"Tom Godwin - The Cold Equations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Godwin Tom)

by Barry Malzberg
The title story of this volume, "The Cold Equations," is perhaps the most famous and controversial of
all science fiction short stories. When it first appeared in the August 1954 issue of Astounding, it
generated more mail from readers than any story previously published in the magazine. Since then, it has
been reprinted thousands of times (almost all college courses on science fiction routinely include it on
reading lists). It has been the basis of a television movie and a Twilight Zone episode, and prior to that
had been adapted for radio and television many, many times.
Its impact remains. In the late l990's it was the subject of a furious debate in the intellectually
ambitious (or simply pretentious; you decide) New York Review of Science Fiction in which the story
was anatomized as anti-feminist, proto-feminist, hard-edged realism, squishy fantasy for the self-deluded,
misogynistic past routine pathology, crypto-fascist, etc., etc. One correspondent suggested
barely-concealed pederasty.
The debaters' affect over a story more than four decades old was extraordinary, and the debate did
not end so much as it kind of expired from exhaustion. Godwin's adoptive daughter, Diane Sullivan, said
in conclusion that Godwin himself had always felt women were "To be loved and protected" and A.J.
Budrys in a similarly funerary tone noted that " 'The Cold Equations' was the best short story that Godwin
ever wrote and he didn't write it."
But, of course, he did. I'll have more to say about the history of the short story in my afterword (see
below), but for now that's enough. Here, in one volume, are the best writings of Tom Godwin. It begins
with his most popular novel, The Survivors, and closes with his legendary story, "The Cold Equations."




THE SURVIVORS
Editor's note: This is my personal favorite of all of Godwin's writings. Some of my
fondness for this short novel, I'll admit, is perhaps simply nostalgia. The first two
science fiction novels I ever read were Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy and .
 . . this one. Between them, the two stories instilled a love of science fiction in a
thirteen-year-old boy which has now lasted for more than four decades. But
leaving that aside, I think this story more than any other captures those themes
which recur constantly in Godwin's fiction: the value of courage and loyalty.

Godwin had a grim side to him, which is reflected in The Survivors as it is in most
of his stories, butтАФalso as in mostтАФit is ultimately a story of triumph. More so, in
some ways, than in any other science fiction novel I've ever read.

Eric Flint


Part 1
For seven weeks the Constellation had been plunging through hyperspace with her eight thousand
colonists; fleeing like a hunted thing with her communicators silenced and her drives moaning and
thundering. Up in the control room, Irene had been told, the needles of the dials danced against the red
danger lines day and night.
She lay in bed and listened to the muffled, ceaseless roar of the drives and felt the singing vibration of
the hull. We should be almost safe by now, she thought. Athena is only forty days away.
Thinking of the new life awaiting them all made her too restless to lie still any longer. She got up, to sit
on the edge of the bed and switch on the light. Dale was goneтАФhe had been summoned to adjust one of