Another lost short story title. . .

[JMH]

. . .which is driving me to distraction. As far as I remember, the story concerned a group of scientists investigating a long-dead civilization on a planet that had been burnt by a star going nova. The scientists finally find a dead machine that had been marking the years since the end of the civilization, and they figured out that the nova would have been visible on earth over Bethlehem in A.D. 0. Does that ring bells with anyone? Thanks in advance.

 

[Leto]

As a short story ? no. As a novel yes. Although title or author are missing too. If I remember correctly, the nova was programmed by a superior entity to be seen on Earth.

 

[JMH]

Hmm. . .perhaps, but I swear it was in a compendium. Novella maybe? And yes, the last passage in the story has the narrator railing against whatever being sacrificed an entire race to produce the star of Bethlehem. Any one else recognize it?

 

[Winters_Sorrow]

I recognise the story but alas not the author or title

maybe it's an urban myth?

 

[Tsujigiri]

I also recognise the story, but no author or title.

There is one similar in a compendium where there is a planet that turns out to be a huge floating tomb. It has dead machines within it, frightened me quite delightfully when I was a kid.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The spouse and I agree that it sounds like an old Analog story. Which one, we don't know (... but we wonders, yes, we wonders).

 

[Leto]

Got the author : Arthur C Clarke but I don't have the original title, just the french translation : L'Etoile (the Star).

 

[Sooby]

Pardon my ignorance - was that Clarke's 'Songs of a Distant Earth'?

Fully willing to admit I may be VERY wrong...

 

[JMH]

"The Star": That's it! Thank you, thank you, thank you. You've all saved me weeks of brain-racking and searching through who knows how many old short story collections.

 

[Leto]

Good for you then. Now I'll have to go through all my "Univers" anthology books to find and re-read-it.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Wish I'd seen this earlier! For good measure, Stephen Baxter's short story, Traces is very similar and worth a read too.

 

[Nilentropy]

"The Star": That's it! Thank you, thank you, thank you. You've all saved me weeks of brain-racking and searching through who knows how many old short story collections.

is it in any of his short story collections?

 

[Leto]

Yep, in the Other side of the Sky at least. Personnally read it in a magazine anthology.

 

[JMH]

It's also, of course, in Clarke's Collected Stories. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it again. I'm sure Mary Doria Russell took inspiration from it for her superb Jesuit sci-fi book The Sparrow.

I realized after re-reading The Star that in the intervening years I had injected part of another science fiction story or book into it. I do remember another plot involving the discovery of a dead civilization, in which the exploratory team finds in a tunnel a dead machine that had been powered by a block of some radioactive element (my physics fail me at the moment), to inscribe marks on the wall as each year passed. The machine had run for so long that the block had decayed to pure lead (?).

So. . .now I have to find THAT one too.

 

[imkatsman]

I see a few beat me to it! LOL Have that in my collection! Glad you got the title tho. To bad there is'nt a search engine that could work off of a story line or character's name...