J. Michael Straczynski

That being said, a few of the other comments here raised in me the thought: some people stay in college way too long.

And the same goes for you. I've stuck around for this because so many of the arguments/assertions were clearly well considered. That I don't necessarily agree with them is not saying they are without merit or thought. You showed both.

Knock it off, you know the rules.

But if the mission is to deliver vaccines to prevent hundreds of deaths and you ditch those vaccines, what purpose is there in the mission?

Thank you, and by the by, I've enjoyed your corner of this back-and-forthing. Honest disagreement honestly rendered is a rare quality these days.

I can counter: because there was an emergency going on, hundreds of lives were at stake, and they weren't focused on the idea of anyone stowing away on a ship to a death planet. Stories aren't about why *didn't* someone do something, it's about what people did under given circumstances.

Nothing was said to indicate they did have that technology, or it would've been mentioned. But if it had, that would bump into your complaint that it already explained too much. No robotics are known to exist in this story-universe, so we can safely assume it doesn't. If you say it does, prove it.

Except you are because you are faulting the story for presenting ideas (or failing to present ideas) that you deem important. Hence, the burden is on you to show how it could have been done differently. If you can't, if all that was done is all that can be done, it negates some part of the issue.

That would work.

Since there were no means of robotic transfer, if what you suggest was implemented then the hundreds of people on the colony die.

Ah, but who gets to decide that? And what happens when it gets aimed at a story you think *is* worth telling?

I always saw it as being about moral anguish, and how trying every possible thing to fight the cold math of space travel sometimes doesn't work out. You could set the story on the Titanic in freezing water and have a much similar situation. X-degrees x Y time in the water.

I'm simply saying, you are suggesting the story should have dealt with the questions you think are important, that the story is flawed without them, so the logical next step is for you to act on your position and demonstrate where and how that could have been done in 12 already crammed pages.

Fair.

The story is about character, the math is the methodology behind those character moments. The textbook definition of SF, especially then, is "the affect of technology on humans." If you remove the mathematics and the weight from the story, there is no story, it's just two folks talking in the ship.

And that's altogether possible. But if that were the case, and the hypercompetent guy saves himself, the story would probably never have been published because nothing of significance actually happens. A day when a dog doesn't bite someone doesn't get reported much. But maybe there was a way.

And that get-out-of-jail-free ticket is arguably one of the worst cultural decisions this country has ever made. "The business of America is business." Nonsense then, nonsense now.

Fair.

And how do you dramatize that in a 12 page story?

So are you suggesting that if Godwin had written about a young boy stowaway, he would have had that changed to a woman? Or would he have let the point stand?

But with you on the fascist-adjacent part.

HOWEVER...your point about SF editors at this time believing that women could not write SF is spot on. It took decades to finally shake of at least some measure of that misogyny, though I'm not entirely convinced that it's truly gone.

This, of course, precludes the fact that the colony they were racing to save had both male and female colonists. She wasn't out there by herself.

No, it was talking about mathematics, weights and fuel supplies, which are straightforward. The cold hard truth of the universe itself -- a sine qua non endorsing that approach in all things in all places, regardless of situation -- is a larger point you are drawing that is not implicit in the text

That's how you perceive it, and that's fair, but I don't know anyone, myself included, who ever thought the story had any application outside the situation presented therein. You can say that it was trying to impart some larger truth, but there's nothing conclusive to support that opinion.

If I recall correctly, this was an emergency situation, they had to get a ship there asap to save the lives of a colony, so they stripped out everything before launch and took up every inch of space with medical supplies. So the situation did not allow for much planning or margin of error.

A) it was 1954 and nobody knew about these things, and B) even if all that had been done, Godwin would just have found other way to make the story happen, because it's not about the staging, the boosters, or the size of the ship, it's about the moral anguish of the situation.

And how would you dramatize that conceptual truth in a very short story set entirely on a space ship in the midst of dealing with the problem at hand without having one of the characters simply talk about it at great length especially since it would mean referencing characters we've never seen?

True, but that's also a very different story. Short SF stories are generally either all first act (setting something up so we ponder the consequences) or all third act (all the elements that went into it have happened, now it's the consequences). Cold is all third act. You're describing a novel.

Yes, the Apollo 1 tragedy. Brain fart on my part.

Then I think you should write that story.

The story was written in 1954, when redundancies and checklists were still being figured and applied, as was seen in the Gemini capsule tragedy in 1966 and the Apollo 13 near-tragedy. As with a car crashing into a tree, the tree isn't the problem, it's where you went off the road half a mile ago.