For Book Club

[james_davis_nicoll]

Aside from The Cold Solution, which stories could be said to be replies to The Cold Equations?

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

[agharta75]

Not until we get "Why Don't We Just Toss The Girl Out The Airlock?"

[jessie_c]

Cora Buhlert's The Cold Crowdfunding Campaign.

[philrm]

That was brilliant, especially the comment section.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Sorta:

"We got outflanked by the Independent squad, and we're never gonna make it back to our platoon. We need to resort to cannibalism."

"That was fast. Don't we have rations or anything?"

[jazzfish]

In Retrospect, I Guess We Might Have Resorted To Cannibalism A Bit Early: "I have no idea how long we'd been marooned when we started edging toward Jerry. Twenty, thirty minutes, time has little meaning when you’re in a situation like that."

[(Anonymous)]

What with subscription walls I'm failing to find any details on this, but The Cool Equations by Deborah Wessell is said to be written in response to The Cold Equations.

[(Anonymous)]

James Patrick Kelly's Think Like A Dinosaur has been described as a response to The Cold Equations. I didn't find the review I read convincing on this point.

"Think Like a Dinosaur"

[raja99]

Perhaps "Think Like a Dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly? It won the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

Re: "Think Like a Dinosaur"

[patrick_morris_miller]

How so?

[jwgh]

That's one of the things going on in Shaenon K. Garrity's 'You Came To The Tower'. https://future-sf.com/fiction/you-came-to-the-tower/

[jbwoodford]

Thanks for sharing that--I hadn't seen it before. Naming the astronauts "Don" and "Stuart" was...subtle. At least for younger readers.

It would be an ultra-short story.

[connactic]

"I caught this teenage girl stowaway in the routine pre-flight check I always run before I hit the launch button on my space rocket, because I am not a lazy idiot and my supervisors aren't either."

Re: It would be an ultra-short story.

[patrick_morris_miller]

"Hey Fred, the scales in your landing gear says your ship is about fifty kilos over. Better hold off launch until we figure it out."

[ffutures]

John Wyndham's short story Survival (1958) - warning SPOILERS, also, I may be remembering the plot slightly wrong since it's a very long time since I last read it: A spaceship whose passengers include a pregnant woman is stuck in orbit around Mars after the engines explode. Tensions soon escalate into violence since there is not nearly enough food or air to keep them alive for the time needed for a rescue mission to arrive, and the woman is theoretically the most expendable person aboard. Becoming aware of it, she uses her feminine wiles to take control of the situation and systematically eliminate the problem (by playing the men aboard against each other) to save herself and the newly-born baby. Her first words, brandishing a kitchen knife as the first rescuers board, are "Look, baby, food..."

[(Anonymous)]

Arthur C. Clarke's Breaking Strain is similar, but without the horror element.

I have wondered whether The Cold Equations was an influence on Geta (Courtship Rite).

[patrick_morris_miller]

Getans would never throw perfectly good meat out an airlock.

[gullyfoyle]

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?49227

[dragoness_e]

So the dude that reviews The Cold Solution seems to whine that "solution" stories all miss the point of the original story, which he feels is a "trolley problem" story, and the whole point is the terrible dilemma. Unfortunately for him, the story "The Cold Equations" is not a thought experiment, it is an attempt to tell a story. Thought experiments are allowed to be stupid and make no sense--they are intended to challenge you to think. Stories that are stupid and make no sense just annoy readers, they don't challenge them--except maybe to write fanfiction fixing the stupid. "The Cold Equations" has too many plotholes and idiotic circumstances to sit well with readers who know anything about the real world.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Would that TCE had been a story, rather than an exercise in petty sadism on Campbell's part.

[dragoness_e]

Indeed. I hear he made Godwin change the ending to the bad one, because, I don't know, he wanted to posture about hard men making hard decisions or something. I much prefer Julius Caesar's attitude in Gallic Wars, or Captain Bligh's after the mutiny: Both of them had a reputation for ruthlessness, and yet none of their people were expendable, they tried to get them ALL home/win the war with a minimum of casualties.

[(Anonymous)]

This series (of questionable quality) from Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190529124350/http://www.rhjunior.com/quentyn-quinn-space-ranger-0119/

[elysdir]

Wow—I just read this one for the first time. I was following along and nodding at the usual arguments against the Cold Equations scenario, but I was not expecting the ultimate villain to turn out to be…

(spoiler space)


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Government safety regulations getting in the way of private enterprise!

[bolindbergh]

Somebody seems blissfully unaware of concepts like "lobbying" and "regulatory capture".

[(Anonymous)]

It honestly starts pretty fun - I like how they just keep pulling people in, even if none of the arguments are original - but then it really goes off the rails.

V

[(Anonymous)]

Except for "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" ?

[elysdir]

I haven’t yet decided whether I want to do an ongoing collection of Cold Equations responses (like my Omelas-responses page).

But here’s a partial list of Cold Equations responses that I put together in 2021; it includes both nonfiction (including your critique from 2019) and fiction.