24 pages • 48 minutes read
The Cold Equations
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Symbols & Motifs
The Future According to the 1950s
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. All of the space frontier workers are male, while women are relegated to the ancillary roles they might have occupied in the 1950s, such as cleaners, linguistic students, and translators. Further, they are associated with the quaint, original planet Earth, a place of familiar motifs such as stores, pets, and handwritten letters. Their place on stable Earth also fits in with the 1950s idea that women’s lives were meant to be consistent as opposed to progressive. When Marilyn attempts to overstep her role, the result is disastrous. This reflects the anxieties of 1950s men, who wanted to contain female power because they were unsure of how to coexist with it.
The Stowaway
The stowaway is an essential motif in Godwin’s story, as it is both a character and a symbolic representation of rebellion and chance occurrences in the calibrated scientific universe. The idea of the stowaway, a person who hides on a vehicle in order to hitch a free ride, risking punishment if they are found out, is one that originated in the era of sea-travel. It would therefore be a familiar concept to Godwin’s readers. Although the ship is in this case traveling through space, the stowaway’s role is even more subversive, as their additional mass scuppers the equation that permits the EDS to have enough fuel to arrive at its destination safely. The stowaway, whose presence is revealed by a reading on a temperature gauge, must be jettisoned into space if they are not to risk the lives that the calculations have accounted for. In The Cold Equations, the stowaway’s transgression is amplified by the fact that six ailing men on Woden will also be sacrificed if the pilot bringing them their curative serum does not make it.
While the pilot judges that having to jettison a man for this transgression “would be unpleasant for both of them,” he has no idea how the chance element of the stowaway’s femaleness will amplify the situation (Location 8490). Marilyn, who is of Earth and contemplates a punishment on the scale of a fine—the kind you would get for being a stowaway on a sea vessel—decides to rebel against the regulations of the space frontier, which dictate that she will have to wait a year to see her much-missed brother. She decides that the fine for stowing away will be worth it and does not consider she has done much wrong when she meets the pilot’s gaze with an “unknowing and unafraid” look (Location 8503). While Marilyn initially occupies a position that is rebellious, especially for a person of her gender, as she comes to terms with the consequences of her actions, she behaves dutifully, communicating with her family and dispatching herself just in time. The stowaway, the initial rebel, thus becomes the hero of the story and retains the reader’s sympathies.
The Gypsy Sandals
The “little white gypsy sandals” that Marilyn wears are a frequently mentioned symbol in the story (Location 8502). The open-toed nature of these shoes is symbolic of Marilyn’s youth and naivety. Given that the space frontier is hostile, the reader might expect her to wear more protective foot-gear, such as boots.
As the pilot gets to know Marilyn better, he sees that her sandals reveal a modest background. He sees “for the first time […] that she was not wearing Vegan gypsy sandals but only cheap imitations; the expensive Vegan leather was some kind of grained plastic, the silver buckle was gilded iron, the jewels were colored glass” (Location 8876). The idea of a kind of leather being superior to plastic is rooted in his own era’s estimation of quality. Similarly, the other materials that make up Marilyn’s sandals are of inferior quality to the more expensive kind they have been adapted to resemble. The sandals of grained plastic and colored glass reflect Marilyn’s ambition to keep up appearances and conceal the fact that her family is struggling to the extent that she has had to take a job without finishing college. Still, this is a touching detail, rather than one that reveals Marilyn as a purveyor of artifice. When she takes her final walk, her imitation sandals give her a stable footing, “the gilded buckles twinkling with little light of blue and red crystals”, accenting Marilyn’s beauty and bravery simultaneously (Location 8996).
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