" (8). The pilot's conflict
arises because this stowaway obviously does not fit in his list of
people whom it is all right to kill (4).
(b) The depicted society has a mixed attitude towards the value of
human life. On one hand considerable effort and expense are
expended on saving the lives of half a dozen men on Woden. On
the other hand there is an almost complete indifference to the
value of life of potential stowaways. The possibility of someone
stowing away exists; a stowaway must be killed; and yet they do
not bother with the most elementary precautions.
The implication is that the authorities and the pilot divide people
into the worthy and the unworthy. Serious efforts are taken on
behalf of worth while people; their lives matter. No effort need be
taken on behalf on the unworthy; their lives do not matter. The
authorities and the pilot assume that anyone who stows away will
be one of the unworthy; ergo it all right to kill them. The
tragedy (for the pilot) is that someone worthy stows away
unexpectedly and he has to kill her anyway.
This, then, is a society which puts a low value on human life. It is
not without humanitarian concern but its actions, regardless of
proclaimed intent or self belief, are callous. To avoid killing is
too much bother when a problem can be solved with a blaster.
Appendix II: It is rocket science
At first sight the "rocket science" of the story seems screwed
up but it actually (almost) works. In the story the EDS is
scheduled to decelerate at 1g for most of the duration of the trip
(a matter of quite some hours) with a final deceleration at 5g.
When the girl is discovered one hour after launch the
deceleration is reduced to .1g for 80 minutes to allow her to say
her goodbyes.
The story explicitly specifies .1g deceleration
(p71) for 80 minutes (17:50-19:10,p72), that she
is discovered one hour after launch (p63), and
that the final deceleration will be at 5g (p73). The
initial deceleration is not explicitly specified and
may not be 1g although the wording suggests
this.
This doesn't make sense in terms of a entry maneuver, a fact
which was a source of confusion in the usenet discussion.
However John Schilling pointed out that, if one takes the story
at face value, the scenario is that the EDS is injected into the
target system at high velocity with respect to the system. The
rationale is that the cruiser can emerge from hyperspace at any
chosen point but cannot alter its relative velocity without
expending fuel (conservation of momentum.) The deceleration is
required to bring the EDS to rest with respect to the target
system. The fuel requirements for entry and landing are
relatively minor.
Given the conditions postulated by Schilling the depicted
situation makes sense; the rate of deceleration is limited in
beginning by the maximum thrust of the rockets. Reducing the
deceleration to .1g for 80 minutes uses up some of the safety
margin. The margin of safety (surplus fuel) is not enough to
include the girl in the final payload. Schilling posted a model
calculation to illustrate this. His model, however, did not quite
match the trip parameters given in the story. Schilling used an
injection velocity of 76 km/sec; modifying the model to bring it
closer to the numbers given in the story requires an injection
velocity of ~200 km/sec. The mass ratios, fuel efficiencies, and
engines thrusts required are in the realm of science fiction but,
then, the story is science fiction.
Apeendix III: Selected Quotations from
the Usenet Discussion
The original posting triggered an extended discussion,
conducted in the calm, even-handed, dispassionate style for
which usenet is famed for. The entirety of the discussion is well
beyond the scope of this article, indeed beyond sanity. However I
quote a number of responses as being representative:
Brian Pickrell
"Dick, the basic point of the story was that there
was no way to save the stowaway from the
consequences of her mistake. Your basic point is
that the authorities should have saved her. That's
a nice thought, but you're contradicting the
author's premise--hardly reason to start talking
about systemic blindness and moral obtuseness....
The subtext of the story is that the female
stowaway died because of her own stupidity--she
stepped out expecting somebody to come take
care of her, nobody did. This, of course, goes
against modern doctrine which states that if you
do something stupid and get killed, someone else
is responsible and you are entitled to sue them.
Please remember that this point of view was not
so prevalent 40 years ago. In fact, once upon a
time, you took your life in your hands any time
you set out on a journey. No passenger on a
sailing ship ever received a guarantee that he
would reach his destination alive. In the story, the
same situation holds for space travel.
By not recognizing that this story is not set in
1990s America and does not follow the same
standards, I think you are guilty of a fundamental
moral obtuseness. "
Londo Mollari
"Saying that there were things that might have
been done before hand to prevent a tragedy is one
thing (and that is true of virtually any tragedy),
but to that Tom Godwin was in any way, shape, or
form suggesting that people should be murdered
the moment they are an inconvenience as Mr.
Harter is suggesting is totally a different matter.
Harter's suggestion misses the entire point of
the story."
"... The point is that in space things are very
unforgiving. If you screw up (or your pilot or his
CO) you could very well not get a second chance
and the penalty is very high. People will do stupid
things, and they will pay the price for it."
John Schilling
Exactly. And, having so educated them, it cannot
afford to devote extensive resources to *further*
coddling the passengers. Having told them, in the
pre-flight training program, that it is Really
Dangerous to go places they aren't authorized to
go or to push buttons they aren't supposed to
push, they can not and do not station guards at
every Dangerous Place, devote crew members'
time to teaching every passenger the specific
nature of every danger, etc.
John Moreno
And you are doing just the opposite and trying to
blame management for the actions and decision
of the criminals. If a murderer or rapist manages
to get himself killed by doing something stupid I
for one am not going to go to excessive lengths in
a attempt (probably doomed to failure) to save
their lives.
Lorenzo L. Love
... How many people are killed at railroad
crossing? We fail to provide any effective means
of preventing people from driving in front of an
oncoming train. Some crossing have an arm that
drops down but as many people simply drive
around these arms they are ineffective. Posting a
guard at every railroad crossing would save many
lives but we fail to do so. Instead we put up a
simple sign. Does this make us a society which
puts a low value on human life? Are we callous?
Is it too much bother to avoid killing when the
problem can easily be solved? No, no and no. We
expect people to have the common sense to obey
warning signs. Those who are too stupid or too
unthinking to obey the signs sometimes die. Can
we expect it to be any different in the future?
Rick Cook
"You know to me the interesting thing about this
story has always been the strongly emotional
reaction it produces in people. The story's point,
of course, (which is very Campbellian and may
have been Campbell's idea) is that there are
certain situations which are just plain
irretrievable. Screw up badly enough and you're
going to die, no matter how appealing, attractive
or well-meaning you are.
I suspect this is behind much of the technical
criticism of the story. Just as it was behind the
visceral reaction the story produced at the time.
The readers naturally expected the author to pull
a technical rabbit out of the hat and save the girl.
That he did not gives the story its impact. If he
had, it would be one more page filler from
"Astounding" and no one would care in the
slightest about the technical flaws."
"My own take on it is that science aside, that
story is very carefully constructed, right down to
the cardboard nature of the characters. Up until
the end, the story is standard 1950s pulp, the sort
of thing that Astounding and other magazines
ran every issue. The difference is that in all the
other hundreds of stories like that, the hero
figures out a way to save the girl, usually by some
clever application of a 'scientific' principle. That
made the ending especially disturbing -- as we
can see from the discussion that's going on
here."
Earl Colby Pottinger
"Face it,those that don't like the story hate the
fact that the message of the story is so IN THIER
FACE. There is no soft, feel good ending. So they
attack the story's conditions like a lack of
guards. Gee, on last cruise ship I saw no guards
either. The girl makes a stupid mistake and dies.
Sorry guys, it happens all the time, just read
your local newspaper."
"The story has *ONLY* one main point stupid
people die in space!"
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri
I have been waging relentless war on reality;
So far reality is ahead, 0 to -1.
Henry Troup
doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only". Sometimes
there are warning decals, sometimes not.
The story holes are quite real though.
Ross Presser
Troup).wrote.posted.offered:
I feel that the "holes" relating to the poor construction of the society
(no preflight check, no guards, etc.) were deliberate; that the author
picked them in order to create the no-win situation. Yes, they don't make
much sense, but as was said about railroad crossings and warning decals,
they're not all that far from situations in reality.
--
Ross Presser
ross_p...@imtek.com
"And if you're the kind of person who parties with a bathtub full of
pasta, I suspect you don't care much about cholesterol anyway."
lam...@my-deja.com
rpre...@NOSPAMimtek.com.invalid (Ross Presser) wrote:
> alt.distin...@nortelnetworks.com (Henry
> Troup).wrote.posted.offered:
>
> >One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact
behind
> >doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only".
Sometimes
> >there are warning decals, sometimes not.
> >
> >The story holes are quite real though.
>
> I feel that the "holes" relating to the poor construction of the
society
> (no preflight check, no guards, etc.) were deliberate; that the author
> picked them in order to create the no-win situation. Yes, they don't
make
> much sense, but as was said about railroad crossings and warning
decals,
> they're not all that far from situations in reality.
The assumption that the situation must be common because there is a
written regulation is silly.
Wide body Jets carry written checklists for what to do in the event of
problems that have NEVER HAPPENED TO ANY SUCH AIRCRAFT. Seriously, if
the existence of a writen regulation, and associated gear, means it
'must' be a common problem, then every first trip in a new type of
vehicle would have NO safty procedures. This will be news to NASA I am
sure...
The problem is reasonably conceivable, thus any organization with a
safety burocracy WILL have a written procedure.
DougL
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Sten Thaning
(Ross Presser) wrote:
>>The story holes are quite real though.
>
>I feel that the "holes" relating to the poor construction of the society
>(no preflight check, no guards, etc.) were deliberate; that the author
>picked them in order to create the no-win situation. Yes, they don't make
>much sense, but as was said about railroad crossings and warning decals,
>they're not all that far from situations in reality.
I recall reading, on more than one occasion, reports about people who
have tried to get a free ride on an airplane by sitting outside or in
an unheated, unpressurised luggage area. Usually this results in the
stowaway freezing to death.
( http://www.canard.com/ntsb/MIA/90A042.htm is the only reference
I can find at the moment.)
If our society know that this happens, it can't be that hard to check
an airplane before take-off, right?
- Sten
Bob Silverman
c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) wrote:
> The Cold Equations - A Critical Study
>
> In 1977 I wrote an article criticizing the quality of SF as a
> "literature of ideas" which discussed the story, The Cold
> Equations.
<snip>
> I do not propose to debate the points raised herein. However
> comments and suggestions for improvment are welcome.
Allow me to add:
There is another major story flaw.
Only a complete idiot would engineer a vehicle to such fine tolerances.
It carries only (barely!) enough fuel to complete its mission under
perfect conditions. However, there are any number of legitimate
scenarios under which additional delta V might be needed. I doubt
whether ALL astronomical bodies in a frontier system have been charted.
Additional delta V might be needed in case of encounter with an
uncharted asteroid or comet. What if very bad weather conditions
at the landing site required a landing delay? One would need
additional delta V to permit entering orbit until the weather cleared
or to permit landing at a place where the weather was clear, then later
taking off and moving to the desired landing place. (or similar)
It is criminal stupidity of mission planners not to plan for unforeseen
problems. Even with economic necessity requiring "minimal ship
configuration", noone in his/her right mind allows for only the
absolute minimum of fuel.
Further, there is a simple technical "solution" to the problem.
Just as one can pick up speed by tacking against a planetary body,
one can similarly shed speed. e.g. Voyager in going from Jupiter to
Saturn actually picked up speed without a burn by "piggybacking"
on Jupiter's orbital motion. Voyager gained momentum, Jupiter lost
the same amount. The same maneuver can be done in reverse.
The story just seems too contrived to be real.
