(Found) Please help Plant pods as rockets

[trailside]

Looking for info on a paper back novel that's at least pre 90s. Main story is alien race building rockets with plant pods as engines. Continually have extinction level events and have to restart building there civilization.
Any help would be awesome!!!
Thanks
Brent

 

[tachyon]

The first thing that comes to mind for this is The Integral Trees by Larry Niven, but the pods weren't built into rockets.

 

[Parson]

The idea of a series of extinction level events is far from unknown in S.F. but plant pods for rockets? Are you sure?

Any other info would be good. Cover? length? (it sounds more like a novella to me) Other pieces of the plot. etc.

 

[Vince W]

My first thought was Raft by Stephen Baxter, but that was published in 1991. Also, while there are flying trees they aren't really rockets.

 

[trailside]

Hard to remember much from the book. Teased it awhile ago.
Story line is the culture gets close to launching and then extinction. Then builds up and launches then extinction them builds up and get to orbit then extinction. And so on.
Hard to remember much else.
Thanks for all the help

 

[tachyon]

Found this searching around. The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle. I've read this way back when but didn't remember this detail about the Motie society rising and falling. I don't think there are seed pod rocket engines in it...

Story about a civilization which repeatedly rises and falls, because individuals can't stop reproducing

 

[Parson]

Indeed The Mote in God's Eye has as the main truth about the Moties society that they have to jump start from atomic power each time they fall. And they fall because of over population. But I am very sure there is no plant pod rocket. All of the tech is manufactured not organic, and one branch of the Moties are savant level at fixing things better than they were when the thing was invented.

 

[Danny McG]

I've just had a quick skim through the novel length version of Nightfall, but, as I thought but needed to check, there's no mention of rocket pod plants

 

[chrispenycate]

Chcking out 'The crucible of time' John Brunner (1982) where just about all technology is biological, and they have to get a viable population off the planet because junk infall is going to destabilise their star. I have a copy but havent read it in thirty years - perhaps I should.

 

[JimC]

This sounds like Larry Niven's Stage Trees from 'A Relic of the Empire'.
Designed by the Tnuctipun before they were killed off by the Thrint.

 

[trailside]

Found this searching around. The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle. I've read this way back when but didn't remember this detail about the Motie society rising and falling. I don't think there are seed pod rocket engines in it...

Story about a civilization which repeatedly rises and falls, because individuals can't stop reproducing

Thank you. I have read that as well. Not the one I was thinking of.

 

[PaulMmn]

Pournelle/Niven (I think it was them) include a plot item of 'Stage Trees--' these trees grow tall and work like solid-fuel rocket boosters. I don't remember the novel they appeared in.

 

[chrispenycate]

Pournelle/Niven (I think it was them) include a plot item of 'Stage Trees--' these trees grow tall and work like solid-fuel rocket boosters. I don't remember the novel they appeared in.

Not a book, and Niven alone in 'a relic of Empire' (short story in th 'Weutron Star' collection.

 

[trailside]

That was it!!!
Thank you very much!!!!
My recollection of the story was very vague. The shooting seed pods in the north where what I remembered as the rockets!!!
Just finished it! Good times.
Cheers!

 

[trailside]

FOUND!!!! Thank you Chrispenycate!!!

 

[chrispenycate]

.-

Looking for info on a paper back novel that's at least pre 90s. Main story is alien race building rockets with plant pods as engines. Continually have extinction level events and have to restart building their civilization.

I'm still holding out for the crucible of time by Brunner. (copyright 1982/1983, originally published in two parts in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine)Dug my copy out and:-
Alien race, definitely. No skeleton, pumped up by hydraulics, more or less. reproduce by budding. Allergic to metals.
Series of meteor strikes, not quite extinction level (or there'd be no beings to restart over, but definitely civilisation destroying. Thir stellar system is drifting into a region of cosmic junk. Successive waves of progress come from different cultures, as the previous societies are exterminated.
They start with astronomy, and the discovery of the New Star, then optics, with Jing and Keepfire, have biological crises as well as physical ones, and finish by drifting away from the planet in sort of pressurised green houses, habitats in which they can miss out on the planetary bombardments.

Just too close to the specified story line.