Think Like A Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s SF, June 1995) begins with the return of Kamala Shastri to Tuulen station, a matter transmitter installation in lunar orbit, after three years on the alien planet Gend. The story then flashes back to the period when she first arrived on the station to go outbound.
In a data dump start (you are pelted with information in the first few pages, which is not unusual for a Gardner Dozois’ Asimov’s SF story) the narrator Michael meets her on her initial arrival at the station, and we get a stream of detail about both her, the space station, and the future they inhabit. The one essential piece of information is that humanity now has limited access to the Galaxy courtesy of the Hanen, an alien race of dinosaur-like creatures who operate the station’s matter transmitter.
However, before Kamala can make her “superluminal transmission” (matter transmission jump) to Gend, one of the “dinos” called Silloin tells them that there will be a short delay because of technical problems. Michael decides to distract Kamala by launching into a “Tell me a secret . . .” routine with her that results in further data dumps that provide details of both their childhoods: he tells her about the time he swapped the crosses on the graves of two of his teachers who died in an accident (later switching then back), then Kamala starts telling him a story about an old lady she visited when she was a child, before being interrupted by Silloin, who informs them that the matter transmitter is now serviceable.
In the main part of the story we then discover, as Kamala is getting ready for the transfer, that the matter transmitter works by copying bodies and duplicating them at the destination station. However, to satisfy a nebulously explained concept of balance and “harmony,” the original bodies have to be destroyed. And that is Michael’s main purpose on the station—to press the button that will destroy Kamala’s original body after her duplicate is created on Gend (I can’t remember if there is a reason why this can’t be done automatically, or by the dinos).
Of course (spoiler) there is the inevitable problem, and Michael retrieves a screaming Kamala from the sending booth after what seems like an unsuccessful transmission—it is apparent that the process is a highly traumatic event for the original—only for Silloin to later find that the duplication process at Gend has been successful. This means there are now two copies of Kamala in the universe.
The dinos subsequently get in a flap about the conservation of harmony, etc., eventually threatening Michael with Earth’s expulsion from the transmission network if he doesn’t destroy the original Kamala. After some to-ing and fro-ing (during which the dinos reproach Michael for his “baby” thinking, and look like they may kill Kamala themselves), Michael forces Kamala into an airlock, and spaces her in a graphic scene:
I heard the whoosh of escaping air and thought that was it; the body had been ejected into space. I had actually turned away when thumping started, frantic, like the beat of a racing heart. She must have found something to hold onto. Thump, thump, thump! It was too much. I sagged against the inner door—thump, thump—slid down it, laughing. Turns out that if you empty the lungs, it is possible to survive exposure to space for at least a minute, maybe two. I thought it was funny. Thump! Hilarious, actually. I had tried my best for her—risked my career—and this was how she repaid me? As I laid my cheek against the door, the thumps started to weaken. There were just a few centimeters between us, the difference between life and death. Now she knew all about balancing the equation. I was laughing so hard I could scarcely breathe. Just like the meat behind the door. Die already, you weepy bitch.
I don’t know how long it took. The thumping slowed. Stopped. And then I was a hero. I had preserved harmony, kept our link to the stars open. I chuckled with pride; I could think like a dinosaur. p. 25-26
This last section obviously makes this story one that references Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations (that’s if you define “references” as “conduct an ill-informed and partisan attack”).1 If this isn’t about the Godwin story, then what we are left with is misogynistic torture porn.
Even before this attempted takedown of the Godwin story I didn’t much care for this piece. I’ve already mentioned the data dump start—who wants to hack their way through that when they start a story?—and the “Tell me a story” digressions—though I can see the need for these to pad the piece out, it is a pity they do not contribute something tangible to the story (e.g. Kamala could be a more sympathetic character).
The story has other problems too, including the Dino’s nebulous and hand-wavey comments about “harmony” and “balance,” which set up an unconvincing Trolley Problem (kill Kamala or something worse might happen). There are also science explanations that would shame a 1930’s pulp:
Whatever went wrong with Kamala’s migration that morning, there was nothing J could have done. The dinos tell me that the quantum nondemoliton sensor array is able to circumvent Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle by measuring spacetime’s most crogglingly small quantities without collapsing the wave/particle duality. How small? They say that no one can ever “see” anything that’s only 1.62 x 10-31 centimeters long, because at that size, space and time come apart. Time ceases to exist and space becomes a random probablistic foam, sort of like quantum spit. We humans call this the Planck-Wheeler length. There’s a Planck-Wheeler time, too: 10-45 of a second. If something happens and something else happens and the two events are separated by an interval of a mere 10-45 of a second, it is impossible to say which came first. It was all dino to me—and that’s just the scanning. The Hanen use different tech to create artificial wormholes, hold them open with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, pass the superluminal signal through and then assemble the migrator from elementary particles at the destination. p. 15-16
Thank you, Professor—do you have any equations to go with that?
I thought this a poorly put together piece, and was later horrified to find that (a) not only did everyone else on my group read rave about it2 but (b) that it won a Hugo award too (and was a Nebula finalist). It seems that all you need to do to woo voters is produce a story with space stations, dinosaurs, and self-referential genre content.
* (Mediocre—and I’m being generous.) 7,800 words.
Notes:
1. In Kelly’s story the spacing scene (with its “die, you weepy bitch”) and the later “think like a dinosaur” comments suggest that the author thinks Godwin’s story is a misogynistic one.* This analysis seems to miss the fact that Godwin’s story is a Trolley Problem** (sometimes you may only have two dreadful choices, pick one) and that Marilyn Lee Cross, the story’s stowaway, was specifically an attractive young woman because that would produce the most visceral response in the original Astounding readership (who, I might add, were of the “women and children first into the lifeboats” generation, and would generally have been appalled at the story’s conclusion).***
If Godwin’s story was meant to be misogynistic it would look entirely different: Barlow would hector Cross about her stupidity, lecture her at great length about the physical limitations of the universe that will result in her death, and the spacing scene would be as explicitly brutal and unpleasant as that in Kelly’s story. None of this happens in the Godwin piece. Instead, Cross is portrayed as sympathetic character (the cheap gypsy sandals, the lost childhood kitten, the final heart-breaking conversation with her brother, etc.) and her death is presented as something that will be devastating to not only her family but to Barlow the pilot.
* That said, misogynistic as a description is a better than Cory Doctorow’s ludicrous suggestion in a 2019 Locus article that the story is “a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.”
** The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter. In the latter clip I suspect most of today’s SF fans would end up on the do-nothing left hand track (where five people are killed instead of one) because they would be too busy wringing their hands (see the recent Hugo winning As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang, this generation’s The Cold Equations, and you’ll see what I mean).
*** Campbell spoke about the reason a young woman was selected for Godwin’s story in his collected letters. See The Cold Equations review on my sfmagazines.com site, footnote 7.
2. That Facebook Group Read discussion thread is here.