This is dimly remembered. I am not hopeful we can nail it down, but:
Essentially Aliens, in a far distant future, with Technology so advanced that they seemed god-like, spent a great deal of time Resurrecting dead humans, all of us me, Cecil, Lincoln, Aunt Sue etc. We were brought to live in their perfect time.
It may have been more than just humans (it may have been all the sentient life in the Universe).
This may not have been main the point of the story, it may (or may not) in fact have been just a mention in the wrap up or epilogue.
Um, not to be short with you, but do you have any other details at all? There are probably a few thousand stories that match what you’ve told us thus far.
I could probably name a dozen, but here’s a question which might narrow it down a bit-
Short story, (say >60 pages) Novella, Novel, or series?
Riverworld is a series, by Phillip Jose Farmer- a “trilogy in at least five parts” from the second book on each promises the next will be “the thrilling conclusion.”. The first (and definitively best) book in the series is To Your Scattered Bodies Go.
Sounds much like Riverworld. There were several short appearances of the novel (To Your Scattered Bodies Go is a fixup of two stories (“The Day of the Great Shout” and “The Suicide Express”), and “The Felled Star” and “The Fabulous Riverboat” were made into a novel with the latter name. There was at least one story that didn’t seem to make it into the books, but may have been collected elsewhere, and various collection written by other authors using the concept.
Considering the occasional alien and all, it sure sounds like it. A question: In your rememberance, did the story also include Neandertals (Neanderthals)? If so, this is definitely it.
I don’t think so. This was by Edmund Cooper, and was, IMHO, a really good science fiction novel.
But, as best as I can remember, it involved an alien spacecraft glomming on to an aircraft in flight and duplicating the passengers, then putting the dupes on an alien planet.
What they went through, figuring out how to survive, how to figure out how their supplies were replenished there, and eventually discovering what they really were was a fascinating piece of work. I would definitely recommend this book.
It just doesn’t seem to fit what the OP was describing, (just my take, I could be wrong certainly). But that is a really good alternative guess that I had not thought of. It could be…it certainly could be…
I think it’s fairly certain that it’s not the Riverworld series that jimmmy is talking about. He said that it’s a short story. The only short stories in the Riverworld series never mention that aliens have caused all humans to be resurrected. Indeed, the Riverworld is almost exclusively about the lives of humans resurrected on the Riverworld. Only in the later novels do we discover that aliens have anything to do with it, and we don’t learn much about the aliens. The humans are not “brought to live in their [the aliens’] perfect time,” so that doesn’t fit at all. The aliens in the Riverworld didn’t want humans to know that they existed.
Thanks for the responses everyone – again I apologize if what I asked was too frustratingly airy.
Based on the great synopses I definitely will check out the Riverworld sieries which I of course have heard of but am fairly sure I never read.
Wendall Wagner helped make clear what poor writing and memory on my part did not – but I obviously shouldn’t have taken up CS thread space with such a vague request – sorry about that - I simply didn’t realize that it was such a common theme! :smack:
I’m not sure that’s true. Aside from the original short stories by Farmer that became “To Your Scattered Bodies Go”, there are three books of Riverworld short stories, and I can’t recall if any of them recount the story background. The books are Riverworld and Other Stories by Philip Jose Farmer, which contains two Riverworld stories not directly connected to the story arc of his main Riverworld series, and two anthologies, Tales of Riverworld and Quest for Riverworld, both edited by Farmer, each containing one Farmer story and the rest by other SF writers. All of these are a bit hard to find, but you can look in used book shops and sites.