>
--
Bob Silverman
"You can lead a horse's ass to knowledge, but you can't make him think"
Alan Carter
>
> The Cold Equations - A Critical Study
>
> In 1977 I wrote an article criticizing the quality of SF as a
> "literature of ideas" which discussed the story, The Cold
> Equations. The thrust of the article was that the story has deep
> flaws which were ignored by the superficial acceptance of the SF
> community. In 1997 I reprinted the article as a web page and
> then posted it in usenet discussion groups. This provoked a
> lively discussion. In response to the points raised in the
> discussion I created a replacement for the original page.
I'm sure I remember the idea revisited in Analog a few years ago. In the
new version, the characters and problem are quite as cardboard as
before, but the answer is very different. The pilot uses her blaster to
cut off her lags, and the legs of the stowaway, and jettisons them. The
legs, that is. Nuff said?
Alan :-)
Anne M. Marble
news:3843ac76...@news.sullybuttes.net...
> The Cold Equations - A Critical Study
Come on, the answer is obvious. The stowaway died because she didn't
have a pedigree. If only she had known her place, she would never have
stowed away on board the ship. (That would have resulted in a dull
story, though.)
Sorry, I couldn't resist. :-> I blame it on the chemicals in these
cough drops.
Anyway, I have heard some people say that "The Cold Equations" is an
example of a young outcast male acting out a power fantasy over women.
The young guy who was called a nerd because he liked SF gets to have
his revenge on the cheerleaders who made fun of him. "She didn't know
about technology, and I did, so I get to have power over her."
I don't buy into that type of criticism because it makes too many
assumptions about the writer. And about the reader. I think the writer
(or perhaps Campbell) was trying to remind us that sometimes, there
are no gimmicks that can solve everything. Science can be unforgiving.
(A good reminder to have in 1954, three years before Sputnick startled
us out of our complacency.)
It's like those biographies that come out and try to second-guess
whether a famous person was a manic-depressive or not. In the end,
this sort of criticism (both pro and con) tells you more about the
critic than about the story.
Louann Miller
<ama...@abs.net> wrote:
>I don't buy into that type of criticism because it makes too many
>assumptions about the writer. And about the reader. I think the writer
>(or perhaps Campbell) was trying to remind us that sometimes, there
>are no gimmicks that can solve everything. Science can be unforgiving.
>(A good reminder to have in 1954, three years before Sputnick startled
>us out of our complacency.)
That would make the Jack London story "To Build a Fire" a close
relative. Same structure: a character trying to solve a problem which,
unknown to him, already became insoluble earlier on when he wasn't
paying good enough attention.
James Nicoll
Except the London story is plausible, yes.
I have a mental image of London discovering the flaws in the
methods used in TBaF in person [although not in the same circumstances]
and thinking "Ah hah: story idea." One hopes he didn't research the
sharking killing method shown in one of his short stories through
experimentation....
"Dynamite....OK."
"High powered rifle....OK."
"Thrusting one's hands down the throat of the shark...judging
by the stumps, not OK."
James Nicoll
--
Ross Presser
>The assumption that the situation must be common because there is a
>written regulation is silly.
I have never made such an assumption.
William December Starr
jam...@nyquist.uwaterloo.ca (James Nicoll) said:
>> That would make the Jack London story "To Build a Fire" a close
>> relative. Same structure: a character trying to solve a problem
>> which, unknown to him, already became insoluble earlier on when he
>> wasn't paying good enough attention. [Louann Miller]
>
> Except the London story is plausible, yes.
>
> I have a mental image of London discovering the flaws in the methods
> used in TBaF in person [although not in the same circumstances] and
> thinking "Ah hah: story idea."
I can see that. Young Mr. London, carefully builds and starts a fire,
at no small effort, and then suddenly through the forest is heard:
<fllluuump!><sizzle>
"Son of a bitch!
Son of a bitch!
Sonofabitchsonofabitchsonofabitchsonofabitch*son*of*a*BITCH*!
<pause>
Hey, I can get a story out of this!"
-- William December Starr <wds...@crl.com>
Richard Harter
>In article <3843ac76...@news.sullybuttes.net>,
> c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) wrote:
>> The Cold Equations - A Critical Study
>>
>> In 1977 I wrote an article criticizing the quality of SF as a
>> "literature of ideas" which discussed the story, The Cold
>> Equations.
>
><snip>
>
>> I do not propose to debate the points raised herein. However
>> comments and suggestions for improvment are welcome.
>
>
>Allow me to add:
>
>There is another major story flaw.
>
>Only a complete idiot would engineer a vehicle to such fine tolerances.
>It carries only (barely!) enough fuel to complete its mission under
>perfect conditions. However, there are any number of legitimate
>scenarios under which additional delta V might be needed. I doubt
>whether ALL astronomical bodies in a frontier system have been charted.
>Additional delta V might be needed in case of encounter with an
>uncharted asteroid or comet. What if very bad weather conditions
>at the landing site required a landing delay? One would need
>additional delta V to permit entering orbit until the weather cleared
>or to permit landing at a place where the weather was clear, then later
>taking off and moving to the desired landing place. (or similar)
>It is criminal stupidity of mission planners not to plan for unforeseen
>problems. Even with economic necessity requiring "minimal ship
>configuration", noone in his/her right mind allows for only the
>absolute minimum of fuel.
>
>Further, there is a simple technical "solution" to the problem.
>Just as one can pick up speed by tacking against a planetary body,
>one can similarly shed speed. e.g. Voyager in going from Jupiter to
>Saturn actually picked up speed without a burn by "piggybacking"
>on Jupiter's orbital motion. Voyager gained momentum, Jupiter lost
>the same amount. The same maneuver can be done in reverse.
>
>The story just seems too contrived to be real.
Thanks for the comments. These points were discussed ad nauseum in
the original discussion. The story, surprisingly is okay in this
regard. The nub is that the EDS must lose a lot of delta V in a very
short time. This rules out maneuvers such as flybys. The scenario
that one must assume for the story to work technically is that the EDS
is loaded with enough fuel (balonium hydroxide as I recall) to kill
the delta V with a small margin left at the end for landing maneuvers.
Extra weight at the end of the flight is on the wrong end of the
rocket equation. Schilling's posting covers this pretty well. See
http://x26.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=224552842.1&CONTEXT=942313704.1525219334&hitnum=4
Perhaps the essay should have more detail on this in the appendix on
rocket science.
As a thought, the story was written in 1954, well before we had
serious experience with men in space. It seems contrived because we
don't do things quite so cavalierly.
Pan
Bob Silverman <bo...@rsa.com> wrote in message
news:8218bh$t6e$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
[snip]
>
> Further, there is a simple technical "solution" to the problem.
> Just as one can pick up speed by tacking against a planetary body,
> one can similarly shed speed. e.g. Voyager in going from Jupiter to
> Saturn actually picked up speed without a burn by "piggybacking"
> on Jupiter's orbital motion. Voyager gained momentum, Jupiter lost
> the same amount. The same maneuver can be done in reverse.
>
And flight duration for maneuvers as you describe will fit within
the time-critical parameters of the mission .... ?
Not very likely, eh?
Pan
Nigel Arnot
Alan Carter wrote:
> I'm sure I remember the idea revisited in Analog a few years ago. In the
> new version, the characters and problem are quite as cardboard as
> before, but the answer is very different. The pilot uses her blaster to
> cut off her lags, and the legs of the stowaway, and jettisons them. The
> legs, that is. Nuff said?
>
I don't think so. Anyone know what percentage mass of a body is leg?
Not 50%, I'm pretty sure. Arms as well? Probably still no go. This is
the essence of the story, however botched it was in the telling.
(If I'm wrong, we have to assume that this DIY drastic surgery would
kill or incapacitate the pilot instead).
The other part is the bureaucracy that doesn't learn from a prior tragedy
...
or care ... which also rings horribly true. How many trains have
to run through a red signal before it's accepted that it wasn't purely
the dead drivers fault?
John Schilling
>Alan Carter wrote:
>> I'm sure I remember the idea revisited in Analog a few years ago. In the
>> new version, the characters and problem are quite as cardboard as
>> before, but the answer is very different. The pilot uses her blaster to
>> cut off her lags, and the legs of the stowaway, and jettisons them. The
>> legs, that is. Nuff said?
> I don't think so. Anyone know what percentage mass of a body is leg?
>Not 50%, I'm pretty sure. Arms as well? Probably still no go. This is
>the essence of the story, however botched it was in the telling.
Both legs and one arm of the adult pilot, both legs and arms of the
~10 year old stowaway, IIRC. It works if two adult legs and one arm
have about the same mass as a 10-year-old's head and torso. Anyone
got a ten-year-old, a saw, and a scale... :-)
>(If I'm wrong, we have to assume that this DIY drastic surgery would
>kill or incapacitate the pilot instead).
That's what magic instantly-cauterizing laser pistols and super-advanced
first aid kits are for. And magic regeneration technology to grow back
the missing limbs afterwards. It worked as an homage, pushing the limits
of SFnal possibility to give a happy ending to a story whose previous
author had similarly pushed the limits of possibility to force a tragic
ending. It wouldn't have worked as a stand-alone story.
Much like "The Cold Equations" itself, which worked only as a rebuttal
to an entire class of stories rather than as a stand-alone.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
John Schilling
>There is another major story flaw.
>Only a complete idiot would engineer a vehicle to such fine tolerances.
>It carries only (barely!) enough fuel to complete its mission under
>perfect conditions.
Modern space launch vehicles routinely work with propellant margins as
fine as that indicated in _The Cold Equations_, despite being designed
and operated by some extremely bright people. The motives are slightly
different, but the mechanics are the same.
>However, there are any number of legitimate scenarios under which additional
>delta V might be needed.... [examples deleted]
And if more delta-V were needed, more propellant would have been loaded.
You might want to reread the story; it was not the *vehicle* that was
engineered to fine tolerances, it was the propellant load for that
specific mission. And there was no uncertainty at all about the
delta-V required for that mission.
That's one of the few things that Godwin not only got right in 1954, but
are still right today. Well, actually, it's two of the things. First,
rocketry is characterized by extremely high mass ratios, with propellant
outweighing hardware by an order of magnitude or more. Second, once the
vehicle and mission are specified, the propellant requirement can be
determined with almost metaphysical certainty and precision.
The hardware is secondary. Overdesigning it costs little - and in fact
the EDS shuttles in "Cold Equations" *were* explicitly overdesigned for
the mission at hand in several respects. Carrying entire spare shuttles
that you don't have fuel for costs little, and in fact the star cruiser
in question did carry more shuttles than it had full loads of fuel for.
It's just a little extra sheet metal.
But carrying more fuel than you can afford is crippling, and loading more
of your limited supply than is required for the mission at hand is what
limits your options for dealing with those pesky scenarios for which
more fuel is needed. To a first-order approximation, you have an
infinite number of shuttles with infinitely large fuel tanks, but only
a finite ammount of fuel. If you know that today's lifesaving mission
requires X ammount of fuel, +/- 1%, and you *don't* know how many or
what sort of other lifesaving missions you will face before you return
to a supply base, you load today's shuttle with X+1% of propellant and
no more.
There are a few outright flaws in TCE, and a lot of areas where time
has simply passed it by and left it in the same limbo as the old
"Martian canals" or "1950s nuclear families in space" SF. This is
none of those.
Nigel Arnot
Bob Silverman wrote:
> In article <3843ac76...@news.sullybuttes.net>,
> c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) wrote:
> > The Cold Equations - A Critical Study
> >
> > In 1977 I wrote an article criticizing the quality of SF as a
> > "literature of ideas" which discussed the story, The Cold
> > Equations.
>
> <snip>
>
> > I do not propose to debate the points raised herein. However
> > comments and suggestions for improvment are welcome.
