Found: SF short story from the 70s/80s
Original topic subject: SF short story from the 70s/80s
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1FlorenceArt
Hi All,
In the eighties I read a number of issues of the French magazine Univers. It published SFF short stories, most of them translated from English. A few of them stayed with me, and there is one in particular I would love to track down. It takes place in a spaceport. Spaceships come and go but due to the effects of near lightspeed travel, there is a huge gap between ship time and station time. When a spaceship stops at the station, only a few weeks (?) have elapsed for the crew but it's been years on the station. The MC is a barman, and following an accident (?) he has received bionic implants that make him very long lived but something of a pariah on station. On the other hand, for the crews he is an element of stability in an environment that changes much faster than they do. Of course he's in love with a woman who works on one of the spaceships and stops by every few years.
In the eighties I read a number of issues of the French magazine Univers. It published SFF short stories, most of them translated from English. A few of them stayed with me, and there is one in particular I would love to track down. It takes place in a spaceport. Spaceships come and go but due to the effects of near lightspeed travel, there is a huge gap between ship time and station time. When a spaceship stops at the station, only a few weeks (?) have elapsed for the crew but it's been years on the station. The MC is a barman, and following an accident (?) he has received bionic implants that make him very long lived but something of a pariah on station. On the other hand, for the crews he is an element of stability in an environment that changes much faster than they do. Of course he's in love with a woman who works on one of the spaceships and stops by every few years.
2vorkosigan
>1 FlorenceArt: It might be Tin Soldier
eta: Sorry, here's something in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Soldier_(novella)
eta: Sorry, here's something in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Soldier_(novella)
3isabelx
It is ringing a bell with me. Are all the ship crew women due to men being physically damaged in some way by space travel? And there is a superstition that it is unlucky for a man to be onboard a spaceship?
4isabelx
>2 vorkosigan: Tin Soldier is definitely the story I am thinking of.
5FlorenceArt
>2 vorkosigan: Thank you, that sounds right!
>3 isabelx: I had forgotten about the part where only women could be crew, but it does ring a bell.
Thank you both!
>3 isabelx: I had forgotten about the part where only women could be crew, but it does ring a bell.
Thank you both!
6vorkosigan
>5 FlorenceArt: Yay! You're welcome.
7FlorenceArt
Thanks again all for your help. Just wanted to follow up on this, I found the story in the collection Amber Eyes and Other Stories, which I read first on archive.org and then bought as a used paperback. I loved the whole collection so much that I also read Psion by the same author, and intend to keep reading everything I find by her.
