Godwin, Tom

Entry updated 17 February 2025. Tagged: Author.

Working name of US author Thomas William Godwin (1915-1980), whose life and career were afflicted by disease and misfortune: family tragedies caused him to leave school after third grade, kyphosis misshaped his spine and truncated his military career, and he was an alcoholic. He published the first of approximately thirty sf stories, "The Gulf Between", in Astounding for October 1953, and soon after wrote his most famous and compelling tale, "The Cold Equations" (August 1954 Astounding), in which a girl stowaway on a precisely payloaded one-person scoutship must be jettisoned by its pilot, because to transport her extra mass would require more fuel than the ship carries, making disaster inevitable and also dooming the colony to which the ship is heading with the medical supplies necessary for its survival. The story itself is precisely told in accordance with the Thought Experiment constraints described above, which are described as absolutely binding (no miracle solution, like jettisoning ship innards, or slingshotting around the target planet as a braking manoeuvre, is permitted); "toughminded" readings of the story, which have been frequent, tend not to reflect upon these minutely worked-out constraints. It is this double-edged "hardness" – minute obedience to minutely circumscribed premises – that may have inspired David G Hartwell to suggest that the tale is a metaphor for reading Hard SF in general (for resemblances between this tale and Robert Cromie's A Plunge into Space [1890], see the entry on Cromie). Dramatizations of the story appeared in the television series Out of This World (1962) and The Twilight Zone (1985-1987); it was filmed as The Cold Equations (1996).

Godwin's only series, the Ragnarok sequence beginning with The Survivors (short version first appeared March 1957 Venture Science Fiction as "Too Soon to Die"; much exp 1958; vt Space Prison 1960), follows the fortunes of several thousand humans whose Starship has been intercepted by the enemy Gern; they are dumped on the heavy-gravity planet Ragnarok (see Prison), where they are expected to perish from predatory native species as well as its savage 200-year-long Great Year, over the course of which its component "normal"-length years traverse a cycle from intolerable cold to unbearable heat. Instead, fueled by humanity's inextinguishable spirit (men wielding power, women giving birth), they execute a revenge on the Gern that takes two centuries – one full year cycle– to mature. Although the death count is very high, the tale conveys a sense of genuine exuberance. In the sequel, The Space Barbarians (1964), which is also doctrinally adherent to the SF Megatext, the triumphant survivors mount a Space-Opera assault on the evil Galactic Empire of the Imperialist Gern. A similar extrovert drive Beyond Another Sun (1971), in which Aliens observe Man on another planet (see Anthropology). Godwin wrote relatively little – he seems to have been in constant pain during the later years of his life – and almost always within the expansionist tradition fostered by John W Campbell Jr. What he did write, however, though sometimes sentimentally conceived, exhibited considerable narrative verve and a fine clarity of conception. [JC]

Thomas William Godwin

born Arizona: 6 June 1915

died Las Vegas, Nevada: 31 August 1980

works

series

Ragnarok

The Survivors (Hicksville, New York: Gnome Press, 1958) [short version first appeared March 1957 Venture Science Fiction as "Too Soon to Die": Ragnarok: hb/Wallace Wood]
- Space Prison (New York: Pyramid Books, 1960) [vt of the above: Ragnarok: pb/Bob Stanley]
The Space Barbarians (New York: Pyramid Books, 1964) [Ragnarok: pb/John Schoenherr]

individual titles

Beyond Another Sun (New York: Curtis Books, 1971) [pb/John Schoenherr]
The Cold Equations & Other Stories (New York: Baen Books, 2003) [coll: contains The Survivors and eight shorter works: pb/Clyde Caldwell]

about the author

Diane Godwin Sullivan. "Tom Godwin: A Personal Memory" (Summer 1990 Quantum #37) [see Thrust: mag/]

links

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