The Cold Equations

Judging by the fact that 18-year-old Marilyn is born in 2160, Godwin’s story takes place in 2178, two hundred and twenty four years after its 1954 publication. A far-off future of commonplace space travel, unheard of planets such as Woden, and barely described communicators that enable contact between different spaceships comprise a consistent motif. However, it is also a future that is consistent with 1950s ideas of progress. Disembodied scientific apparatuses stand in for the human body; for example, the personified “telltale white hand” of the gauge that alerts the pilot to Marilyn’s presence or the communicators that carry voices far beyond the location of the actual body are extensions of technology already present in Godwin’s time, such as the radio and telephone (Location 8489). Interestingly, the story does not imagine that in the future people would have portable communication and information devices; as in a pre-cellphone age, such devices are location-specific. Moreover these devices are used as their real-life equivalents may have been in the 1950s—they are tools for navigating actual space rather than interactive distractions which take users into micro virtual worlds.

The story’s gender politics also show how the future is consistent with the ideas of its time.