{"id":4950,"date":"2022-07-22T15:32:04","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T15:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=4950"},"modified":"2022-07-28T16:09:45","modified_gmt":"2022-07-28T16:09:45","slug":"the-cold-calculations-by-aimee-ogden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=4950","title":{"rendered":"The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Cold Calculations<\/em><\/strong> by Aimee Ogden (Clarkesworld<\/em> #183, December 2021) is yet another \u201cresponse\u201d to Tom Godwin\u2019s classic, The Cold Equations<\/em> (I use the word \u201cresponse\u201d lightly as this piece, like many, misses the point). Godwin\u2019s story involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on a ship taking vital medicines to a colony planet. If the (female) stowaway remains on board the pilot won\u2019t have enough fuel to decelerate and land, etc., so the pilot\u2019s choice is apparently (a) she goes out the airlock or (b) they both die in space, and the colonists die too. The story (spoiler) goes on to confound reader expectation of the time by having the pilot put the stowaway out the airlock rather than finding an engineering solution.1<\/sup>
Reader reaction to the story often misses the Trolley Problem2<\/sup> at its heart (which of these two awful solutions do you choose?) and criticism generally falls into one of two categories: (a) engineering or security or physical problems that can or should have been addressed, and\/or (b) observations that the piece is intentionally misogynist because a woman is brutally killed (this latter ignores her sympathetic treatment earlier in the story, the likely feelings of the story\u2019s contemporary readers\u2014mostly from a \u201cwoman and children first\u201d generation, and the fact that, if the stowaway was a man and he was put out the airlock, no-one would care, and the story would have no effect on its readership).
Ogden\u2019s story doesn\u2019t acknowledge the philosophical issue at the heart of Godwin\u2019s story (it falls largely into the first nit-picking category above, with an anti-capitalist slant) and, instead, we mostly get inchoate rage about bad things happening to good people, with the finger of responsibility repeatedly pointed at \u201cthem\u201d. We also get a lot of finger wagging at people who write stories like Godwin\u2019s. These two lines of attack are limned in the opening passage:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It\u2019s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad.
We\u2019ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We\u2019re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide\u2014poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless.
But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?
It\u2019s simple physics, of course. Natural law.
Unless, of course, someone\u2019s been fudging the numbers.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

After this the story jumps straight into the action with Alvarez just about to put a stowaway, Shaara, out the airlock. At the last moment Alvarez baulks, and the story then cuts away to a scene where a woman\u2019s twenty-four year old daughter is dying from the continual chemical poisoning she has been exposed to at her factory job. The point made is that the owners were putting profit before safety.
The rest of the story yo-yos between the action on the ship (Alvarez and Shaara are ripping out everything they can to try and jettison the extra mass) and other passages that are similar to the above, with the second about the sacrifice of Komarov, who piloted the obviously unserviceable Soyuz-1<\/em> instead of Gagarin because \u201cthey\u201d had made up their minds it would be launched regardless, and the third about a sick Cantonese worker who is badly treated on a railroad project.
Meanwhile, Alvarez and Shaara bitch about accountants and their penny pinching:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not physics that\u2019s killing us. [. . .] It\u2019s some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash.\u201d Whose cold calculation was it? How much did it save? Twenty, thirty thousand bucks. A single externality: one small human life. Cheap as hell, all things considered. \u201cMoney\u2019s all that counts. Who cares what happens to the likes of\u2014\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The author also chips in:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There should have been fail-safes and backups, extra reserves. There should have been possibilities\u2014possibilities other than the company literally nickel-and-diming two people to their deaths. There should have been a world where this story has a happy ending.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ll come back to happy endings later.
All this comes to a climax when Alvarez is about to put himself out of the airlock instead of Shaara but, before he can, the story cuts away to another external scene where a factory has collapsed (due to more penny pinching) but where the workers start rescuing those buried, pulling rocks out of the rubble one at a time. Then the writer injects herself even more forcibly into the story and directly addresses the reader, stating that they are coming to the \u201chands on part of the story\u201d, and telling them to \u201cfind their anger\u201d as \u201cthey are going to need it\u201d. Finally, after a long and muddled passage about what the \u201cmen at desks\u201d insist on, and \u201cif one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do\u201d, etc., etc., the reader is exhorted to \u201cpush<\/em> already\u201d. We see the mother of the poisoned woman determining that this won\u2019t happen to anyone else; Gagarin realising that he should have tried to prevent the launch of Soyuz<\/em>-1; the Cantonese worker trying to tip a boxcar off the tracks; and the factory workers finding the hand of a survivor in the rubble. There is one final authorial push, and then we discover that (spoiler) readers\u2019 wishes have changed reality on the ship: Alvarez and Shaara now have enough fuel to make landfall.
I thought this was an awful piece of work for a number of reasons. First, exhorting readers to wish for a happy ending for your doomed characters, and then providing it, is dramatically unsatisfying (profoundly so); second, the story suggests that difficult problems do not have to be faced head-on but can be wished away; third, it is a political rant that profoundly misunderstands economics (if you build endless safety margins into every device they would be unaffordable); fourth, the story presents different situations in the story as if they are morally equivalent, i.e. the malfeasance in the chemical factory vs. the design decisions for the spaceship; fifth, the constant mention of \u201cthem\u201d, \u201cthe men behind desks\u201d, \u201cthe people with blood on their hands and fingers on the scale\u201d, \u201csome accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash\u201d, sounds paranoid; sixth, if you are going to reference a story that is known to everyone, make sure you understand what it is about\u2014if you don\u2019t, write your own. Seventh, and finally, it is a bad idea for one writer to suggest what other writers should and should not write:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do?
It\u2019s easy to decry his callousness, to raise our voices and shout over him. But this girl is not Tinkerbell, and a show of hands and a little noise will not be enough to bring her back. It\u2019s not enough, it never was, just to point at the evil and name it for what it is (though that is the starting place).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If a man at a desk can kill a girl with a little bit of ink, then we can save her in exactly the same way. There are more of us than there are of him. Break his pen, throw it out the window, and send the desk after it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

– (Awful).3<\/sup> 5,500 words. Story link<\/a>.

1. For a longer review of Tom Godwin\u2019s story, and background information about the story\u2019s genesis, see The Cold Equations<\/a><\/em> at sfmagazines.com.

2. The Wikipedia page on\u00a0The Trolley Problem<\/a>, or the more entertaining\u00a0The Good Life<\/a><\/em>\u00a0take on the matter.

3. Needless to say, this piece of rabble rousing finished joint second in the Clarkesworld<\/em> Readers\u2019 Poll for 2021 stories.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021) is yet another \u201cresponse\u201d to Tom Godwin\u2019s classic, The Cold Equations (I use the word \u201cresponse\u201d lightly as this piece, like many, misses the point). Godwin\u2019s story involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on a ship taking vital medicines to a colony planet. If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1177],"tags":[79,50,1178,622,12,1179],"class_list":["post-4950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aimee-ogden","tag-50","tag-aimee-ogden","tag-clarkesworld","tag-short-story","tag-the-cold-equations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4950"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5125,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4950\/revisions\/5125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}