In Tom Godwin’s futuristic short story, “The Cold Equations,” an EDS spaceship is on a mission to help save several men on Woden, a newly colonized planet. The story is set in 2178 inside the EDS space ship, which was lunched from the spaceship cruiser, Stardust. The protagonist, Barton, is the pilot of the EDS ship and has just the right amount of fuel to make it safely to the planet. Barton realizes he is not alone and is surprised to find the stowaway is a young 18-year-old girl. Marilyn Lee Cross is a naïve, intelligent girl who is blissfully unaware, for the moment, that, with her added weight, there will not be enough fuel to make it safely to Woden. After doing what Barton could to save her life, Marilyn realizes her fate of death. She writes farewell letters to her parents and her…show more content… After a last good-bye Marilyn Lee Cross goes into the airlock and gets sucked into the vacuum of space. This futuristic story takes place in the new frontier of space, which abides only by the harsh laws of nature. In this setting Godwin demonstrates how in adulthood people do not have the same safety nets as they did in childhood. Marilyn is a naïve young adult who realizes too late that her actions and mistakes have real consequences. She no longer has her parents to keep her safe and the frontier is not “something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows” (14). Marilyn symbolizes the young adult who is a child transitioning into adulthood. The significance of the age 18 is now that she is a legal adult her choices have real consequences which affect people besides herself.
