Are there any Scifi novels that have the following as the main theme?
Various colonization ships are launched within the near future to, let’s say, habitable planets 40 lightyears away. Given it took ‘New Horizons’ 11yrs to get to Pluto as per my calculations it would take about 2156yrs to go 40lightyears…of course technology would advance a lot in those two millennia. Technology actually advances so much that mankind has discovered ways of travelling faster then light and ends up colonizing said planets years/centuries before the original ships arrive…
I don’t know about as a main theme (though I’m pretty sure it has been), but that’s shown up at least in the background in a significant number of works.
“Far Centaurus” by A. E. Can Vogt used the concept in 1944: the crew is using suspended animation, and when they get to alpha Centauri, humans are waiting for them.
I was trying to remember a fairly recent instance of the plot, and found it on the TV Tropes page. The short story The Shoulders of Giants by Robert J. Sawyer. Available on-line here.
Spoiler
Heinlein had apparently planned to do it, but never wrote the novel. Heinlein fan/writer Spider Robinson completed the “unfinished juvenile novel” Variable Star from Heinlein’s notes in 2006, which uses the idea.
To me, it feels much more like a Robinson novel than a Heinlein novel, despite his evident attempts to follow Heinlein’s structure and style. When he departed from Heinlein, I can’t help but think that he must have been aware of it, but couldn’t help himself.
There was one story - I don’t remember the author - about a lone spaceman, probably in suspended animation, on a long journey to a distant planet. When he arrives, there’s a huge welcoming committee, parades, bands, the entire planet is expecting him and celebrating his arrival.
Don’t have time to read the Tv Tropes page but has it ever been subverted, i.e. starship goes on a hundreds or thousands-year-long journey, only to be picked up halfway through by the faster ships that have caught up with them and have kindly stopped for the stragglers? (Then the rest of the story can proceed as usual with culture shocks and space adventures etc.)
In Heinlein’s “Time For The Stars” there is a variant of the concept: initial explorations take place in Torch Ships that can accelerate at one G. Years of exploration by a number of ships take place while back on Earth decades pass due to relativistic effects. Then FTL ships are developed and go out to return the Torch Ship’s crews to Earth.
In the Weber-verse, early colonization ships from Earth were hibernation style slower than light ships (with expected flight times of a few centuries). After a couple hundred years, mankind discovers FTL, and the promising exoplanets targeted by the sleeper ships are snapped up by colonists using hyperdrive equipped ships.
Several different outcomes were the result (some happy endings, some bad).
Of course? Remember that there have been long periods in history when technological progress was stagnant. Equally, technology may indeed advance elsewhere, but not in that field.