Trivia / The Cold Equations

• Executive Veto: Astounding editor John W. Campbell himself refused to publish the story until the author wrote an ending in which the girl died. Godwin submitted several revisions that were essentially "okay I removed that way to save her, but you could also do this" before he gave up on trying to sway him. On the one hand, it is only as famous as it is because of the brutal Downer Ending, so on one level this was probably the correct editorial decision from a pure longevity perspective... but on the other hand, it is at least as infamous for the contrivances it needs to engage in to reach that ending, so the point is arguable.
• Science Marches On:
  • Today we'd simply build an unmanned robotic ship with no life support; you could probably afford to send three ships, just for redundancy.
  • More generally, the fact this was written before actual space flight really shows — if you imagine the EDS as a barebones boat far from land rather then a spaceship, a lot of the contrivances make much more sense.
• Trend Killer: The story was written as a deconstruction of a Science Hero who could never really fail because he would always Techno Babble up a Deus ex Machina solution to whatever scrape he'd gotten into that week. This fact is much less well known than The Cold Equations itself because the archetype ended up discarded and forgotten, due in part to this very deconstruction.

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