>
> Allow me to add:
>
> There is another major story flaw.
>
> Only a complete idiot would engineer a vehicle to such fine tolerances.
Hardly. A military aircraft designed with the same safety margins as
acovilian jet would get shot down. The designers do a necessarily
cold-blooded calculation about the relative costs of highly-stressed
fighters failing mechanically during peacetime, versus the costs of
reduced performance (due to higher airframe weight and stability)
in combat during wartime.
Nature has done a similar evolutionary job on birds (esp. their
skeletons) by evolution: for not a few avian individuals, their first
attempt at flight is their last. The gain to the species outweighs
the cost to the individual.
But this is missing the point. There is a certain dramatic structure
here, that of tragedy in the classical sense, which *requires* that
there is no way out. If the story as actually told failed in this
requirement (and it did) then the telling was botched.
The rest of my comments are probably superfluous.
> It carries only (barely!) enough fuel to complete its mission under
> perfect conditions.
The story only requires insufficient margin to allow an extrahuman body, or
the significant parts thereof, to be carried. Perhaps
it would merely change the risk to the pilot from 2% (acceptable? to
a brave man on an emergency mission to save many) to a 2%
chance of survival. Much the same.
> However, there are any number of legitimate
> scenarios under which additional delta V might be needed. I doubt
> whether ALL astronomical bodies in a frontier system have been charted.
All significant gravitators will have been. The small bits, you wouldn'tsee
them coming until too late in any case.
> Additional delta V might be needed in case of encounter with an
> uncharted asteroid or comet.
Nope. That's just deadly. But pretty rare. Space is *big*.
> What if very bad weather conditions
> at the landing site required a landing delay?
Do your meteorology on the way in, course-correct withinsome fine limits (a
hundred-mile window might suffice),
shed all remaining delta-V through atmospheric friction, deploy
a parafoil at 10000 ft (or wherever) and *probably* make it.
Easier with radio reports from the ground (which is probable).
> One would need
> additional delta V to permit entering orbit until the weather cleared
> or to permit landing at a place where the weather was clear, then later
> taking off and moving to the desired landing place. (or similar)
> It is criminal stupidity of mission planners not to plan for unforeseen
> problems. Even with economic necessity requiring "minimal ship
> configuration", noone in his/her right mind allows for only the
> absolute minimum of fuel.
You do know that there is a big problem at London, New York, andother major
airports with planes (mostly but not exclusively from the
third world) arriving with insufficient fuel reserves to "hold" let
alone divert? A few months ago, there was one ran out of fuel while
taxi-ing, and I think there was also a crash (in Brazil?)
Yes, incredibly foolish, for a civilian jet. Yet done, purely for
economic reasons!
(And then there's the hyperballistics in Heinlein's "Friday ... I digress).
> Further, there is a simple technical "solution" to the problem.
> Just as one can pick up speed by tacking against a planetary body,
> one can similarly shed speed. e.g. Voyager in going from Jupiter to
> Saturn actually picked up speed without a burn by "piggybacking"
> on Jupiter's orbital motion. Voyager gained momentum, Jupiter lost
> the same amount. The same maneuver can be done in reverse.
Unless you're already using that, and trying harder would
create a trajectory that would intersect atmosphere (too fast) or rock.
Or unless you're in too much of a hurry for anything except
"straight in" to have any purpose. How fast was that plague
spreading?
> The story just seems too contrived to be real.
>
Given a vehicle that masses less than the pilot and a payloadmassing
ounces, hardly. That we can't build such a vehicle today,
or predict the delta-V from x kilos of fuel to that accuracy, isn't
a problem -- we assume that by the time they have starships,
this will be the case.
A better argument would be why have a human pilot? But
once again, it's a case where the story demands that be the case.
(And the author probably hadn't forseen computers that good
in his wildest fantasies when it was written!)
Matt Austern
> The Cold Equations - A Critical Study
>
> In 1977 I wrote an article criticizing the quality of SF as a
> "literature of ideas" which discussed the story, The Cold
> Equations. The thrust of the article was that the story has deep
> flaws which were ignored by the superficial acceptance of the SF
> community. In 1997 I reprinted the article as a web page and
> then posted it in usenet discussion groups. This provoked a
> lively discussion. In response to the points raised in the
> discussion I created a replacement for the original page.
>
> I do not propose to debate the points raised herein. However
> comments and suggestions for improvment are welcome.
Could we talk about gun control instead?
Nancy Lebovitz
Nigel Arnot <nigel...@kcl.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
>Alan Carter wrote:
>
>> I'm sure I remember the idea revisited in Analog a few years ago. In the
>> new version, the characters and problem are quite as cardboard as
>> before, but the answer is very different. The pilot uses her blaster to
>> cut off her lags, and the legs of the stowaway, and jettisons them. The
>> legs, that is. Nuff said?
>>
>
> I don't think so. Anyone know what percentage mass of a body is leg?
>Not 50%, I'm pretty sure. Arms as well? Probably still no go. This is
>the essence of the story, however botched it was in the telling.
>kill or incapacitate the pilot instead).
>
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com
October '99 calligraphic button catalogue available by email!
Ross Presser
>c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) writes:
>
>> The Cold Equations - A Critical Study
>>
[snip]
>>
>> I do not propose to debate the points raised herein. However
>> comments and suggestions for improvment are welcome.
>
>Could we talk about gun control instead?
Sure. With gun control, the story would have been impossible, because
the pilot would have had no blaster.
John Hardin
Nigel Arnot wrote in message <38443E6F...@kcl.ac.uk>...
> I don't think so. Anyone know what percentage mass of a body is leg?
>Not 50%, I'm pretty sure. Arms as well? Probably still no go.
Yes, but the pilot's legs may be about the same mass as the stowaway
child's torso, giving:
pilot torso + pilot arms + stowaway child torso ~=
pilot torso + pilot arms + pilot legs
--
John Hardin KA7OHZ ICQ#15735746 jha...@wolfenet.com
pgpk -a finger://gonzo.wolfenet.com/jhardin
768: 0x41EA94F5 - A3 0C 5B C2 EF 0D 2C E5 E9 BF C8 33 A7 A9 CE 76
1024: 0xB8732E79 - 2D8C 34F4 6411 F507 136C AF76 D822 E6E6 B873 2E79
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Our sense is that most of the viewers with money or an education have
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Our programming more and more will have to turn to those who don't
have any real education or money for other programming options."
-- anonymous Network Suit, to JMS
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>I'm sure I remember the idea revisited in Analog a few years ago. In the
>new version, the characters and problem are quite as cardboard as
>before, but the answer is very different. The pilot uses her blaster to
>cut off her lags, and the legs of the stowaway, and jettisons them. The
>legs, that is. Nuff said?
I've always thought that idea absurd. What are the chances that the
pilot could actually survive and be in good enough shape to land the
ship after amputating his own legs? People often die, or at least go
into shock, when you chop off a limb.
My problem with the story is that I never manage to suspend my
disbelief. The sort of stripped-down-operating-at-a-razor's-edge
spaceship which they depict most likely doesn't have place for a
stowaway to hide in the first place.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>Both legs and one arm of the adult pilot, both legs and arms of the
>~10 year old stowaway, IIRC. It works if two adult legs and one arm
>have about the same mass as a 10-year-old's head and torso. Anyone
>got a ten-year-old, a saw, and a scale... :-)
>
Tell me, John, after we chop off both of your legs and one of your
arms, how long will you be conscious and capable of landing a
spaceship.
>
>>(If I'm wrong, we have to assume that this DIY drastic surgery would
>>kill or incapacitate the pilot instead).
>
>That's what magic instantly-cauterizing laser pistols and super-advanced
>first aid kits are for. And magic regeneration technology to grow back
Ah. Throw the super-advance first aid kit out the airlock. If it's
got enough stuff in it to keep these two alive after that, well, it
probably weighs a couple of hundred pounds.
And you tell me that a society which has that sort of technology is
operating its shuttle flights that close to the edge?
>the missing limbs afterwards. It worked as an homage, pushing the limits
>of SFnal possibility to give a happy ending to a story whose previous
>author had similarly pushed the limits of possibility to force a tragic
>ending. It wouldn't have worked as a stand-alone story.
No kidding.
--
Pete McCutchen
Kristopher/EOS
>
> Bob Silverman wrote:
>
>> The story just seems too contrived to be real.
>
> Given a vehicle that masses less than the pilot and a
> fuel to that accuracy, isn't a problem -- we assume
> that by the time they have starships, this will be the
> case.
A vehicle weighing less than the pilot, that has a full
airlock, room for a closet, and the spare weight for the
pilot to carry a weapon?
Kristopher/EOS
Anne M. Marble
news:384473e7$0$80...@news.net-link.net...
>
> A vehicle weighing less than the pilot, that has a full
> airlock, room for a closet, and the spare weight for the
> pilot to carry a weapon?
Answer: Really, really, really small pilots.
Now if only the stowaways would cooperate and make really, really,
really small stowaways as well.
BTW why hasn't anybody written a version where he teaches the stowaway
how to pilot the thing, and then pushes himself out of the airlock?
(I'm sure there's a futuristic autopilot on the thing.)
Elisabeth Carey
>
> In a previous article, na...@unix3.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) says:
>
> >In article <38443E6F...@kcl.ac.uk>,
> >Nigel Arnot <nigel...@kcl.ac.uk> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> I'm sure I remember the idea revisited in Analog a few years ago. In the
> >>> new version, the characters and problem are quite as cardboard as
> >>> before, but the answer is very different. The pilot uses her blaster to
> >>> cut off her lags, and the legs of the stowaway, and jettisons them. The
> >>> legs, that is. Nuff said?
> >>>
> >>
> >>the essence of the story, however botched it was in the telling.
> >>kill or incapacitate the pilot instead).
> >>
> sexy streetwise spoof, her best story IMO. First published in
> Silverberg's Universe 2 (I'm pretty sure) and well-worth seeking
> out. Parking problems in NYC are also addressed.
> One of my personal faves of the decade.
>
> I vaguely recall the Analog story but don't remember author/title.
> Might've been a "Probability Zero" short-short?
"The Cold Solution", by Don Sakers, I believe.
Lis Carey
Keith Morrison
> [1] Stowaways in EDS ships are a regular albeit infrequent
> occurrence (1,8). There is a standard procedure for handling
> stowaways (4).
Just a comment. This means, precisely, squat.
I just finished several meeting concerning assorted contracts where
much of the time was spent going over the things that we would have
to do given a set situation, although in all likelihood said given
situation may never occur. Moreover, given some changes in other
sections of the contracts and the applicable laws, we could be assured
that said situations would never occur. That, however, wasn't one
of the options we had.
You talk about a bureaucracy but this sort of thing is one of the
hallmarks of a bureaucracy, therefore the fact that there is a
standard procedure for something, in and of itself, tells you nothing
about how likely said situation may arise and thus its implications
for the society (or in this case, the story) as a whole.
Your other objections may be valid but this one is not.
--
Keith
Frank
>The Cold Equations - A Critical Study
>
>In 1977 I wrote an article criticizing the quality of SF as a
>"literature of ideas" which discussed the story, The Cold
>Equations. The thrust of the article was that the story has deep
>flaws which were ignored by the superficial acceptance of the SF
>community. In 1997 I reprinted the article as a web page and
>then posted it in usenet discussion groups. This provoked a
>lively discussion. In response to the points raised in the
>discussion I created a replacement for the original page.
>
>I do not propose to debate the points raised herein. However
>comments and suggestions for improvment are welcome.
