Three immortal aliens crash on a primitive Earth. Due to boredom, they nudge an ape up the evolutionary ladder and then spend the next several millennia dealing with the social/religious turmoil.
This is all I know about the book. I have never read this book, have no idea who wrote it or when it came out. The only reason I know as much as I do is that several years ago, when I purchased a complete set of Hitchhiker’s Guide books, The blurb above popped up as a ”Hey, you purchased that book. You might like this one.” link.
Sure sounds like it, many thanks. I would have bet money that it involved three aliens and not two as in “Galactic Bus” but I could easily be wrong about that.
It is Waiting for the Galactic Bus, by Parke Godwin. Pretty funny, not very scientific except in a sort of Star Trek-ish way. The sequel, The Snake Oil Wars, was also kinda fun.
It’s probably impossible to be sure with such a limited description, but I agree that Parke Godwin’s Waiting for the Galactic Bus is a good candidate. IIRC there are only two aliens, and the book mostly skips over the millennia and deals mostly with a modern-day situation that plays out in a fairly short period of time, but it basically fits the description and – perhaps more importantly – is funny, dark, and weird in a way that makes it something that would plausibly be recommended to Hitchhiker fans.
I haven’t read the sequel The Snake Oil Wars, but it may be that it better fits the blurb Alpha Twit remembers.
Waiting for the Galactic Bus was the first book I ever read by Parke Godwin, and was surprised to later discover that he was mostly known for writing fairly serious historic fantasy novels.
In Galactic Bus, the TWO aliens, Barion and Coyul, are stranded as a prank while on a sort of interstellar senior class trip. Barion fiddles with a proto-human’s mind. Coyul does something more, pushing the guy’s development to the next “quantum level,” so to speak.
Insert some jumbo-jumbo about consciousness being an indestructible form of energy, so that everyone’s “soul” hangs around after death, bugging Barion and Coyul about what it all meant, and assuming that they’re now in the Afterlife. And Barion is God and Coyul is the Devil.
No more aliens show up until the late twentieth century, and when they do, Barion gets exiled to an asteroid in deep space, while Coyul is left behind on Earth to take over as God and try to get the human race’s emotional development up to speed with it’s intellectual development.
In the second book, Coyul is busy being God, Abe Lincoln is representing him in a civil suit against an Evangelical (being represented by John Calvin) who threw a bomb at him while he was making a speech, and an old girlfriend of Coyul’s comes by for a visit.
It’s been quite a few years since I read either Waiting for the Galactic Bus or Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and I’m afraid I don’t get what you mean here.