I never liked this very much, because the whole "we can only take exactly this mass, and an extra 60kg or whatever will doom us" thing is such an obvious design and/or process flaw. If you really are dependent on that (though I don't think the author made the case that they were, convincingly), you need to ensure it (by, for instance, weighing the craft); it's ridiculously optimistic to think that someone never accidentally leaves a piece of equipment lying around, say.
And even if you accept the absurd premise, it still doesn't work; the stowaway would presumably have used consumables (oxygen, if nothing else), and if you're that weight constrained you won't be carrying excess consumables anyway, so you're still doomed even if you lose the stowaway.
If anything, it's the same thing that bothers me about some 'softer' sci-fi; take a story you want to tell, and construct some completely implausible rules to make it work. To add insult to injury here, it's... not a very good story, IMO. Also, I believe Clarke hinted at a similar scenario in Islands in the Sky, published two years previously, though it didn't actually _happen_ there.
I generally agree, though mostly as a failure of storytelling. An actual plague pushing things to the absolute limits isn’t implausible. Adjust things so the main character is freaking out about landing a cargo 20% over standard safety limits etc.
That said, what allows us to make such criticisms is an understanding of the physics and economics involved. We can’t reason about what say Iain Banks’s Culture is going to do on economic grounds because things aren’t fleshed our enough to make such judgements. Bat at least we can reason about distances involved. Even softer in say the Star Wars universe economics and physics is such an afterthought that we can’t objectively judge if say the Death Star was a sound use of resources or a pointless vanity project. Worse, because hyperspace lanes are so hand-wavy we can’t even reason about movement speeds and and distance.
I never liked this very much, because the whole "we can only take exactly this mass, and an extra 60kg or whatever will doom us" thing is such an obvious design and/or process flaw. If you really are dependent on that (though I don't think the author made the case that they were, convincingly), you need to ensure it (by, for instance, weighing the craft); it's ridiculously optimistic to think that someone never accidentally leaves a piece of equipment lying around, say.
And even if you accept the absurd premise, it still doesn't work; the stowaway would presumably have used consumables (oxygen, if nothing else), and if you're that weight constrained you won't be carrying excess consumables anyway, so you're still doomed even if you lose the stowaway.
If anything, it's the same thing that bothers me about some 'softer' sci-fi; take a story you want to tell, and construct some completely implausible rules to make it work. To add insult to injury here, it's... not a very good story, IMO. Also, I believe Clarke hinted at a similar scenario in Islands in the Sky, published two years previously, though it didn't actually _happen_ there.