>
I was surprised to see no mention of John Kessel, whose interpretation
of "The Cold Equations" initiated a debate that raged in THE NEW YORK
REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION for almost two years. Here's the relevant
excerpt from his original letter (in the February 1993 issue):
"What makes me crazy is when I read a work that is all scream and
proceeds to offer wild justifications for it really being a cool
scientific extrapolation, a matter of logic with no gonads involved at
any point. I want all the fans of Tom Godwin's 'The Cold Equations'
to recognize that they like it because it's a social darwinist parable
about how the homeless don't belong anywhere else than the gutter they
find themselves in, and that this is not social injustice but a simple
working out of absolute laws of nature. Most of all I want them to
admit the _satisfaction_ they get when the dumb bitch gets heaved out
of the airlock, admit that they think the little tart gets exactly
what she deserves for not understanding the cold laws of the universe
that we tough-minded men have to struggle against every day of our
frontier lives while they sit home on their cute asses eating
bon-bons. This story is about as coolly rational and impartial as the
Wansee Conference."
(James Patrick Kelley has, I believe, specifically mentioned Kessel's
reading of "The Cold Equations" as being one of the inspirations for
his story "Think Like a Dinosaur.")
Steve Taylor
> Tell me, John, after we chop off both of your legs and one of your
> arms, how long will you be conscious and capable of landing a
> spaceship.
Judging by the Black Knight in _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_, there
should be no real problems.
> Pete McCutchen
Steve
Richard Harter
(Ross Presser) wrote:
>alt.distingu...@sgi.com (Matt Austern).wrote.posted.offered:
>
>>c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) writes:
>>
>>> The Cold Equations - A Critical Study
>>>
>[snip]
>>>
>>> I do not propose to debate the points raised herein. However
>>> comments and suggestions for improvment are welcome.
>>
>>Could we talk about gun control instead?
>
>Sure. With gun control, the story would have been impossible, because
>the pilot would have had no blaster.
Excellent point. In a free society the girl would have been armed and
the pilot would have made it out the hatch.
>
>--
>Ross Presser
>ross_p...@imtek.com
>"And if you're the kind of person who parties with a bathtub full of
>pasta, I suspect you don't care much about cholesterol anyway."
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
P.D. TILLMAN
Earl Colby Pottinger
like to add a real life event to this discussion. My brother who is
in a coma, stays at home with me and my parents on "light duty"
life support. IE. Powered food drip, fogger, and suction. He will
not die if we lose power, he will just be very uncomfortable.
We do have a standby generator, but when the main power fails
we *ALWAYS* take notice, and contact the fire department on
causes and how long they expect the power to be off.
In mid June of 1999, a 15 year boy with his friends (?) looking on
climbed a 15 foot mesh wire fence, worked his way over 4
strands of barded wire mounted in an outward angle, climbed
down the inside of the fence, crossed 10 feet of concrete,
climbed on top of a 10 foot transformer station which had
nothing but vertical tubing and flat metal sides, then crawled
within two feet of one of the high tension junction, and reached
out to see how close he could get without being shocked!
Ofcourse, unlike household wire, when he got too close
the current 'jumped' the gap and he was killed. This was
only two blocks from my home. I have walked around that
station. There are signs on the fence all sides. There are
signs on the transformer's sides. There are even high voltage
pictures on the junctions.
There are however no guards. Nor do we teach children
at an early age that high voltage currents jump large gaps.
We don't even teach them the diffirence between high, mid
and low voltage systems.
Earl Colby Pottinger
PS. I do however, agree that my previous quoted
statement is wrong and that was my mistake. Today I would
say "The story has *only one main point! People who do not
think carefully and thus make stupid choices will die if they
are in space. Space does not care what the reasons of an
action are, only what the actions are."
Who knows, if you repost in another two years I may
disagree with myself again :)
"Henry Troup" <h...@nortelnetworks.com> :
> One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact behind
> doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only". Sometimes
> there are warning decals, sometimes not.
>
> The story holes are quite real though.
>
>
--
Earl Colby Pottinger
{Hydrogen Peroxide Rocket Developer
Earl Colby Pottinger
expects a plane, helicopter, rocket, race car, speed boat, coast guard
life boat etc to do a mercy run without doing a pre-check first. And in most
cases of the above the pre-check is done no matter how routine the trip.
What I find very bad, are the many lame solutions given for after the
craft is already in flight. Most of the solutions like dumping one of the
doors of the airlock show the person to be "reaching" for an answer.
Earl Colby Pottinger
rpre...@NOSPAMimtek.com.invalid (Ross Presser) :
> alt.distin...@nortelnetworks.com (Henry
> Troup).wrote.posted.offered:
>
> >One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact behind
> >doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only". Sometimes
> >there are warning decals, sometimes not.
> >
> >The story holes are quite real though.
>
> I feel that the "holes" relating to the poor construction of the society
> (no preflight check, no guards, etc.) were deliberate; that the author
> picked them in order to create the no-win situation. Yes, they don't make
> much sense, but as was said about railroad crossings and warning decals,
> they're not all that far from situations in reality.
Richard Horton
On 1 Dec 1999 02:23:38 GMT, til...@aztec.asu.edu (P.D. TILLMAN)
wrote:
>I vaguely recall the Analog story but don't remember author/title.
>Might've been a "Probability Zero" short-short?
It was a full-length story. Lemme see. (Checking.) Hey, I remembered
it before getting to my Analog shelf: "The Cold Solution", by Don
Sakers.
The Deborah Wessell story you mentioned, "The Cool Equations", is very
good. (Much better than the Sakers!) I'd like to see more by
Wessell. She published a couple of stories a few years back, but I
haven't seen anything recently.
Another "Cold Equations" response is "Think Like a Dinosaur", by James
Patrick Kelly, a Hugo winning novelette. Though that is also in
dialogue with _Rogue Moon_.
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent)
James Nicoll
Earl Colby Pottinger <ear...@idirect.com> wrote:
>
>There are however no guards. Nor do we teach children
>at an early age that high voltage currents jump large gaps.
>We don't even teach them the diffirence between high, mid
>and low voltage systems.
Milage varies on this, actually.
--
Richard Harter
I'm sorry but I don't follow you. The text you quote is not an
objection; it is an observation. That there are stowaways now and
then is explicitly stated in the story as noted; likewise there are
standard procedures is explicitly stated in the story as noted. I
will grant that contingency planning is common enough, even for
contingencies that may never occur. So?
Earl Colby Pottinger
You in fact correct. But this just supports the point that because
people shoulded be warned of a danger does not insure that
all people will be warned of that danger.
Keith Morrison
> I recall reading, on more than one occasion, reports about people who
> have tried to get a free ride on an airplane by sitting outside or in
> an unheated, unpressurised luggage area. Usually this results in the
> stowaway freezing to death.
> ( http://www.canard.com/ntsb/MIA/90A042.htm is the only reference
> I can find at the moment.)
>
> If our society know that this happens, it can't be that hard to check
> an airplane before take-off, right?
In fact, aircraft are checked prior to takeoff. Aside from the
ground crew, the pilots do a walkaround, not to mention that the
area around the plane it usually off-limits to unauthorized
personnel with lots of signs and people watching, and yet people
still, from time to time, grab on to the landing gear to hitch
a ride.
--
Keith
Keith Morrison
> >You talk about a bureaucracy but this sort of thing is one of the
> >hallmarks of a bureaucracy, therefore the fact that there is a
> >standard procedure for something, in and of itself, tells you nothing
> >about how likely said situation may arise and thus its implications
> >for the society (or in this case, the story) as a whole.
> >
> >Your other objections may be valid but this one is not.
>
> I'm sorry but I don't follow you. The text you quote is not an
> objection; it is an observation. That there are stowaways now and
> then is explicitly stated in the story as noted; likewise there are
> standard procedures is explicitly stated in the story as noted. I
> will grant that contingency planning is common enough, even for
> contingencies that may never occur. So?
Badly mispoken on my part. The observation is used to support your
thesis, but the observation in question does not necessarily do that,
thus using it to support your argument isn't useful.
--
Keith
Alan Carter
> Tell me, John, after we chop off both of your legs and one of your
> arms, how long will you be conscious and capable of landing a
> spaceship.
Well, Kimball Kinnison managed it :-)
Alan
Leigh Kimmel
schi...@spock.usc.edu (John Schilling) writes:
> And magic regeneration technology to grow back
> the missing limbs afterwards.
Actually regeneration only *looks* like magic because we don't have it
right now. But experimentation is already in the works that will
probably develop full regeneration within the next decade or two, as
long as the bio-Luddites who think it's an act of cosmic _lese majeste_
against God don't get it banned. We've already been able to use tissue
samples to grow functional windpipes and other organs _in vitro_ on an
inorganic substrate -- it was in a news item I saw on ABC news a month
or so ago.
--
One terrified boy and the girl who would save him.
"Claws of Vengeance" on sale now
http://www.alexlit.com/ Alexandria Digital Literature
Leigh Kimmel -- writer, artist and historian
kim...@globaleyes.net
http://members.tripod.com/~kimmel/lhkwebpage.html
Ask me how to order the new Sime~Gen novel!
Check out my bookstore http://members.tripod.com/~kimmel/bookstore/
William December Starr
schi...@spock.usc.edu (John Schilling) said:
>> (If I'm wrong, we have to assume that this DIY drastic surgery
>> would kill or incapacitate the pilot instead). [Nigel Arnot]
>
> That's what magic instantly-cauterizing laser pistols and
> super-advanced first aid kits are for.
Well if it's _that_ advanced, you can just cut off the stowaway's head,
stuff it in the first-aid kit, and jettison the rest of the body...
there's about 90% of your mass problem solved right there. :-)
-- William December Starr <wds...@crl.com>
William December Starr
kim...@mail.globaleyes.net. (Leigh Kimmel) said:
> Actually regeneration only *looks* like magic because we don't have it
> right now. But experimentation is already in the works that will
> probably develop full regeneration within the next decade or two, as
> long as the bio-Luddites who think it's an act of cosmic _lese
> majeste_ against God don't get it banned. We've already been able to
> use tissue samples to grow functional windpipes and other organs _in
> vitro_ on an inorganic substrate -- it was in a news item I saw on ABC
> news a month or so ago.
What's a windpipe beyond a tube of cartilage, though? Growing an
organic _machine_ like an arm would be a whole other order of work, I
think. I'd love to be wrong about this, of course.
Jonathan W Hendry
You could always dehydrate the stowaway. That'd lighten the load
quite a bit. Something like the gadget from the original Batman
movie would be ideal: reduce them to funky colored powder.
Larisa Migachyov
> In article <821gf9$lmb$1...@spock.usc.edu>
> schi...@spock.usc.edu (John Schilling) writes:
>
> > And magic regeneration technology to grow back
> > the missing limbs afterwards.
>
> right now. But experimentation is already in the works that will
> probably develop full regeneration within the next decade or two, as
> long as the bio-Luddites who think it's an act of cosmic _lese majeste_
> against God don't get it banned. We've already been able to use tissue
> samples to grow functional windpipes and other organs _in vitro_ on an
> inorganic substrate -- it was in a news item I saw on ABC news a month
> or so ago.
And for that matter, limb transplants are already being done; I was
reading something about a hand transplant quite a while ago.
--
Larisa Migachyov
Quaternion Press Publishing House
Have a math question? Ask the Quaternion at
http://www.quaternionpress.com/mathhelp.html
William December Starr
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> said:
> My problem with the story is that I never manage to suspend my
> disbelief. The sort of stripped-down-operating-at-a-razor's-edge
> spaceship which they depict most likely doesn't have place for a
> stowaway to hide in the first place.
