"Time Enough" is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 short story written by Damon Knight

Damon Knight

Damon Francis Knight was an American science fiction author, editor, critic and fan. His forte was short stories and he is widely acknowledged as having been a master of the genre.-Biography:...

. It first appeared in the July 1960 issue of Amazing

Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories was an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction...

magazine and has since been reprinted twice, in Far Out

Far Out (book)

Far Out is a collection of 13 science fiction short stories by Damon Knight. The stories were originally published between 1949 and 1960 in Galaxy Magazine, If Science Fiction and other science fiction magazines...

(1961) and The Best of Damon Knight (1976).

Synopsis

A psychiatrist of the future (1978) treats a young man, using a machine that causes him to relive an embarrassing incident from his childhood. The psychiatrist describes the treatment as follows:

"The past can be altered. The scholar can take his exam over again, the lover can propose once more, the words that were thought of too late can be spoken...It's like a game of cards. If you don't like the hand that is dealt to you, you can take another, and after that, another..."

At the end of the story, having failed once again to resolve the childhood incident in a satisfactory way, the client leaves, with the words, "There's always tomorrow, isn't there?"

Background

About this story, Knight wrote

During an unproductive session at the typewriter in 1959, I said the hell with it and decided to go and lie down. While horizontal, with the dorsal muscles relaxed, I got the idea for "Time Enough," thus establishing a principle that I have followed successfully ever since: when you're not writing, get away from the typewriter.