I find this fascinating for what it says about genre. I don't know the story and SF is a pretty small part of my reading. But the fact that this story has been so controversial in the genre for so long is really interesting. Basically, it is a lifeboat story, which used to be fairly popular back when passenger ships were a thing. Moving it from the oceans to space doesn't really change much. In some sense, it purifies it, because the lifeboat story had that element of when will we see a ship, which this does not. In that sense it is more akin to the plane crash in the mountains story, which was also popular back when planes crashed in ways that were possible to survive.
But obviously, bringing this familiar trope into the SF genre, even at a time when the lifeboat story and the plane crash story was much more common than it is today, was a big thing. Why should that be? I'm not enough up on the genre to assert this with much confidence, but it seems to me that SF is, or, at least, was, the genre of competence. It was the genre of intellect, in which neither virtue (as in fairy tales), nor courage (as in military stories), nor ruggedness (as in westerns) was the defining virtue, but competence. And here was a story in which competence availed nothing. And as your account of the reaction seems to indicate, the main thrust of the criticism was exactly this, that competence should have prevailed.
This serves, in a small way, to reinforce my impression that genres are defined not by subject matter or location, except incidentally, but by their defining virtues.
That's an interesting way of looking at it! That means that "Lord of the Rings" and a power-builder isekai are in different genres rather than being filed together as fantasy. What's more, a lot of historical fiction books like "The Lost Prince" or "The Scarlet Pimpernel" could be filed together with one or the other of those.
You're getting at something real here. I had a brief debate in the comments of my "Medieval Historical Fantasy" post as to whether "The Perilous Gard" contained real magic - by the normal genre standards, whether it could be historical fiction. It was interesting, but the question didn't really matter for how you experienced the story!
But just the same, there is a commonality in - say - "stories exploring questions of spaceships and robots" where sometimes you do want to group them together and think how the spaceships and robots would affect all sorts of different parts of life. The Lifeboat Question is real; if you're always having a competent guy find a third option, you're impoverishing yourself as a writer or reader.
At bottom, I'm thinking there's no one right way to divide genres.
I've noted before that The Lord of the Rings spawned a genre it does not belong to. It may have spawned modern fantasy, but Tolkien himself called it a fairy story, and in his essay, On Fairy Stories he referred to fantasy as simply one of the tools of fairy stories.
I agree that there is no one right way to divide genres. As an academic literary concept, genre is a debated topic, and as a commercial categorization system it is something else again. Personally, I like Chesterton's definition of a fairytale, which he described as the story of a sane man in a mad world, as opposed to the modern novel, which is the story of a mad man in a sane world.
By that definition, of course, you can have space ships and robots as part of a mad world or as part of a sane world. You can have magic and dragons as part of a sane world too if you invent a sufficiently strict "magic system" for them, whereas magic in a fairytale is an intrusion of chaos into an ordered universe.
By the same token, I recently wrote an essay in which I suggested that a lot of historical fiction is really fairytale, in that it is set in those times and places where the world is at is most mad, such as the court of Henry VIII or The Second World War. Magic is neither required for nor definitive of a mad world.
It seems to me that sentimentally, SF may be the genre of competence, but more fundamentally, it's the genre of competence that originates in a rational understanding of how the world actually works. And "The Cold Equations" dramatizes the consequences of not having that understanding. So it's using a deeper definition to challenge and indeed overturn a shallower definition—and that in fact is why it had such an impact.
Oh, good for you. I'm glad to see a critical response to "The Cold Equations" that doesn't miss the point Campbell (more than Godwin) was making in it.
I'm thinking also of Heinlein's story "Sky Lift," where medical supplies need to be taken to a research base on Pluto, and getting them there before it's too late requires constant acceleration at 3.5 gravities, for several days—which turns out to be a tradeoff of the two pilots for a much larger number of other people. To my mind it's one of his best short stories.
I find this fascinating for what it says about genre. I don't know the story and SF is a pretty small part of my reading. But the fact that this story has been so controversial in the genre for so long is really interesting. Basically, it is a lifeboat story, which used to be fairly popular back when passenger ships were a thing. Moving it from the oceans to space doesn't really change much. In some sense, it purifies it, because the lifeboat story had that element of when will we see a ship, which this does not. In that sense it is more akin to the plane crash in the mountains story, which was also popular back when planes crashed in ways that were possible to survive.
But obviously, bringing this familiar trope into the SF genre, even at a time when the lifeboat story and the plane crash story was much more common than it is today, was a big thing. Why should that be? I'm not enough up on the genre to assert this with much confidence, but it seems to me that SF is, or, at least, was, the genre of competence. It was the genre of intellect, in which neither virtue (as in fairy tales), nor courage (as in military stories), nor ruggedness (as in westerns) was the defining virtue, but competence. And here was a story in which competence availed nothing. And as your account of the reaction seems to indicate, the main thrust of the criticism was exactly this, that competence should have prevailed.
This serves, in a small way, to reinforce my impression that genres are defined not by subject matter or location, except incidentally, but by their defining virtues.
That's an interesting way of looking at it! That means that "Lord of the Rings" and a power-builder isekai are in different genres rather than being filed together as fantasy. What's more, a lot of historical fiction books like "The Lost Prince" or "The Scarlet Pimpernel" could be filed together with one or the other of those.
You're getting at something real here. I had a brief debate in the comments of my "Medieval Historical Fantasy" post as to whether "The Perilous Gard" contained real magic - by the normal genre standards, whether it could be historical fiction. It was interesting, but the question didn't really matter for how you experienced the story!
But just the same, there is a commonality in - say - "stories exploring questions of spaceships and robots" where sometimes you do want to group them together and think how the spaceships and robots would affect all sorts of different parts of life. The Lifeboat Question is real; if you're always having a competent guy find a third option, you're impoverishing yourself as a writer or reader.
At bottom, I'm thinking there's no one right way to divide genres.
I've noted before that The Lord of the Rings spawned a genre it does not belong to. It may have spawned modern fantasy, but Tolkien himself called it a fairy story, and in his essay, On Fairy Stories he referred to fantasy as simply one of the tools of fairy stories.
I agree that there is no one right way to divide genres. As an academic literary concept, genre is a debated topic, and as a commercial categorization system it is something else again. Personally, I like Chesterton's definition of a fairytale, which he described as the story of a sane man in a mad world, as opposed to the modern novel, which is the story of a mad man in a sane world.
By that definition, of course, you can have space ships and robots as part of a mad world or as part of a sane world. You can have magic and dragons as part of a sane world too if you invent a sufficiently strict "magic system" for them, whereas magic in a fairytale is an intrusion of chaos into an ordered universe.
By the same token, I recently wrote an essay in which I suggested that a lot of historical fiction is really fairytale, in that it is set in those times and places where the world is at is most mad, such as the court of Henry VIII or The Second World War. Magic is neither required for nor definitive of a mad world.
It seems to me that sentimentally, SF may be the genre of competence, but more fundamentally, it's the genre of competence that originates in a rational understanding of how the world actually works. And "The Cold Equations" dramatizes the consequences of not having that understanding. So it's using a deeper definition to challenge and indeed overturn a shallower definition—and that in fact is why it had such an impact.
Very good writing and intelligent criticism.
Oh, good for you. I'm glad to see a critical response to "The Cold Equations" that doesn't miss the point Campbell (more than Godwin) was making in it.
I'm thinking also of Heinlein's story "Sky Lift," where medical supplies need to be taken to a research base on Pluto, and getting them there before it's too late requires constant acceleration at 3.5 gravities, for several days—which turns out to be a tradeoff of the two pilots for a much larger number of other people. To my mind it's one of his best short stories.