gwr@cord.UUCP (GW Ryan) (02/27/85)
(who IS the line eater?) > I am trying to find the title and author of a book i read 12 (ish) > years ago . I may have the story confused with others i have read > but here is the little you've got to go on . > There story is set maybe on earth , a group of humanoids , > ( who may later turn out to be insects !) live near the sea in a > vast forest/jungle , i think they live in trees / foiliage (?) . Not a novel... a short story. It's "Hothouse" by Brian W. Aldiss. I have it in an anthology that I got ~15 years ago from the SF Book Club called "Mutants". It's a marvelous story! They seem to be people living in trees; they actually live at the tops of a network of huge banyan trees (the tops of which are called "the Tips") that have overrun the entire earth. There are some older humans and a bunch of children. > humanoid get into (burrows) a moth which lands on > the top of the trees/foiliage and which then flies to the moon > where our humanoid > turns into a fly ( man this sounds crazy ! but i'm sure i read it ) . They "Go Up" to the Tips to die when they are old ... they are snagged in the legs of a giant spider like thing called a traverser and are carried to the moon. In this story, the moon and earth have stopped rotating with respect to each other ... there are traverser-webs connecting the two worlds. That's the image that stayed with me longest; the earth and moon snarled with cobwebs. Anyway, somewhere on the trip to the moon the people change into "flymen": men with wings. > I remember the jungle being full of nasty things they had to avoid > like plants which eat you . Also every thing was very BIG ( or they > were very small ) . there are tigerflies and termights, nasty carnivorous plant life of all sorts, and ... all kinds of great stuff in a world filled with vegetable life and just one animal species: man. It's a great story ... I'm glad you reminded me of it! jerry