24 pages • 48 minutes read
Tom GodwinThe Cold Equations
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1954A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Tom Godwin
The author of “The Cold Equations”, Tom Godwin was an American science fiction writer who was most prolific from 1950 to 1970. In his career, Godwin published three novels and around 30 short stories. Published in 1954, “The Cold Equations” was by far his most renowned work. In his Afterword to the Kindle edition, The Cold Equations and Other Stories, compiled and edited by Eric Flint, David Drake argues that Godwin’s other work is not “similar to ‘The Cold Equations’ in tone, nor is any of it even remotely comparable to ‘The Cold Equations’ in impact” (Location 9024).
Ever since its publication, “The Cold Equations” has been steeped in controversy, first of all, in relation to the originality of Godwin’s endeavor. Drake, along with many other science fiction fans, point out that Godwin’s story’s plot was adapted from “A Weighty Decision” by Al Feldstein, a story in the May-June 1952 issue of the Weird Science comic. In the earlier work, the jettisoned girl is not a sister in search of her brother but the pilot’s fiancée, who comes aboard to surprise him. In contrast to the Weird Science story, Godwin’s adaptation originally had a happy ending, as the girl was able to be saved. However, John Campbell, Godwin’s editor at Astounding magazine, insisted that he “accept the implications of his own material (the universe is vast and uncaring and has no room for pity, sympathy or even awareness of the human condition) and reinstalled the original ending” (Location 9060). Still, a significant incident from Godwin’s biography may help to explain why he changed the female protagonist from a fiancée to a younger sister in search of her brother: His own sister died at age five as a result of accidentally shooting herself with a pistol she was playing with. The notion of a playful, good-intentioned transgression having serious consequences is common to both Godwin’s sister and the character of Marilyn.
The publication of Godwin’s story was met with a uniquely impassioned response from Astounding magazine’s largely male readership, as the magazine received letters from “anguished men who insisted that the girl could have been saved” (Location 9067). The story’s fame continued, lending Godwin a fame that eluded many of his fellow science fiction writers. Debates on the story’s moral dilemma continued until the late 1990s, when in the New York Review of Science Fiction people puzzled and argued over its meaning. According to writer and editor Barry Malzberg in the Preface, the story was variously “anatomized as anti-feminist, proto-feminist, hard-edged realism, squishy fantasy for the self-deluded” (Location 26).
The Pilot
The pilot of the Emergency Dispatch Ship, or EDS, is a seasoned professional on the ruthless space frontier who is “inured to the sight of death, long since accustomed to it and to viewing the dying of another man with an objective lack of emotion” (Location 8451). He is thus theoretically able to follow the instruction to immediately jettison a stowaway with grim equanimity.
However, when he learns that the transgressor is a girl, the pilot falters in his objectivity, making exceptions such as double-checking with the commander about whether she has to die and calculating how much longer he can extend her life. Although the equation based on Marilyn’s weight and the descent of the plane is dubbed cold, it is also an emotion-tinged compromise on the pilot’s part, between his utilitarian obligation to save seven lives instead of one, and his subjective value of the girl’s life above the others. His attitude toward Marilyn is a mixture of human compassion and a typical 1950s male sentimentality towards women, which viewed them as the gentler sex who had to be protected from danger and the folly of their own ways. While his eventual action follows the path of science, he remains haunted and guilt-ridden by the life he sacrificed, walking away from his action “with the slow steps of a man old and weary” (Location 9003). The aging is less a physiological than an emotional state, suggesting that the pilot is permanently traumatized. The girl’s presence and disappearance make the pilot aware of the loneliness of his solitary missions. As the story is directed through the pilot’s third-person limited narration, the reader is invited to take up his perspective.
Marilyn Cross
Marilyn Cross is an 18-year-old girl who, desperate to see her brother Gerry on the planet Woden, fatally underestimates the punishment for entering an EDS unauthorized. Marilyn is somewhat prepared for a foray into the space frontier, having taken a linguistics course on space languages and scoring a job on Mimir. Yet she is naïve in thinking that the lenient ways of Earth are those of the space frontier. To the pilot, she “belonged on gentle earth, in that secure and peaceful society where she could be young and gay and laughing with the others of her kind” (Location 8739). Here, Marilyn is infantilized in line with a 1950s male view of women, despite the fact that she is brave enough to disobey rules and looks “unafraid” into the pilot’s eyes when he discovers her (Location 8502).
Her delicate physical appearance of curls and a petite five foot three, 110-pound frame aligns with 1950s beauty stereotypes and also sets her up as a pleasant companion rather than a burden. Her sandals which are “cheap imitations” of the expensive Vegan ones are a testament to her family’s financial hardship in addition to her determination to keep up appearances (Location 8877).
Whereas the pilot goes from being rational to more emotional, Marilyn has the opposite journey. She begins by expressing outrage that her punishment vastly exceeds the scale of her crime. However, she then accepts her fate, contemplating the gruesome manner in which she will die, and shows heroic poise as she walks to her death, “with her head up and the brown curls brushing her shoulders, with the white sandals stepping as sure and steady as the fractional gravity would permit” (Location 8995). Her dignity and confidence make her death more moving, as the reader feels the sacrifice of a strong, young life.
Gerry Cross
Marilyn’s older brother Gerry is the family’s chief breadwinner as he supplements the paltry earnings of his father’s little store with the money he generates from more lucrative work on the space frontier. For most of the story, his character is evoked indirectly through Marilyn’s reports; however, he appears briefly through the direct speech of their call.
Although Gerry was absent from Marilyn for a long but unspecified period of time, the two remain very close. However, theirs is not an equal relationship. As the older brother to a younger sister, Gerry provides for Marilyn and attempts to protect her. This begins when she is six years old and he denies her kitten’s death, frantically replacing the dead animal by waking up the pet shop owner and threatening to “break his neck” if he does not sell him the kitten that will maintain his sister’s illusion (Location 8927). Later, Gerry unable to fully express the harshness of the space frontier in his reports home—an act which contributes to Marilyn’s underestimation of the punishments for those who transgress.
On their telephone call, Marilyn shows Gerry that she has taken responsibility for her transgression and encourages him to make the best of the bad news and support their parents. Here, in a reversal of roles, Gerry takes his lead from Marilyn as he pretends “everything is all right” in a voice “suddenly deep and infinitely gentle, with all the pain held out of it” (Location 8962). She encourages him into a nurturing role as she embarks on her final adventure.