I think that the set-up _can_ be made believable, even if Godwin didn't
back in his pre-Space-Age story. "We've retrofitted an Oompa-class
light scoutship for the trip. We've stripped out every piece of
unnecssary mass except the interior bulkheads, and we'd strip _them_ out
too if we had the time but we don't. Maxing out the fuel tanks and
riding right on the ragged edge of your life-support, you can just make
it to Ratsass IV and bring your velocity down to something that their
in-system tugs can match..." Something like that, with the fact that
time is ultra-critical emphasized, so that the unavailability of the
kinds of solutions that come with the luxury of time is credible.
Nigel Arnot
Kristopher/EOS wrote:
> Nigel Arnot wrote:
> > Given a vehicle that masses less than the pilot and a
> > payload massing ounces, hardly. That we can't build such
> > a vehicle today, or predict the delta-V from x kilos of
> > fuel to that accuracy, isn't a problem -- we assume
> > that by the time they have starships, this will be the
> > case.
>
> A vehicle weighing less than the pilot, that has a full
> airlock, room for a closet, and the spare weight for the
> pilot to carry a weapon?
>
SFnally, what's the problem? Allow force fields and you
could have it massing virtually zero. Or something like
Larry Niven's General Products Hull ...
(Actually I was thinking atmospheric reentry mass, not fully
fuelled mass. Anyone know how much an Apollo
capsule weighed at reentry? Not a huge factor
more than the men and the moonrocks, and we could
do quite a bit better today.
William December Starr
Frank <fch...@nospam.usa.net> said:
> I was surprised to see no mention of John Kessel, whose interpretation
> of "The Cold Equations" initiated a debate that raged in THE NEW YORK
> REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION for almost two years. Here's the relevant
> excerpt from his original letter (in the February 1993 issue):
"What makes me crazy is when I read a work that is all scream and
proceeds to offer wild justifications for it really being a cool
scientific extrapolation, a matter of logic with no gonads involved
at any point. I want all the fans of Tom Godwin's 'The Cold
Equations' to recognize that they like it because it's a social
darwinist parable about how the homeless don't belong anywhere else
than the gutter they find themselves in, and that this is not social
injustice but a simple working out of absolute laws of nature. Most
of all I want them to admit the _satisfaction_ they get when the
dumb bitch gets heaved out of the airlock, admit that they think the
little tart gets exactly what she deserves for not understanding the
cold laws of the universe that we tough-minded men have to struggle
against every day of our frontier lives while they sit home on their
cute asses eating bon-bons. This story is about as coolly rational
and impartial as the Wansee Conference."
What's to debate? You say "That John Kessel person is a complete
moron," and you go on with your life.
Barry DeCicco
Given a late 21st century first aid kit, this might not be that
hard. They should have some incredible anti-shock and -pain drugs.
Whatever blood was lost could be replaced immediately, with blood
substitute.
Barry
Ian
>One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact behind
>doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only".
I can't think of anything completely equivalent to "guaranteed death" that
would typically be behind such a door; just relatively dangerous things
that have an atypically high chance of killing or seriously injuring you.
Ian
>alt.distin...@nortelnetworks.com (Henry
>Troup).wrote.posted.offered:
>
>>One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact behind
>>doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only". Sometimes
>>there are warning decals, sometimes not.
>>
>>The story holes are quite real though.
>
>I feel that the "holes" relating to the poor construction of the society
>(no preflight check, no guards, etc.) were deliberate; that the author
>picked them in order to create the no-win situation. Yes, they don't make
>much sense, but as was said about railroad crossings and warning decals,
>they're not all that far from situations in reality.
From what I understand of the story, it is indeed relatively far from
situations in reality. Railroad crossings are a bad example, for one
thing. Even though crossing when a train is somewhere near doesn't mean
instant death, warning lights and physical barriers provide quite a good,
recognized "don't go here" message. And trains are a common and
sufficiently well-understood phenomenon such that only small children - and
not all small children at that - could plausibly not know just what they're
risking if they cross when the warning lights are flashing.
Someone who gets hit by a train is generally engaging in an activity that
they would have reliably _known_ was very dangerous and courting death.
Ian
>In article <jF014.26601$PF1.1...@quark.idirect.com>,
>Earl Colby Pottinger <ear...@idirect.com> wrote:
>>
>>There are however no guards. Nor do we teach children
>>at an early age that high voltage currents jump large gaps.
>>We don't even teach them the diffirence between high, mid
>>and low voltage systems.
>
> Milage varies on this, actually.
I know that when I was in elementary school, there were lots of safety
videos to the effect of "stay well away from power transformers or anything
else that's fenced and says high voltage, or extremely horrible things will
happen to you". Safety education was done reasonably well.
Jonathan W Hendry
> "Henry Troup" <h...@nortelnetworks.com> wrote:
>>One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact behind
>>doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only".
> I can't think of anything completely equivalent to "guaranteed death" that
> would typically be behind such a door; just relatively dangerous things
> that have an atypically high chance of killing or seriously injuring you.
How about an open elevator shaft?
James Nicoll
Nigel Arnot <nigel...@kcl.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> SFnally, what's the problem? Allow force fields and you
>could have it massing virtually zero. Or something like
>Larry Niven's General Products Hull ...
I was going to post something about how you'd never get me
on a ship whose life support was dependent on there being no power
outs but it occurs to me that there's no reason a force field should
require energy to maintain. Something like Anderson's potential barrier
force fields from _Shield_, for example, might cost energy to set up
or change but none to operate, anymore than Earth's gravity requires
energy to be present.
Offhand I can't think of a force field in fiction that acts like
that, though. Lots of counterexamples exist, including _Shield_.
James Nicoll
--
Thomas
William December Starr wrote:
> In article <s4ap0p...@corp.supernews.com>,
> kim...@mail.globaleyes.net. (Leigh Kimmel) said:
>
> > Actually regeneration only *looks* like magic because we don't have it
> > right now. But experimentation is already in the works that will
> > probably develop full regeneration within the next decade or two, as
> > long as the bio-Luddites who think it's an act of cosmic _lese
> > majeste_ against God don't get it banned. We've already been able to
> > use tissue samples to grow functional windpipes and other organs _in
> > vitro_ on an inorganic substrate -- it was in a news item I saw on ABC
> > news a month or so ago.
>
> What's a windpipe beyond a tube of cartilage, though? Growing an
> organic _machine_ like an arm would be a whole other order of work, I
> think. I'd love to be wrong about this, of course.
Saw a show with some of the people behind this the other night. They
said that given a billion and a decade for R&D they could essentially
grow hearts from tissue-cultures on a assembly line. Subsequent
organs should be easier. Remarkably this is possible without using -any-
of the technologies that give a lot of people the creeps, no cloning or GE
is involved. Breaktroughs in cloning could achive the same results quicker
and cheaper, but might get adversely affected by the odd rep cloning has for
being an -evil- tech (thank you hollywood). But overall Ię² say that limb
and organ replacement is a rather inevitable development if our society
does not fall apart.
sw
Actually, wouldn't the life-system bit be much better than the fuel bit?
After all, you can always think of *something* to throw out that you can
probably get by without, but it's going to be awful tricky coming up with
more oxygen in deep space. That solves the "just lighten the load" problem,
plus the "safety margin" problem (since an "acceptable life-system safety
margin" for one person wouldn't necessarily be enough to support an entire
second person). Also could solve the size problem, depending on how it
were set up, if the limitation isn't reaction mass.
Good grief, I'm trying to tweak the scenario to kill the poor stowaway
anyway. All that nihilism over in the "destroy the universe" thread must have
warped me.
--
--- An' thou dost not get caught, do as thou wilt shall be the law ---
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make
my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." -- Voltaire
--- The Surly Bastard Chronicles @ http://www.eyrie.org/~sw/sbc ---
John Schilling
>"Henry Troup" <h...@nortelnetworks.com> wrote:
>>One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact behind
>>doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only".
>I can't think of anything completely equivalent to "guaranteed death" that
>would typically be behind such a door; just relatively dangerous things
>that have an atypically high chance of killing or seriously injuring you.
The doors in "Cold Equations" didn't contain guaranteed death either.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the star cruiser's shuttle bay is
just going to be a storage place for unused hardware, and the curious
kid who breaks in just finds a really cool but safe playground.
If you start putting "Absolute Guaranteed Instant Death" signs around
such places, the curious kids who break in anyhow and survive will
know you are lying when you post such signs, which defeats the whole
purpose.
Making the signs into flat-panel electronic displays which update
automatically as operational conditions change would help, but I can
hardly fault a 1950s SF writer for not predicting that possibility.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
Matt Austern
> Actually, wouldn't the life-system bit be much better than the fuel bit?
> After all, you can always think of *something* to throw out that you can
> probably get by without, but it's going to be awful tricky coming up with
> more oxygen in deep space. That solves the "just lighten the load" problem,
> plus the "safety margin" problem (since an "acceptable life-system safety
> margin" for one person wouldn't necessarily be enough to support an entire
> second person). Also could solve the size problem, depending on how it
> were set up, if the limitation isn't reaction mass.
That's the setup in Arthur C. Clarke's story "Breaking Strain" (first
published in 1949, several years before "The Cold Equations"). The
limitation in that story is the life support system's capacity, not
the mass of the ship. Makes much more sense that way, I think.
"Breaking Strain" deserves to be much better known than it is. It's
one of Clarke's best short stories, which is saying a lot.
Kristopher/EOS
>
> Alan Carter wrote:
>
>> Pete McCutchen wrote:
>
>>> Tell me, John, after we chop off both of your legs and one
>>> of your arms, how long will you be conscious and capable
>>> of landing a spaceship.
>
>> Well, Kimball Kinnison managed it :-)
>
> that hard. They should have some incredible anti-shock and
> -pain drugs. Whatever blood was lost could be replaced
> immediately, with blood substitute.
Oh hell, with that kind of stuff on board, through the first-
aid kit and the blaster out the airlock, that should be enough.
Or better yet, jettison the damn airlock from the "stripped to
the bones" vessel.
"Cold Equations" and the works it "spawned" all sound like
throw-at-the-wall material.
Kristopher/EOS
Kristopher/EOS
>
> In article <dan84skk7eq6ui38q...@4ax.com>,
> Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> said:
>
>> My problem with the story is that I never manage to suspend my
>> disbelief. The sort of stripped-down-operating-at-a-razor's-edge
>> spaceship which they depict most likely doesn't have place for a
>> stowaway to hide in the first place.
>
> I think that the set-up _can_ be made believable, even if Godwin
> didn't back in his pre-Space-Age story. "We've retrofitted an
> Oompa-class light scoutship for the trip. We've stripped out
> every piece of unnecssary mass except the interior bulkheads,
> and we'd strip _them_ out too if we had the time but we don't.
> Maxing out the fuel tanks and riding right on the ragged edge of
> your life-support, you can just make it to Ratsass IV and bring
> your velocity down to something that their in-system tugs can
> match..." Something like that, with the fact that time is
> ultra-critical emphasized, so that the unavailability of the
> kinds of solutions that come with the luxury of time is credible.
But they still left in an airlock?
Kristopher/EOS
Kristopher/EOS
>
> In article <Z85EOEyJFLPfJ8...@4ax.com>,
> Frank <fch...@nospam.usa.net> said:
>
>> I was surprised to see no mention of John Kessel, whose
>> interpretation of "The Cold Equations" initiated a debate
>> that raged in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION for
>> almost two years. Here's the relevant excerpt from his
>> original letter (in the February 1993 issue):
<snipped>
> What's to debate? You say "That John Kessel person is a
> complete moron," and you go on with your life.
