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The protagonist was going to do something, or something was going to happen to him, that was going to cause his descendants to not be born. So they kidnap him and trap him on a ship (that is, an oceangoing ship, not a spaceship) for his whole life against his will, to keep him safe or to stop him from doing something that would lead to them not being born. At the end of his life, he points out to them that they forgot to give him the opportunity to actually bear any children, so after all their effort they're all going to die anyway.I think I misremembered this. I think he was just going to do something that was going to cause some kind of problem for his descendants. (I feel like maybe it was a reputational thing, like he made a bad name for himself and all of his eventual descendants; but maybe I'm making that up.) So they kidnap him and trap him on a ship (an oceangoing ship, not a spaceship) for his whole life against his will, to stop him from doing the thing. He resents his confinement, especially over something so relatively trivial, but he can't do anything about it. At the end of his life, he points out to them that they forgot to give him the opportunity to actually bear any children, so after all their effort to fix their problem, all they've accomplished is killing themselves. (He deliberately didn't tell them until it was too late, because he resented them that much. Not just for kidnapping him, I think, but for being shallow and ridiculous people in general.)
I might be screwing up some details, but I'm pretty sure about the broad details that people from the future isolated him on a ship, but then it was all for naught because they forgot to let him have children.
I don't remember when I read it, but it was probably less than ten years ago. I feel like the story itself was older than that, though; it had the vibe of classic science fiction (i.e. 40s-70s) more than modern science fiction. But, I might be wrong about that.
Edited by NoriMori