Tasco Magnon, time traveler, decides to take his new bride on his next trip through time—a quest to find the mythical Knot in Time—where the two of them get trapped, and only one can return.

After Smith’s death in 1966, the story was completed by his wife, Genevieve Linebarger, and sold to Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Vision, but that anthology was endlessly delayed. So in 1987, a translated version of the story was published in a French collection of Smith’s stories, and that was the first published version (although we’ve listed it as an English story, since that’s how it was written). The English version was finally published in Smith’s 1993 complete short science fiction collection by NESFA. By then, Ellison’s rights to the story had expired, although that didn’t stop him from suing NESFA.
—Michael Main
‘Honeymoon in time,’ indeed. Why? Is it that your woman is jealous of your time trips? Don’t be an idiot, Tasco. You know that ship’s not built for two.

Tags

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Variants

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  1. ”Himself in Anachron,” as by Cordwainer Smith, in The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (NESFA Press, June 1993) [English original, appearing six years after the French translation].
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Cordwainer Smith
    Genevieve Linebarger [uncredited]

Translations

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  1. French.
    “Lui-même en Anachron,” as by Cordwainer Smith, in Les puissances de’espace (Presses Pocket, September 1987) [French translation, appearing six years before the English original].
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Cordwainer Smith
    Genevieve Linebarger [uncredited]
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . translated by Simone Hilling
  2. French.
    “Lui-même en Anachron” , as by Cordwainer Smith , in  [em[Les seigneurs de l'instrumentalité, I: Les Sondeurs vivent en vain[/em], revised edition (Folio SF, May 2017).
    3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Cordwainer Smith
    Genevieve Linebarger [uncredited]
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . translated by Simone Hilling
    Pierre-Paul Durastanti (revision)
  3. German.
    “Allein im Anachron,” as by Cordwainer Smith, in Was aus den Menschen wurde (Heyne, 2011).
    4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Cordwainer Smith
    Genevieve Linebarger [uncredited]
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . translated by Ulrich Thiele
  4. Spanish.
    “Solo en Anacrón,” as by Cordwainer Smith, in Los señores de la instrumentalidad I: Piensa azul, cuenta hasta dos (Ediciones B, June 1991).
    5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Cordwainer Smith
    Genevieve Linebarger [uncredited]
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . translated by Carlos Gardini