The woman who sailed in the soul

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The woman, who sailed in the soul , English title The Lady Who Sailed the Soul is one under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith of the American author Cordwainer Smith in 1960 for the first time in the Galaxy published science fiction - short stories . Genevieve Linebarger is co-author.

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The story takes place at the beginning of his 15,000-year series of tales of the instrumentality of mankind around 6000 AD, but, like other works by Linebarger, is told as if it happened a long time ago and has already entered the collective consciousness of a people .

It is a rather rare romantic story in science fiction.

To travel the stars , people use spaceships with huge solar sails . Since the journeys are very long, the travelers are put into a death-like sleep while the pilot, assisted by machines, keeps watch on the bridge without sleeping, while his body ages during the journey many times the elapsed time.

The main character of the story is eighteen-year-old Helen America, who is dying to become the first female sailor. One day when she meets a sailor who has traveled to earth from a distant world, she falls in love with him. Mr. No-longer-gray, as the sailor is only called, has changed so much on his journey that he flees into space again before his relationship with Helen , but this time as a sleeping passenger.

Since Helen desperately wants to see her lover again, she goes to great lengths to train to be a sailor, after all she is entrusted with the spaceship “ Soul ”.

A catastrophe during the trip almost destroyed Helen's body, but eventually she reached her lover unscathed, aged about forty years just as prematurely as he.

expenditure

  • First printing: The Lady Who Sailed the Soul. In: Galaxy , April 1960 edition, pp. 58-81.
  • Book publication: HL Gold (Ed.): Mind Partner and 8 Other Novelets from Galaxy. Doubleday (Doubleday Science Fiction), 1961.
  • Collection: Cordwainer Smith: You Will Never Be the Same. Regency Books, 1963.

Translations followed in Italian (1960), French (1965), German (1975) and Spanish (1991).

German translations:

  • The woman who sailed in the soul. In: Cordwainer Smith: Star dreamers. Stories. From the American by Rudolf Hermstein . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1975. Paperback edition 1991, ISBN 3-518-37893-7 , pp. 7–41.
  • The lady who sailed with the "soul". In: Cordwainer Smith: The best stories by Cordwainer Smith. From the American by Thomas Ziegler . Moewig, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-8118-6708-3 , pp. 59-87. (= Playboy paperback ; 6708: Science Fiction).
  • The lady who sailed with the soul. In: Cordwainer Smith: What became of the people. With a foreword by John J. Pierce . German by Thomas Ziegler. Heyne, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-453-52806-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ EPILOGmedia website Ronald Hoppe: Instrumentality of Mankind ( Memento of the original from November 12, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved November 12, 2014 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.epilog.de
  2. ↑ a b Website of EPILOGmedia Ronald Hoppe: The Lady Who Sailed the Soul ( Memento of the original from November 12, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved November 12, 2014 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.epilog.de