- GODWIN, Tom
- Working name of US writer 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 30 sf stories, "The Gulf Between", in ASF in 1953, and soon after wrote his most famous tale, "The Cold Equations"(1954), in which a girl stowaway on a precisely payloaded spaceship must be jettisoned by the one-man crew because to transport her extra mass would require more fuel than the starship carries, so making disaster inevitable and dooming also the colony to which the ship is heading. TG's first two novels, The Survivors (1958; vt Space Prison 1960) and its sequel The Space Barbarians (1964), tell of the abandoned human survivors of an alien prison planet who wait 200 years for revenge, then undergo SPACE-OPERA adventures involving a demoralized Earth and telepathic alliesbut ultimately demonstrating - in the approved ASF fashion - humanity's inextinguishable spirit. A similar bias governs Beyond Another Sun (1971), an anthropological sf novel in which aliens observe Man on another planet. TG wrote relatively little, and almost always within the expansionisttradition fostered by John W. CAMPBELL. What he did write, however, exhibited a fine clarity of conception and considerable narrative verve, though his characterizations were sometimes sentimental.JCAbout the author: "Tom Godwin: A Personal Memory" (1990) by Diane Godwin Sullivan, in Quantum \#37.
Science Fiction and Fantasy Encyclopedia. Academic. 2011.
