Message-ID: <157@cord.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-Feb-85 00:46:11 EST
Article-I.D.: cord.157
Posted: Wed Feb 27 00:46:11 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Feb-85 13:00:14 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Piscataway
Lines: 41

(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