Seed ship, exploding tree cones, "community" body organs...?

[ProZack]

I'm trying to find a book I read in the early 90's, I think.

It was about a living/sentient ship that traveled from star system to star system and sometimes picked up a couple of passengers along the way.

I think the ship was traveling back along it's previous path after thousands of years visiting worlds it had seeded with human life.

There was a tree that caught fire and the seed pods exploded like bombs on one planet.

There was a planet that was planted in all trees and burnt to a crisp because the people had forgotten that even though trees had a very high water content, they burned ferociously.

There was a person (girl?) who's body organs had minds of their own and worked together as a collective... I recall the lungs saying they were going to choke and other parts saying, like, don't you dare.

The ship was the mind of (I think) a giant squid and perhaps it had traveled along an arm of the galaxy and then crossed/attempted to cross the emptiness between galaxies.

Does anyone have any ideas of what this book is?

Thanks

 

[Bick]

Much of this sounds very much like Larry Niven's 'Known Space' material, although it sounds like a mixture of his books, and it doesn't all fit, so I'm far from sure. The alien travelling back to the planet he seeded with human life sounds like 'Protector'. The seed trees occur in many stories and explode in a story in 'Neutron Star'. The squid-like ship's mind doesn't ring a bell though.

 

[Vince W]

I was thinking this sounded like Niven as well. The squid reference makes me think of the Outsiders.

 

[Bick]

The outsiders don't get much coverage though do they - a brief mention here and there. I'm not sure about the organs attacking the host body either. That doesn't sound like Niven. I wonder if a couple of different books have been remembered here?

 

[ProZack]

Perhaps I'm mixing some things up...


I know the book had a ship that was alive/thinking. The ending was that the ship had traveled along the arm of the galaxy and crossed the void between galaxies. The ship/mind had barely made the trip and had run into some powerful aliens on the other side who were replaying/probing it's memories in reverse order. (This was to account for the disjointed "stories" in the rest of the book.) They played the memories all the way back to before it was a "ship" and it was a Giant Squid in the deep oceans of Earth. The ship was either the mind of the Giant Squid or based on it. The reason given was that it was the only "mind" that was used to great periods of aloneness and was thus suitable to not going crazy when traveling between star systems.


There were no other "aliens" in the book as the strange "people" the ship encountered were humans that were uniquely evolving on the planets they were seeded onto.


The book cover in my mind led me to "The Dark beyond the Stars" by Frank M. Robinson but that wasn't the correct book.

Almost finished rereading it.


If I hadn't had a large chunk of my SciFi library stolen, I'd have it on my shelves... it's driving me a little bonkers.


Thanks for your ideas so far.

 

[CassFrank]

This sounds to me like John Brunner’s A Maze of Stars (1991). Time frame fits. It is a travelogue story about a sentient ship following up and planets it seeded with humans.

From a review: “An artificially intelligent ship has been tasked with seeding human colonies on about 600 worlds in an arm of the galaxy, and now it has returned (again) to check up on them. Brunner then uses various of the worlds to show some of the myriad ways in which civilization can make itself miserable or (occasionally) happy. Parts of it read like short stories as Brunner follows individuals on certain worlds.”

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