Maybe we read that differently...what makes John Kessel is a
complete moron?"
Kristopher/EOS
Danny Sichel
> And for that matter, limb transplants are already being done; I was
> reading something about a hand transplant quite a while ago.
Yeah, but I think it failed when the guy ran out on his anti-rejection
treatments to escape fraud charges/
By the time the cops caught up with him, it was too late for the hand.
I think.
James C. Ellis
>
> Oh hell, with that kind of stuff on board, through the first-
> aid kit and the blaster out the airlock, that should be enough.
>
> Or better yet, jettison the damn airlock from the "stripped to
> the bones" vessel.
I figure that the girl's weight in fuel probably wouldn't be missed,
considering typical weight-to-thrust ratios. They'd just have a
slightly harder bump upon landing.
Biff
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare - a pumpkin with a gun.
[...] Euminides this! " - Mervyn, the Sandman #66
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Kristopher/EOS
>
> Larisa Migachyov wrote:
>
>> And for that matter, limb transplants are already being
>> done; I was reading something about a hand transplant
>> quite a while ago.
>
> Yeah, but I think it failed when the guy ran out on his
>
> By the time the cops caught up with him, it was too late for
> the hand.
>
> I think.
You're not serious.
Kristopher/EOS
Gary Weiner
Sounds good, as long as you don't rehydrate her with heavy water.
--
Gary J. Weiner - webm...@hatrack.net
http://www.hatrack.net
HatRack Web Design & Hosting - Hang your web with us
-----
"And so he says I don't like the cut of your jib. And I go I says, IT'S
THE ONLY JIB I GOT, BABY!" - The Evil Midnite Bomber what bombs at
Midnite
Anne M. Marble
news:1aua4s44nn0bh9pg7...@4ax.com...
> "Henry Troup" <h...@nortelnetworks.com> wrote:
>
> >One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact
behind
> >doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only".
>
> I can't think of anything completely equivalent to "guaranteed
death" that
> would typically be behind such a door; just relatively dangerous
things
> that have an atypically high chance of killing or seriously injuring
you.
Like the stockroom of a grocery store. Or the kitchen in a fast food
restaurant. Sure, they're not completely safe places. (Just ask OHSA!)
a crate of eggs could fall off a shelf and kill you. Or you could be
damaged by hot grease or sharp blades. But it's not the equivalent of
ending up in a Tom Godwin story.
And more often than not, you won't even find relatively dangerous
things behind the "Authorized Personnel Only" door. Just an employee
lounge or employee restroom.
Anne M. Marble
news:3845...@news.depaul.edu...
>
> You could always dehydrate the stowaway. That'd lighten the load
> quite a bit. Something like the gadget from the original Batman
> movie would be ideal: reduce them to funky colored powder.
Where's the Master when you need him? Zap! Then again, he had a
TARDIS, so he didn't have to worry about things like reentry.
William December Starr
eosl...@net-link.net said:
> But they still left in an airlock?
Maybe it -- both doors -- was seriously integral, and they didn't have
the time to blowtorch through the hinges or whatever. I still maintain
that you can hide a _lot_ under the rug of intense time pressure. Not
the least of which is the chaos and crappy security that lets an airhead
stowaway sneak on board...
(Also, the more I think about it the more I can see the decision being
made that a working airlock constituted part of a complete life-support
system and therefore shouldn't be compromised, not even for this
mission. "By the time he gets in-system and the local tugs catch up
with him, his air supply situation might be critical enough that he'll
have had to trank himself out after his last fuel burn to cut down his
respiration. If that happens, the local tug jockeys are going to have
to be able to get in to him without having to take the time to rig a
temporary airlock.")
Anne M. Marble
> >
> >How about an open elevator shaft?
>
> noticing that there was no floor on the other side, especially when
> it's an elevator door marked with warning signs?
Open elevator shafts don't always have warning signs. Speaking from
personal experience. The elevators at my previous job were pretty bad.
Sometimes, they bounced slightly when you got to your floor. There was
always someone working on the elevators. Once in a while, the elevator
doors would open, and there would be only half an elevator, or no
elevator at all. No warning signs, either. But we still didn't get on
that elevator. :->
We called one of them the Rosalind Shay Memorial Elevator. (*)
(*) For those who missed it, Rosalind was the character was played by
Diana Muldaur. (Yes, the doctor from the second season of Star Trek:
The Next Generation.) The character started out as a strong woman, a
foil to the men on the show. But she quickly turned into the
cold-hearted woman everybody loved to hate. Yawn. Finally, one day,
the character walked through the elevator doors -- only there was no
elevator. (!!!) That scene was the sure sign that the writers had lost
any sense on how to plot.
William December Starr
eosl...@net-link.net said:
>> What's to debate? You say "That John Kessel person is a
>> complete moron," and you go on with your life. [wdstarr]
>
> Maybe we read that differently...what makes John Kessel is a complete
> moron?"
If he believes the tripe he spews he must be brain-damaged. Of course,
he could just be lying about what he believes...
"I want all the fans of Tom Godwin's 'The Cold Equations' to recognize
that they like it because it's a social darwinist parable about how the
homeless don't belong anywhere else than the gutter they find themselves
in, and that this is not social injustice but a simple working out of
absolute laws of nature." Riiiiight. The Amazing Kessel knows what
we're thinking, just by the fact that... well, actually, I don't know
_how_ he divined this rubbish. (The phrase "He just makes it up to suit
his prejudices" does spring to mind, though.)
Leigh Kimmel
l...@leland.Stanford.EDU (Larisa Migachyov) writes:
> And for that matter, limb transplants are already being done; I was
> reading something about a hand transplant quite a while ago.
Right -- that happened not too far from here, at a hospital in
Louisville, KY, IIRC. However, you still have the problem of rejection
-- the recipient will have to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest
of his life, which will also leave him very vulnerable to diseases.
If _in situ_ regeneration of limbs doesn't work, and if we can tinker
cloning techniques to only clone selected organs at adult size instead
of a whole baby, and overcome people's objections to the cloning of
human tissue, we could approach regeneration that way and transplant
the tank-grown limb.
Again, the bio-Luddites will probably be more of a problem than the
technical difficulty.
--
One terrified boy and the girl who would save him.
"Claws of Vengeance" on sale now
http://www.alexlit.com/ Alexandria Digital Literature
Leigh Kimmel -- writer, artist and historian
kim...@globaleyes.net
http://members.tripod.com/~kimmel/lhkwebpage.html
Ask me how to order the new Sime~Gen novel!
Check out my bookstore http://members.tripod.com/~kimmel/bookstore/
Leigh Kimmel
> of all I want them to admit the _satisfaction_ they get when the
> dumb bitch gets heaved out of the airlock, admit that they think the
> little tart gets exactly what she deserves for not understanding the
> cold laws of the universe that we tough-minded men have to struggle
> against every day of our frontier lives while they sit home on their
> cute asses eating bon-bons. This story is about as coolly rational
> and impartial as the Wansee Conference."
Alternatively, I could propose a reading that hinges upon class instead
of gender -- the girl as a member of the upper class, accustomed to
family money cushioning her from the harsh realities of life (note how
her job popped up so conveniently when she needed it, without any
evidence of her having to go through strenuous applications, which
seems to indicate that daddy's money and connections may have quietly
lined it up when she got done with college early) but through her
ignorance of the harsh realities of the environment she's entered
stumbling into a situation where all of daddy's money can't save her. I
think all of us have known at least one person who never learned
responsibility because their parents bailed them out of all their jams,
paid for all the things they broke through carelessness, etc., and
perhaps there's more than a little satisfaction in imagining the girl
in the story being that person getting a final, fatal comeuppance.
However, I think that the biggest weakness in the story may well be an
unclearness in just what kind of story it is trying to tell. The title
and all the talk about the inexorable laws of physics in it seem to
indicate that it is about the idea that nature is indifferent to human
ideas of justice and fairness, it is impersonal and judges only by
one's ability to adapt to it, not whether one is a "good" person or has
done anything morally wrong.
If that is true, then the Jack London story that someone mentioned
earlier ("To Build a Fire"? -- I'm not sure of the exact title)
succeeds much better, because in it the laws of nature are
self-enforced, rather than requiring the agency of a human being to
kill the foolish young man who got himself into an untenable situation.
Godwin muddies the issue by introducing the pilot with the blaster to
enforce the regulation that stowaways must be spaced. Instead, it would
have worked better if the girl had been by herself, forced to face up
to the mess she'd gotten herself into by the circumstances themselves
instead of by human agency (or at most perhaps by some kind of radio
communication to a ship or station who cannot rescue her because it's
become physically impossible).
The alternative is to consider it a lifeboat story, a meditation on
when it's morally acceptable to cause the death of one person in order
to save the lives of others. In that case, all the talk about the cold
equations of physics create a misleading sense that it's totally a
matter of impersonal laws of nature and not of human morality.
Ian
>In article <38457762...@kcl.ac.uk>,
>Nigel Arnot <nigel...@kcl.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>> SFnally, what's the problem? Allow force fields and you
>>could have it massing virtually zero. Or something like
>>Larry Niven's General Products Hull ...
>
> I was going to post something about how you'd never get me
>on a ship whose life support was dependent on there being no power
>outs but it occurs to me that there's no reason a force field should
>require energy to maintain.
Sure. A force field tears the laws of physics to shreds, might as well
handwave in a few other screwy assumptions in the process.
>Something like Anderson's potential barrier
>force fields from _Shield_, for example, might cost energy to set up
>or change but none to operate, anymore than Earth's gravity requires
>energy to be present.
Earth's gravity does require energy to be present - mass-energy, that is.
Ian
>Ian <iadm...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>> "Henry Troup" <h...@nortelnetworks.com> wrote:
>
>>>One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact behind
>>>doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only".
>
>> I can't think of anything completely equivalent to "guaranteed death" that
>> would typically be behind such a door; just relatively dangerous things
>> that have an atypically high chance of killing or seriously injuring you.
>
Jordan S. Bassior
>What's a windpipe beyond a tube of cartilage, though? Growing an
>organic _machine_ like an arm would be a whole other order of work, I
>think.
Yes, but we know it's possible. Because each of us grows two of them naturally
... hence the genetic machinery exists somewhere, if only in cloned neonatal
tissue, to grow arms in the first place.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
"Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; but he is halfway between an ape and
a god and he is travelling in the right direction." (Dean William R. Inge)
Katie Schwarz
>>"Henry Troup" <h...@nortelnetworks.com> wrote:
>
>>>One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact behind
>>>doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only".
>
>just going to be a storage place for unused hardware, and the curious
>kid who breaks in just finds a really cool but safe playground.
>
>If you start putting "Absolute Guaranteed Instant Death" signs around
>such places, the curious kids who break in anyhow and survive will
>know you are lying when you post such signs, which defeats the whole
>purpose.
>
>Making the signs into flat-panel electronic displays which update
>automatically as operational conditions change would help, but I can
>hardly fault a 1950s SF writer for not predicting that possibility.
Can you fault him for not predicting the possibility of signs stating
"Stowaways Will Be Spaced"? :-) After all, the story wasn't about a
curious kid who thought it might be fun to poke around in the
spaceship, it was about someone who stowed away on purpose.
If the object is to prevent stowaways, even a bureaucrat is likely to
figure out that a sign reading "Stowaways Will Be Spaced" is much more
effective than one reading "Keep Out". There's a big ding in the
suspension of disbelief right there.
--
Katie Schwarz
"There's no need to look for a Chimera, or a cat with three legs."
