The Warm-Blooded Equations

"Now that we know for sure they're telling lies when they say

Noone gets hurt and therefore nobody dies

You know it's hard to believe anything that you hear

They say the world is round"

 

Garbage - Metal Heart

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"But when the Great Horde attacked our homeland in my grandfather's day, we moved into this region in force. We pushed the Vaegirs back, and made their fortresses our own.
Of course, you know how things go. My father's generation were hard warriors from the cold lands across the mountains, but this generation all has houses in the town and great estates and spend time as much trading as they do practicing archery. The next generation will grow soft on Velucan wine and will lose their lands to the next batch of illiterate hill-raiders to come over the mountains, just you watch. It's how things always were, and how things [will?] always be."

 

Baheshtur, one of your Tartar companions from Mount&Blade: Warband

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"Weary had a block of balsa wood which was supposed to be a foxhole pillow. He had a prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms 'For the Prevention of Disease Only!' He had a whistle he wasn't going to show anybody until he got promoted to corporal. He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times.
[...]
The corporal found the dirty picture of the woman and the pony in Weary's hip pocket. 'What a lucky pony, eh?' he said. "Hmmmm? Hmmmm? Don't you wish you were that pony?' He handed the picture to the other old man. 'Spoils of war! It's all yours, you lucky lad.'
[...]
Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden in such a place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse between two Doric columns, in front of velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls."

Pages 18, 24 and 90 of Slaughterhouse Five

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Once upon a time, there was a story. Actually, it was in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Magazine, to employ the more dignified precision befitting Scientifiction. But in getting an itch to re-read The Cold Equations now, I was unpleasantly surprised to find its Wikipedia article devoting all its commentary space to nothing but negative reviews and open attacks declaiming such things should not be said! Interestingly, for something published in '54 and considered a classic and added to the SFWA's best stories list in 1970, Wikipedia's critic reviews start in '77 and then jump straight to the '90s and 2010s. Back to why later, but mark that discrepancy. Moreover, the most valid point of critique makes no appearance: that it's poorly written.

 

Even by SF's lax wordsmithing standards as the no-frills genre of ideas, The Cold Equations is filled with dull, uninformative descriptions, unrealistic dialogue and repetitive restating of redundant rehashing. Oh, to have been an assistant editor at Astounding seventy years ago and taken a thesaurus and a pair of garden shears to that weedy typescript! But editing still saved it, its hard-hitting main point owing most to that magnificent bastard John W. Campbell's refusal to accept trite feel-good moralism. I'll leave you to read a synopsis, or better yet seek the story itself (come on, it's just 20 pages, you'll live!) and move spoilerly on to the unjustified criticism.

 

The standard bitching runs that nobody would engineer a spacecraft with zero margin of error in its fuel or other reserves so as to crash if it takes on an extra passenger. Very well, maybe it's not zero. Maybe you've got ten (or eight) kilograms of wiggle-room for your carry-on luggage. Make it twenty, keep the change. That still won't carry a teenage girl. Or, give it more leeway, maybe it can! Maybe the designers specifically feared some moron would march aboard and designed it with that many kilograms to spare... and then two extra morons march aboard. You'll still have to draw lots and space one. Or maybe it's just one really fat chick! Gonna start filleting her so the main bits can live? Or hey, maybe, maybe! -- the design couldn't even take one full-sized human and the pilot had to be a horse jockey who fasted for three days before embarking! Do you see how straining to move the goalposts absolutely misses the point? You will faceplant into an implacable physical law somewhere, and that's where the story is. One pilot and one stowaway make a good concise core cast.

 

So let's not pretend sincerity in those engineering quibbles. Fans would normally have no problem accepting that a frontier setting uses bare-bones equipment, Conestogas with no spare wheel, or that the shuttle is a purpose-built machine with a very limited scope, used in an emergency solely by trained personnel. Those D-Day landing craft don't look particularly sea-worthy to me either, but hey, they did their exact specific job well enough without worrying whether any divas wanted to take one cruising. Ay, there's the rub. The same audiences cheering openly or at least sighing in self-righteous approval for male sacrifices (remember the ending to Titanic? why didn't she make some room for him on that coldly equated raft?) revolt when the tables are flipped. Females' aristocratic privilege must be preserved. But an overentitled bimbo's hauteur is, to borrow an idiotic modern phrase for once in proper context "just a social construct" fed by her betters' willingness to bow to her demands until she believes trespassing signs don't apply to her, accustomed to smiling and giggling her way out of any trouble. Godwin and Campbell merely placed her in a situation where that illusion dissipated, and drove home the point with every repetition that had the stowaway been male, the pilot would have readily shot him without argument.

