Book title and author question.

[TSwizzle]

Does anyone know the title and author of a book where the premise is a space traveler crashes his craft on a planet (may even be earth pre human evolution) and is marooned. He can't repair the craft to take off but he needs replacement parts or something. But the traveler lives for thousands of years, long enough for inhabitants to evolve and develop the parts needed to repair and get off the planet. Does that sound familiar ?

 

[Bronzeage]

No, but it's an interesting idea. Through out history, the development of technology was spurred by available resources and current needs. The first man who wanted a better air blast for his forge was not thinking of a steam locomotive. Living through the evolution of generations to get to space travel, even with a head start like a functional space craft design, sounds dreary. There would be a lot of preaching to the upcoming generation, telling them about the advantages of getting rocks really hot.

 

[James Brown]

I found two possibilities thanks to a member of another board I frequent:

I think I know two, but they're short stories. One's by Stephen Baxter and one's by Alastair Reynolds.

The one I was thinking of is "The Spacetime Pit" by Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown. The astronaut uses hibernation technology and wakes intermittently to guide the development of an alien civilization in the direction required to repair her spacecraft. Then things get strange.

The other one turns out to be only slightly related, one of Reynold's "Merlin" stories, "Minla's Flowers"... His protagonist again attempts to guide civilization while extending his lifespan with hibernation technology, but it's to help them develop space flight in order to evacuate their own world.

 

[Wiploc]

I remember a short story. Don't know the name or author.

The memory is vague, but I think a race of lizards was building a spaceship. They wondered why. They also wondered why they had evolved so rapidly from regular ground-scuttling lizards into brainy bipedal lizards with hands -- the sort of animal that was able to build a spaceship and wonder why. Maybe there was a box that they were going to put on the spaceship, a box that they wondered about.

The reveal at the end was that a military courier had crashed on this planet, and he -- so that he would never fail in his courier duty -- had been given a compulsion to deliver the critical message in that box.

The courier had died, but the compulsion had somehow remained, and it had worked with with the materials at hand, shaping the local lizards into sentient tool users who would finally deliver the message in the box, a message that would make all the difference to the war, except that the war had been over now for a thousand years.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I remember a short story, 'Chrysalis.' A nondescript guy is a janitor at a sresearch facility. He just happens to be present when major advancements are made in developing space travel. At some point, he ends up near the first launch, stows away on the rocket.
Turns out his life form has a larval stage that spurs development, becoming a space-traveling adult when it reaches orbit.
The title refrrs to all of human civilization as but the mechanism of his maturing.

 

[James Brown]

Another couple of possibilities:

"Does a Bee Care?" by Isaac Asimov. Plot summary here.

It may be part of the novel "Mutineer's Moon" by David Weber, which might be available in the Baen Free Library.

 

[ideologyhunter]

I think it's the New Testament. But they don't really need engine parts. They're just just going to spontaneously float up in the air at some point (and hopefully dodge meteors.)

 

[jonatha]

I remember a short story, 'Chrysalis.' A nondescript guy is a janitor at a sresearch facility. He just happens to be present when major advancements are made in developing space travel. At some point, he ends up near the first launch, stows away on the rocket.
Turns out his life form has a larval stage that spurs development, becoming a space-traveling adult when it reaches orbit.

No it wasn't

 

[TSwizzle]

Thanks for the input, I'll try to hunt some of these down. I think I saw this discussed on these forums a while back but was not able to track it down.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Another couple of possibilities:

"Does a Bee Care?" by Isaac Asimov. Plot summary here.

It may be part of the novel "Mutineer's Moon" by David Weber, which might be available in the Baen Free Library.

Nobody crash-landed in Mutineer's Moon. Dahak would destroy any planet it tried to land on, all the other craft were fine other than lacking FTL capability.