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "Death and the Compass"
Ross TenEyck
>>One point I'd like to raise is that many deadly things are in fact behind
>>doors that just says "Keep Out" or "Authorized Personnel Only".
>I can't think of anything completely equivalent to "guaranteed death" that
>would typically be behind such a door; just relatively dangerous things
>that have an atypically high chance of killing or seriously injuring you.
...and those typically have, in addition to the signs saying "Keep Out,"
signs saying "Danger: Radiation" or "Warning: Hard Hat Area" or some
such.
The whole "Cold Equations" thing could have been avoided by adding a
line on the sign saying, "Warning: stowaways will be shot without trial.
This means you." Or something.
--
================== http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~teneyck ==================
Ross TenEyck Seattle, WA \ Light, kindled in the furnace of hydrogen;
ten...@alumni.caltech.edu \ like smoke, sunlight carries the hot-metal
Are wa yume? Soretomo maboroshi? \ tang of Creation's forge.
Jordan S. Bassior
>How many people would open a door and walk through without noticing that
>there was no floor on the other side, especially when it's an elevator door
>marked with warning signs?
True story:
I was once hiking along a cliffside, in the dark, with a group of people. One
of them, named Harry, apparently had very poor night vision, because I noticed
that he was drifting to the right, where the edge was.
I warned him: "Harry, stop moving to the right."
Harry: "Why's that?"
Me: "Because about four feet to your right there is a 100 ft. drop onto sharp
rocks."
Harry: "I wish you hadn't told me that."
After he said that amazingly stupid thing, for an uncharitable moment I wished
I hadn't told him that.
Never underestimate the possibilities of human stupidity in a life-or-death
situation.
James Nicoll
Ian <iadm...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>jam...@nyquist.uwaterloo.ca (James Nicoll) wrote:
>
>>In article <38457762...@kcl.ac.uk>,
>>Nigel Arnot <nigel...@kcl.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>> SFnally, what's the problem? Allow force fields and you
>>>could have it massing virtually zero. Or something like
>>>Larry Niven's General Products Hull ...
>>
>> I was going to post something about how you'd never get me
>>on a ship whose life support was dependent on there being no power
>>outs but it occurs to me that there's no reason a force field should
>>require energy to maintain.
>
>Sure. A force field tears the laws of physics to shreds, might as well
>handwave in a few other screwy assumptions in the process.
It makes a change from talking about FTL and stealth in space,
though.
Anyway we know about "force fields" of sorts, four of them
last I heard. They just aren't currently thought to be useful to
hold air in with, excepting the brute force one of gathering a planet
sized amount of mass.
Anderson's ff set up a spherical region a certain distance
from the unit. You set the value of potential barrier to some value
and anything moving slower would bounce of the field. It was symetric
so if something -did- get through, it picked up what it lost getting
to the field: you take no damage or full damage.
It had other problems: you couldn't move with it on unless an
outside force worked on you. Not clear how work was transfered to the
generator. You could bubble a city with it but you wouldn't be able to
leave the city unless you forced your way through the field [so if it
was set to 11 km/s, it'd be as hard to leave as Earth is].
>>Something like Anderson's potential barrier
>>force fields from _Shield_, for example, might cost energy to set up
>>or change but none to operate, anymore than Earth's gravity requires
>>energy to be present.
>
>Earth's gravity does require energy to be present - mass-energy, that is.
>
Yes, but once it's there, you don't have to do any work to
maintain it. In fact, you have to do work to change it and you can't
ever get rid of it, just move it around.
--
Richard Harter
Nicoll) wrote:
It occurs to me that one could postulate a force like the strong force
only repulsive. The notion is that at the center the force is very
weak, at a maximum at a characteristic distance, and then tails off.
It's a field generated by bogons.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri
I have been waging relentless war on reality;
So far reality is ahead, 0 to -1.
Katie Schwarz
>Sten Thaning wrote:
>
>> I recall reading, on more than one occasion, reports about people who
>> have tried to get a free ride on an airplane by sitting outside or in
>> an unheated, unpressurised luggage area. Usually this results in the
>> stowaway freezing to death. ...
>>
>> If our society know that this happens, it can't be that hard to check
>> an airplane before take-off, right?
>
>In fact, aircraft are checked prior to takeoff. Aside from the
>ground crew, the pilots do a walkaround, not to mention that the
>area around the plane it usually off-limits to unauthorized
>personnel with lots of signs and people watching, and yet people
>still, from time to time, grab on to the landing gear to hitch
>a ride.
It's worth re-emphasizing that they don't do those checks to coddle
the stupid, undeserving stowaways. They do them for *their own*
survival, looking for blocked sensors, loose panels, leaks, stuff like
that.
Now, the "Cold Equations" pilot would have had exactly the same
motivation for checking his storage closet before taking off. What if
there'd been a hardened criminal ready to sneak out and get the drop
on him, instead of a helpless teenage girl? What if the extra mass,
skewed balance, and altered moment of inertia caused the spaceship to
handle improperly and crash on takeoff? (Airplane pilots must
calculate their center of gravity very carefully.) Stupid pilot. By
not checking, he was endangering *HIMSELF* and his mission.
The whole premise that they've had mission-threatening stowaways
before but they don't check for them is ridiculous. They go to the
trouble of putting a temperature sensor in the closet to give away
stowaways, but they don't do anything as simple as *locking the door*,
even supposing they can't, for some reason, make the closet too small
for a person to hide in? The shoot-stowaways regulation functions as
a security blanket to make the pilot feel better about making the girl
die, but it opens up great gaping holes in the setup. I think it
would have been a much stronger story without the butt-covering
regulation. Suppose no one had ever stowed away before (plausible --
those emergency shuttles don't go at predictable times and they don't
go to places most people want to go). The pilot and girl would have
had to realize what they had to do for themselves, instead of just
quoting authority.
Katie Schwarz
>
>That's the setup in Arthur C. Clarke's story "Breaking Strain" (first
>published in 1949, several years before "The Cold Equations"). The
>limitation in that story is the life support system's capacity, not
>the mass of the ship. Makes much more sense that way, I think.
Without having read this story, I predict that it quotes Kipling. :-)
Katie Schwarz
>
>Modern space launch vehicles routinely work with propellant margins as
>fine as that indicated in _The Cold Equations_, despite being designed
>and operated by some extremely bright people. The motives are slightly
>different, but the mechanics are the same. ...
>
>That's one of the few things that Godwin not only got right in 1954, but
>are still right today. Well, actually, it's two of the things. First,
>rocketry is characterized by extremely high mass ratios, with propellant
>outweighing hardware by an order of magnitude or more. Second, once the
>vehicle and mission are specified, the propellant requirement can be
>determined with almost metaphysical certainty and precision. ...
>
>There are a few outright flaws in TCE, and a lot of areas where time
>has simply passed it by and left it in the same limbo as the old
>"Martian canals" or "1950s nuclear families in space" SF. This is
>none of those.
Modern space vehicles don't have closets where people can hide, that I
know of -- they're probably using every cubic cm. That's the "Martian
canal" that kills the story for me. I try to picture a man-sized
storage closet in a one-pilot vehicle such as a Mercury capsule, or a
Blackbird or something, and I just break down laughing. Imagining a
stowaway getting within a hundred yards of one without being spotted
is pretty hard, too. Did the spaceship in the story have no ground
crew?
Larisa Migachyov
Not to mention that said storage closet probably doesn't need a door,
which only adds unnecessary weight; but I think that the story was not
intended to be realistic.
I was going to put in something about safety factors, but I admit that
aerospace design is quite different from regular engineering design; while
I do not like safety factors less than, say, 10, I suppose a spaceship
really can't afford anything too much greater than 1. Still - if the
safety factor is 1, as is in this case, isn't the thing going to be way
too fragile for human operation? I would think that with something that
tightly designed, just breathing in the wrong direction would break it.
--
Larisa Migachyov
Quaternion Press Publishing House
Have a math question? Ask the Quaternion at
http://www.quaternionpress.com/mathhelp.html
edw...@entropic.co.uk
> s...@eyrie.org (sw) writes:
>>Actually, wouldn't the life-system bit be much better than the fuel
>>bit? After all, you can always think of *something* to throw out that
>>you can probably get by without, but it's going to be awful tricky
>>coming up with more oxygen in deep space. That solves the "just
>>lighten the load" problem, plus the "safety margin" problem (since an
>>"acceptable life-system safety margin" for one person wouldn't
>>necessarily be enough to support an entire second person). Also could
>>solve the size problem, depending on how it were set up, if the
>>limitation isn't reaction mass.
>
> That's the setup in Arthur C. Clarke's story "Breaking Strain" (first
> published in 1949, several years before "The Cold Equations"). The
> limitation in that story is the life support system's capacity, not
> the mass of the ship. Makes much more sense that way, I think.
This is also what happens in Herge's _Tintin on the Moon_. Which, now
I come to think of it, deals with the whole issue rather more
interestingly than "The Cold Equations" (though I can't really tell as
I've never read that story). And it's a comic book aimed primarily at
children...
--
Edwin Young
Jordan S. Bassior
>Modern space vehicles don't have closets where people can hide, that I
>know of -- they're probably using every cubic cm.
We know that *mass* was crtitical on the ship in TCE; we do *not* know that
*volume* was critical.
>Did the spaceship in the story have no ground crew?
Airplanes have ground crews, yet stowaways sneak aboard them.
Keith Morrison
> Modern space vehicles don't have closets where people can hide, that I
> know of -- they're probably using every cubic cm. That's the "Martian
> canal" that kills the story for me. I try to picture a man-sized
> storage closet in a one-pilot vehicle such as a Mercury capsule, or a
> Blackbird or something, and I just break down laughing.
Why? I don't recall the story saying how large the ship actually was,
only that its mass was the critical factor, not the volume. In this
specific instance the ship was carrying something small (the vaccine)
but in other situations the cargo might be something larger (heck, it
might be people).
--
Keith
Keith Morrison
> > Well if it's _that_ advanced, you can just cut off the stowaway's head,
> > stuff it in the first-aid kit, and jettison the rest of the body...
> > there's about 90% of your mass problem solved right there. :-)
>
> You could always dehydrate the stowaway. That'd lighten the load
> quite a bit. Something like the gadget from the original Batman
> movie would be ideal: reduce them to funky colored powder.
Nah, use that device from Star Trek that turns people into light foam
polyhedrons.
--
Keith
Nigel Arnot
Leigh Kimmel wrote:
[snip]
> However, I think that the biggest weakness in the story may well be an
> unclearness in just what kind of story it is trying to tell. The title
> and all the talk about the inexorable laws of physics in it seem to
> indicate that it is about the idea that nature is indifferent to human
> ideas of justice and fairness, it is impersonal and judges only by
> one's ability to adapt to it, not whether one is a "good" person or has
> done anything morally wrong.
That's what I thought the first time I read it, a long time ago. But
the critique we're discussing here made me think that it may have
another message, that ties up with the title and may be why the
story stuck in my head.
> The alternative is to consider it a lifeboat story, a meditation on
> when it's morally acceptable to cause the death of one person in order
> to save the lives of others. In that case, all the talk about the cold
> equations of physics create a misleading sense that it's totally a
> matter of impersonal laws of nature and not of human morality.
Close. But isn't it more of a Titanic story? The tragedy was *avoidable*,
had someone in the starship company bureaucracy really bothered to
think about who might try to stow away on such a vessel, and why,
and what would sensibly prevent this.
