"
The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin is a famous hard science fiction story from the 1950s -- but it's also controversial. It appeared in the famous Astounding Magazine (in digest form) in the 1950s. Of course, it was edited by John C. Campbell -- and he had a strong hand in the way the story turned out.
SF author and essayist James Gunn (not the director!) said “The touchstone story for hard-core science fiction is Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations’.” But others look at the story's flaws -- the way it was constructed, the writing, etc. (Is it great physics but lousy engineering? Is it about the dangers of the frontier, or is it a poorly constructed trolley problem?)
So I was wondering what the readers on this site think of it.
Thanks to
Lightspeed Magazine, you can read it
here.
There is an essay plus an energetic discussion about it on
File 770.
There are many more essays online about it, probably too many to collect in one post. I wrote about it for Medium
here, and I included links to more essays.
Let me know if you find any new essays!
There have also been new stories that were written in response to this tale. Like
The Cold Crowdfunding Campaign by Cora Buhlert. Filled with lots of in-jokes.