 

Here we come back to Wikipedia's critical summary, with opposition to The Cold Equations seeming to increase the more society has been feminized, the more that demented entitlement grew to dominate our social mores until even the fundamental truism that the laws of the universe do not bend to your whims (no, not even if you're cute and nice) became anathema to modern narcissism.

 

Well, if you don't like that, for the love of fainting couches stay away from one Cyril Kornbluth. And most of the public have. Though very much an honorable peer of golden age SF, his is not a name frequently mentioned among the field's greats. At least not these days. I had of course read The Marching Morons, but did not remember until picking up a short story collection now that he was also behind The Little Black Bag, loosely set in the same universe and a lauded classic in its own right. So I kept going. His writing is most obviously, most deeply marked by WWII, with questions of the application of power and violence, and the distaste and necessity for such, cropping up again and again, in more direct or more fanciful ways. If you'd like the more brusque culture shock version, sample Two Dooms, and keep that fainting couch handy.

 

Not that he was by any means a one-trick-pony. You could try The Silly Season for an immersive take on the mercenary mindset of journalism, even if much of its period jargon has fallen into disuse since the heyday of late-industrial "wire" networks. The Rocket of 1955 is a cynical couple-page flash-fiction smirk toward the chest-puffing can-do attitude of the early space race - one having regained its relevance with Musk/Bezos and the like's corporate parasitism of the space program. Shark Ship is an especially memorable, if slightly disjointed, musing on censorship, perversion and the potential of hijacking both instinct and civilizational values.

 

But there's a certain brand of Kornbluth yarn spun along The Marching Morons' spindle, which belies fantasies of human nobility, human progress and the virtue of naive benevolence, the type of SF apt to be written by bitter war veterans and perhaps most famously brought to the public's attention by Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Try The Luckiest Man in Denv if you want military-industrial complex power fantasy human interest. Try The Adventurer if you want a classic plucky downtrodden rebel pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

 

But especially try The Only Thing We Learn, the tale of a mighty space empire celebrating its rich and noble cultural heritage. After the first few pages I thought I'd gotten the gist of the story, some ultraconservative, might makes right, macho glorification of ruthless warmongering, the only civilian, the only intellectual in the flashback being after all a fat, drunken boor. Lucky I didn't toss it aside. Turns out there's plenty reason to let yourself go and give up once you see clearly the arc of history leading your society to its demise. I found myself re-reading the set-up and conclusion. The "winners" are explicitly no better, no mightier or more deserving than their victims; conversely the rich and noble heritage is a gilded revisionist slant on the undeserving. *

The linking tragic flaw here is intellectual dishonesty, misapplying artificial, ossified ethics intended not to address problems but to maximize the speaker's grandstanding, to polish useless sidearms. Again, the civilized do not lose for weakness or fundamental incompetence, but for refusal to face reality. In The Cold Equations, that reality is hard vacuum and gravity. In Kornbluth's various stories it is more often the human animal. He acknowledges, occasionally (which is more often than most) that human behavior operates by animal rules, that it repeats itself unto stagnation and self-destruction, that we are not beautiful and unique snowflakes, that the vast bulk of the species is a subhuman herd of marching morons. That mentalities are physical properties of the physical world, not negotiable social niceties. And any workable solutions to whatever intrigue you find yourself plotting or plotted into will have to be based in observation of such reality, not well-wishes and prosocial platitudes. Crooks, liars, tyrants, slaves, parasites and marauders, all are no mere aberrations which can be stamped out by heroic opposition. They are logical outgrowths of animal nature and opportunity, and will continue arising until either the latter, or better yet the former, are eliminated as roots of the problem.

 

Boy, that's a tough sell these days!

The standard-bearers of modern fantasy sold to the past generations in their youths, the Nimonas and Wesleys and Harrys and the like, proclaim a far more upbeat message: act as stupid as you like because you're special and the universe will reshape itself to suit your tantrums, and social influence is everything. That insanity is itself a matter of physical science, of ape hormones and kin recognition instincts and codependence. You could've addressed it. The naked ape simply decided to look at its own navel instead of looking at itself in the mirror. When reality does hit, you may find yourself forced to reach all the way back to the greatest generation for a dose of smelling salts.

 

"I wish I wasn't flesh and blood

I would not be scared

Of bullets built with me in mind

Then I could be saved"

 

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* For a bonus, notice how closely the old rebels match anglophone ancestors. For another bonus, I'd bet someone at Games Workshop decades ago was a Kornbluth fan. The self-assured militaristic pomp of The Only Thing We Learn's armada matches too closely the 40K Imperium of Man, and the rebels pilot a fair suggestion of Orkish kludges.