Long-haul ship arrives only to find FTL ship got there first

[Orcadian]

A memory stimulated by Deaks' post Smelly space travellers....

After a very long, very hard journey, a ship of colonists finally arrives at its destination star, only to discover an advanced civilisation already in possession. It is a horrible shock made still worse by the fact that, inexplicably, these people are evidently human! Cannot remember how the situation is resolved.

And I remember a second colonisation story. A long-haul ship arrives at a planet and begins to build their settlement. Somehow (conflict, natural disaster) an essential piece of interstellar communications equipment is destroyed. So this tiny colony is forced to rebuild its lifeline to Earth from blueprints & instuctions, which takes many years. Finally they broadcast a signal and unexpectedly, a ship contacts them. FTL travel has been invented and a spaceship has arrived to find out what happened to their expedition.

I may be conflating these two stories - not sure. I read this book / these books pre-1970. (Neither book is Heinlein's twins/torchships story, btw.)

 

[Ravensquawk]

A memory stimulated by Deaks' post Smelly space travellers....

After a very long, very hard journey, a ship of colonists finally arrives at its destination star, only to discover an advanced civilisation already in possession. It is a horrible shock made still worse by the fact that, inexplicably, these people are evidently human! Cannot remember how the situation is resolved.

And I remember a second colonisation story. A long-haul ship arrives at a planet and begins to build their settlement. Somehow (conflict, natural disaster) an essential piece of interstellar communications equipment is destroyed. So this tiny colony is forced to rebuild its lifeline to Earth from blueprints & instuctions, which takes many years. Finally they broadcast a signal and unexpectedly, a ship contacts them. FTL travel has been invented and a spaceship has arrived to find out what happened to their expedition.

I may be conflating these two stories - not sure. I read this book / these books pre-1970. (Neither book is Heinlein's twins/torchships story, btw.)

How about the Lightspeed Leapfrog list of a bunch of stories I haven't read:
(Or, like Far Centaurus, long forgotten.)

Lightspeed Leapfrog

 

[Ravensquawk]

And this short-short story that didn't make the list and is hard to find unless you already know about it:

365 Tomorrows: The Long and Short of It

 

[Ravensquawk]

I don't remember a story of this type with a communications equipment breakdown specifically, but I didn't remember future humans finding present time humans stinky, either.

One of my favorite lightspeed leapfrog stories is on Escape Pod.

The tenor-baritone narrator seems a bit fast, and when zie reads the female captain's words, zie sounds a little bit like Monty Python characters. But it's a good story, with two surprise twists about both the interstellar colony ship and the colony it finds ahead of it.

The ISFDB listing has a link to it.

Addendum: I see that Robert J. Sawyer's Story and the 365 Tomorrows story are both too new to be the pre-1970 story. But they're both good and maybe the classic one is in the list. Still searching.

"The Shoulders of Giants" by Robert J. Sawyer

 

[Orcadian]

Thanks for the suggestions, Raven. I'll look into them.

 

[Orcadian]

Update: The stories mentioned at 'Lightspeed Leapfrog' (and Sawyer's book) make an interesting list but most are pub. too late, alas! But there are some there that I'd like to find an audio recording of, notably Summertide (Charles Sheffield) and On the Road to Tarsus (Sean Williams). Far Centaurus also sounds interesting but is only a short story, so can probably manage an e-book of that one.

 

[Ravensquawk]

Well, here's "Far Centaurus".

And here's "The Shoulders of Giants".

I didn't find those others either (except, of course, at the corporate mega-giant), though discovered that Escape pod has a story by the great Ted Chiang.

I'm going to keep looking around for another older classic, even if not one as classic as Far Centaurus. They're my favorites.

Like other unsolved questions like the story about the statues that move slowly originally in a grade school reader that isn't "Adagio" by Barry Longyear, I want to read it it as badly as does the original questioner.

 

[Orcadian]

@Ravensquawk, thanks, especially for Far Cantaurus! (I must learn that trick!) I have made screenshots and will read this when the eyes are having a good day.