The latest issue of Steven H Silver’s Argentus (PDF available here) opens with an article by Paul Kincaid. The bulk of the article is a bit confused because it takes a very interesting suggested distinction between hard SF and space opera, and then tries to map that onto the much more complex spectrum of left v right politics, thereby leaving itself open to all sorts of pointless nitpickery. However, I want to take issue with just one short section, which talks about Tom Godwin’s (in)famous story, “The Cold Equations”:
What is significant about the story is not the misogyny. The fact that the victim is a little girl ratchets up the emotional impact, but the stowaway could as easily have been a little boy, the pilot’s wife, the first alien ever encountered. Who she is, is irrelevant.
Well, precisely who she is is irrelevant, but the fact that she is a young girl, not so much. Indeed, Kincaid himself admits as much earlier on when he says:
The little girl would not, could not, harm a fly
In other word, the character of a young girl was chosen as a representative of ineffectual innocence. I suspect that if the stowaway had been “the first alien ever encountered” then John W Campbell would have insisted that Godwin find a way to save it for the good of science. Had the stowaway been the pilot’s wife, a romantic plot might have been acceptable. But a young girl is disposable in a way that another character might not have been.
And if you still think that’s irrelevant, check out this article from yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News on gender selection:
Steinberg, the medical director of the Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles, uses PGD to harvest fertilized embryos, identify their sex after a few cellular divisions, and implant the chosen gender. Chinese and Indian couples from the Bay Area, who pay up to $18,000 per attempt to have a boy, are a major source of his clients, Steinberg said.
The good news is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a trend to abort female fetuses in the US.
it was Campbell suggested a girl. I believe that in the original draft it was not.
PDF available doesn’t actually include a link: http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/argentus.html.
And it would be interesting to see the first draft that Farah refers to. I imagine it would have a very different emotional quality.
Steve:
Apologies – link fixed now.
Farah:
I think that proves my point, though Campbell may have argued he wanted a girl for heightened emotional impact only.
The situation in the story is that the balance is between saving an entire planet or saving one person. Beyond that, who that one person is can only heighten the emotional impact, it does not affect the structure or the point of the story.
The point of the passage you quote is that the story could go in different emotional directions, depending on whom the stowaway might be, but the main thrust of the story would remain unaltered.
So yes, the reason for choosing a little girl is to emphasise her fragility, her helplessness, because the point of the story is that the vast and unemotional rule-driven nature of the universe does not care for who might suffer as a result.
I suspect that if the stowaway had been the pilot’s own son, as young, as helpless, as innocent as the girl, it would have been a very different story emotionally, but the basic underlying structure of the story would not have changed one iota.
Paul:
No it isn’t, it is all about value. You yourself wrote, “her very presence threatens the survival of an entire planet.” So it is a choice – save the girl or save the planet. If the stowaway had been the first alien ever encountered then Campbell might have argued that the planet had to be sacrificed. And I’m pretty sure that if the stowaway had been related to the pilot, especially it if had been his son, the story would never have been written the way it was because the readers would not have liked it. The story only worked because the stowaway was someone that most of the expect readers would accept had to be sacrificed, without much thought as to how she might also be saved.
I might add this is sort of false presentation of “unavoidable” choices is fairly typical of authoritarian governments. “We have a budget crisis, we have to cut funds for health care to the poor (because we can’t sacrifice a penny of the military budget, but we won’t say that).” So actually my reading strengthens your point.