This is exactly true to life. Bureaucracies are very much like the "cold
equations" of physics. They exist for their own purposes, and rarely
care much about how well they serve those who they are there to
serve. Occasionally you'll find a part of one where the people are
actually helpful, or a malign one that actively tries to hurt you, but
by and large, like the laws of physics, they just don't give a damn.
Bill Woods
:
> Oh hell, with that kind of stuff on board, through the first-
> aid kit and the blaster out the airlock, that should be enough.
>
> Or better yet, jettison the damn airlock from the "stripped to
> the bones" vessel.
How do you jettison the only airlock of a ship in space?
Maybe there's one spacesuit for the pilot, but there won't
be a second for the girl.
Also,
[Richard Harter's post]
> (7) p67 "How did you manage to stow away?"
> "I just sort of walked in when no one was looking my way," she
> said. "I was practicing my Gelanese on the native girl who does
> the cleaning in the Ship's Supply office when someone came in
> with an order for supplies for the survey crew on Woden. I
> slipped into the closet there after the ship was ready to go and
> just before you came in. It was the impulse of the moment to stow
> away..."
This sounds as though there were people near the door to the hanger
or inside the hanger when she snuck in, but they weren't alert for
intruders, and she slipped through the cracks. This seems plausible
enough for me.
--
Bill Woods
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely
mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way
down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
-- Douglas Adams
John Schilling
>John Schilling <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote:
>>Modern space launch vehicles routinely work with propellant margins as
>>fine as that indicated in _The Cold Equations_, despite being designed
>>and operated by some extremely bright people. The motives are slightly
>>different, but the mechanics are the same. ...
>>That's one of the few things that Godwin not only got right in 1954, but
>>are still right today. Well, actually, it's two of the things. First,
>>rocketry is characterized by extremely high mass ratios, with propellant
>>outweighing hardware by an order of magnitude or more. Second, once the
>>vehicle and mission are specified, the propellant requirement can be
>>determined with almost metaphysical certainty and precision. ...
>>There are a few outright flaws in TCE, and a lot of areas where time
>>has simply passed it by and left it in the same limbo as the old
>>"Martian canals" or "1950s nuclear families in space" SF. This is
>>none of those.
>Modern space vehicles don't have closets where people can hide, that I
>know of -- they're probably using every cubic cm. That's the "Martian
>canal" that kills the story for me. I try to picture a man-sized
>storage closet in a one-pilot vehicle such as a Mercury capsule, or a
>Blackbird or something, and I just break down laughing. Imagining a
>stowaway getting within a hundred yards of one without being spotted
>is pretty hard, too. Did the spaceship in the story have no ground
>crew?
The spaceship in the story had no ground crew, for the simple reason
that it was not launched from the ground. It was launched from another
spaceship which was itself explicitly subject to extremely tight mass
and schedule constraints, which is a very different environment.
It also wasn't a one-man vehicle, it was a general-purpose emergency
response vehicle that happened to be carrying one man *this* time.
Other missions would have other requirements, and modest accomodations
for passengers and cargo are called for. That puts you up in the range
of an Apollo capsule or maybe a Cessna 180 aircraft.
Which, unlike the Mercury or Blackbird you posit, *do* have room for
a hidden stowaway who doesn't mind dark, cramped holes.
It's not that long a story, and if you enter with a presumption of
disbelief there's no emotional cost to reading it either. If you
plan to participate in the discussion, you really ought to take the
time to read it.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
John Schilling
>I was going to put in something about safety factors, but I admit that
>aerospace design is quite different from regular engineering design; while
>I do not like safety factors less than, say, 10, I suppose a spaceship
>really can't afford anything too much greater than 1. Still - if the
>safety factor is 1, as is in this case, isn't the thing going to be way
>too fragile for human operation? I would think that with something that
>tightly designed, just breathing in the wrong direction would break it.
You've got problems if you don't like safety factors less than ten, because
I doubt you'll find them *anywhere*. You might get a factor of four or five
in a civil engineering structure where mass is no object, but that's about
it. And it's more than enough.
The typical rule of thumb in aerospace structures is a factor of 1.5, which
is still more than enough if you are rigorous about figuring out what the
actual stresses are. Propellant reserves for commercial aircraft are
supposed to be sufficient for 45 minutes of cruise flight.
Propellant reserves for space launch vehicles are only about 1-2%, or a
safety factor of 1.01-1.02. I can't think of any other field where the
margins are that thin - in this one case, they *have* to be that thin
because of the high, and exponential, mass ratios associated with
chemical rocketry, and they *can* be that thin because orbital mechanics
is a precise enough science to allow predicting fuel consumption with
such certainty.
Unfortunately for the longevity of the story, we no longer consider
chemical rocketry to be a sensible way to *land* on an earthlike planet,
and aerobraking is typically associated with much larger uncertainties
and thus much larger safety margins. It might be possible to rewrite
the story with a transpiration-cooled heat shield, a limited supply
of coolant, and a state of the art advanced enough to predict coolant
use to within 1-2%, but I wouldn't want to try making that scenario
credible.
Thomas
Leigh Kimmel wrote:
> In article <823seb$jc6$2...@nntp.Stanford.EDU>
> l...@leland.Stanford.EDU (Larisa Migachyov) writes:
>
> > And for that matter, limb transplants are already being done; I was
> > reading something about a hand transplant quite a while ago.
>
> Right -- that happened not too far from here, at a hospital in
> Louisville, KY, IIRC. However, you still have the problem of rejection
> -- the recipient will have to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest
> of his life, which will also leave him very vulnerable to diseases.
>
> If _in situ_ regeneration of limbs doesn't work, and if we can tinker
> cloning techniques to only clone selected organs at adult size instead
> of a whole baby, and overcome people's objections to the cloning of
> human tissue, we could approach regeneration that way and transplant
> the tank-grown limb.
>
> Again, the bio-Luddites will probably be more of a problem than the
> technical difficulty.
But you donĀ“t really -need- cloning for this. There has been work
done on growing organs from simple tissue-samples by letting
the tissuesamples grow in a biodegradeble matrix of suitaible properties
Cloning will probably make this sort of thing lots easier but even
it you posit a really severe backlash against bio-tech limb replacement
will eventually be mastered.
William December Starr
Thomas <c96...@student.dtu.dk> said:
> Saw a show with some of the people behind this the other night. They
> said that given a billion and a decade for R&D they could essentially
> grow hearts from tissue-cultures on a assembly line. Subsequent organs
> should be easier.
Easier????? The heart is a vital organ, sure, but it's just a specially
shaped complex of muscle tissue. Apply an electrical charge _here_ and
this part of it contracts and then relaxes. Apply the charge _there_
and that part of it does so. Coordinate the electrical pulses properly
and you've got a heartbeat.
Now compare the simplicity of that to the functioning of the chemical
processing plants we call things like "liver" and "kidneys"...
default
>
> Nigel Arnot wrote...
> > I don't think so. Anyone know what percentage mass of a body is leg?
> >Not 50%, I'm pretty sure. Arms as well? Probably still no go.
>
> Yes, but the pilot's legs may be about the same mass as the stowaway
> child's torso, giving:
>
> pilot torso + pilot arms + stowaway child torso ~=
>
> pilot torso + pilot arms + pilot legs
Ah, a New Math story problem.
--
Chris Clayton "That which does not kill you, makes you
cla...@rust.net entertaining at dinner" - Steve Simmons
John Schilling
>In article <823scc$o...@crl.crl.com>, William December Starr wrote:
>Actually, wouldn't the life-system bit be much better than the fuel bit?
>After all, you can always think of *something* to throw out that you can
>probably get by without, but it's going to be awful tricky coming up with
>more oxygen in deep space. That solves the "just lighten the load" problem,
>plus the "safety margin" problem (since an "acceptable life-system safety
>margin" for one person wouldn't necessarily be enough to support an entire
>second person).
Nope.
First off, "you can always think of *something* to throw out that you can
probably get by without..." is just plain not true. The idea is such a
part of SF's common culture (and not just SF) that we tend to accept it
without thinking, but the supply of extraneous junk on board any givin
vehicle is not infinite and not necessarily sufficient for any task at
hand. When you get to the point where people seriously suggest dumping
airlock doors and wing flaps, the absurdity of the position becomes clear.
As far as life support is concerned, there are two problems. The first
is that the life support consumables required for short-term missions
are so minimal that the marginal cost of providing a large safety margin
is trivial. Deciding not to provide a ten-percent fuel reserve for a
one-man orbital rocket is a defensible engineering decision, because such
a reserve would end up tripling the size, weight, and cost of the vehicle.
But even a factor of two increase in the life-support capability, only
adds up to a 0.4% increase in the vehicle. Rocket vehicles are going to
have, *do* have, razor-thin propellant margins but substantial excesses
of life-support capcity.
(off-topic nit: I *hate* it when SF writers, usually of the Hollywood
variety, try to bump up the dramatic tension by having the heroes divert
their spaceship's life-support power to the engines to get somewhere
faster. You might as well try to make your car go faster by turning
down the dash lights)
The second problem is that short-term life-support requirements cannot be
predicted with anywhere near the certainty of propellant requirements.
The problem is just too complex - for example, a person resting calmly
will use perhaps half the oxygen of one in a fear-induced panic, but
telling your pilot he's only got enough oxygen to live if he remains
calm might just excite that fear. Or not, but are you really going to
cut his oxygen supply in half and hope he's cool enough to deal?
Any acceptable safety margin for one person, by even the most relaxed
standards imagineable, is going to be enough to *possibly* support two.
And the uncertainty would fundamentally change the story.
Keith Morrison
> (off-topic nit: I *hate* it when SF writers, usually of the Hollywood
> variety, try to bump up the dramatic tension by having the heroes divert
> their spaceship's life-support power to the engines to get somewhere
> faster. You might as well try to make your car go faster by turning
> down the dash lights)
Ahem.
My parents' car once had an electrical failure that caused the plugs
to not get enough juice if I had any other electrical device (radio,
lights, air fans, windshield wipers) on. Obviously you couldn't go
very long with such a problem, but the dash lights could cause the
propulsion system to fail until the problem was fixed.
--
Keith
Matt Austern
> Matt Austern <aus...@sgi.com> wrote:
> >
> >That's the setup in Arthur C. Clarke's story "Breaking Strain" (first
> >published in 1949, several years before "The Cold Equations"). The
> >limitation in that story is the life support system's capacity, not
> >the mass of the ship. Makes much more sense that way, I think.
>
> Without having read this story, I predict that it quotes Kipling. :-)
Don't remember, but I do remember that it quotes from James Branch
Cabell---yet another plus.
Michael S. Schiffer
>Propellant reserves for space launch vehicles are only about 1-2%, or a
>safety factor of 1.01-1.02. I can't think of any other field where the
>margins are that thin - in this one case, they *have* to be that thin
>because of the high, and exponential, mass ratios associated with
>chemical rocketry, and they *can* be that thin because orbital mechanics
>is a precise enough science to allow predicting fuel consumption with
>such certainty.
>Unfortunately for the longevity of the story, we no longer consider
>chemical rocketry to be a sensible way to *land* on an earthlike planet,
>and aerobraking is typically associated with much larger uncertainties
>and thus much larger safety margins. It might be possible to rewrite
>the story with a transpiration-cooled heat shield, a limited supply
>of coolant, and a state of the art advanced enough to predict coolant
>use to within 1-2%, but I wouldn't want to try making that scenario
>credible.
Wouldn't it be easier for story purposes to just make the target
planet an airless asteroid with some bases on it?
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS GURPS Alternate Earths 2 is out, featuring
ms...@mediaone.net six new alternate histories!
msch...@condor.depaul.edu <http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/altearths2/>