Science fiction story about an intelligent man put in suspended animation to solve future problems

Question

I am asking this question for an older relative. This story sticks out to them over four decades after reading it, but they can't remember the title.

The story is about an extremely intelligent man who is put into suspended animation and is woken up when a really complex problem needs to be solved. He is then put back into suspended animation until a new problem arises. The story was likely published before 1980 (my relative believes they read it in 1978 or 1979). They also thought it was written by Ray Bradbury, but that may or may not be the case.

I don't know if it was a short story or a novel.

The only other piece of information I can give is that they think there was a character named Nagha (I don't know if that's the correct spelling).

Searching the internet with just these parameters has not worked.

Answer 1

This sounds like The Sleeping God, a story by Jesco von Puttkamer. It was published in Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath's Star Trek: The New Voyages 2, in 1978. (Yes, it's a Star Trek short story.)

The story starts with Nagha, an artificial intelligence:

The Nagha was a child.

She was all but omniscient and omnipotent, of immense size and gigantic capabilities. But she was only a child - a big humorless child. ...race of intelligent beings that constructed the original miniature cell of the Nagha...the computer complex that would one day, many millions of years later, think of conquering another Universe.

The Enterprise is on its way to investigate the mysterious attacks, when it receives orders to divert to Raga's Planet to pick up 'the Sleeper'.

"There is not much available on him, Captain. He is definitely human, apparently of Indian descent and is maintained in suspended animation....It seems that about one hundred years ago a small boy was discovered as a stowaway on a ship bound for Raga's Planet. He gave his name simply as Singa..."

"One day, now fully matured, he demanded to see the Council of Elders and the local representatives of the Federation. That was some eighty-five years ago. His story seemed somewhat incredible. He claimed to be a mutant, having been born to his parents from mutated genes which had been traumatized by radiation leaks in a malfunctioning space-ship drive they were working on. The mutation had endowed him with superior capabilities, and he was offering himself to the Elders for service to mankind."

"...A special investigatory team of scientists was dispatched to Raga's Planet. They found Singa's mental powers to be far greater than they had first assumed from his original statements. They were truly immense. Captain, there is at present no being in the known Universe that could match the mental capabilities of the Sleeper."

"...Singa may have been a mental mutant, but he aged normally, just like any other human being. Far-sighted people warned that a truly unique, never-again-repeatable opportunity would go to waste if nothing was done. And so..." Kirk nodded. "So they put him in suspended animation."

Answer 2

This is a long shot as a few of the details differ, but could it be C.M. Kornbluth's The Marching Morons? The main character wakes from suspended animation to find

a world mainly full of morons ruled by an intelligent elite. They're facing an insurmountable problem of population explosion. As a shrewd amoral con man, he offers a solution to their problem in return for being made World Dictator.

The ending and other details differs from your description, but it does feature a character called Ryan-Ngana which might be misremembered as Nagha. It was published in 1951, and ISFDB lists it as appearing in numerous collections in the late 70s/early 80s so that could tie in timewise.

[Found via the Wikipedia page for Idiocracy, as I wondered whether that might have been in any way based on a short story which was closer to the OP's premise]

Answer 3

This is a bit of a long shot, but the idea of an intelligent man who is consulted when a problem arises, sounds a bit like the character Hari Seldon in Asimov's Foundation series.

However, he is not in suspended animation, but rather appears as a hologram, having predicted the course the Foundation, a society he originated, would take, through the science of psychohistory.

It was published as a trilogy in the '50s, collecting stories that had been published in Astounding Magazine in the '40s. Hari Seldon's hologram recordings themselves appear in the three last stories of Foundation (the first book of the trilogy, collected in 1951) and in both chapters of Foundation and Empire (the second book, collected in 1952).

Asimov added two prequels to the series in the '80s, with the last one published posthumously in 1993. These show Hari Seldon during his life Asimov wrote two prequels that show Hari Seldon during his life more closely: Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993). Besides psychohistory, telepathy plays an important part in the series, with Asimov calling it "mentalism".

• The idea of consulting an intelligent man matches, although not the precise manner in which it was done.
• The author is not Ray Bradbury, but Isaac Asimov, another big name in science fiction and of the same era.
• There is no character named Nagha or anything reasonably close. There is a planet named Gaia, though. There is a list of characters that you can point your relative to, to see if anything clicks.