The Smoke Ring
Larry Niven
 This book takes place about fifteen years after the end of the original story, when survivors of the Dalton-Quinn tree, a few Carther States jungle dwellers, and two London Tree Citizens have settled on a new tree. This 'Citizen's Tree' has become a stable community which some believe may be too small to survive in the long run. Kendy, the recorded personality of a citizen of "The State" who exists in the computer of the original space-ship that colonized the Smoke Ring, has become impatient. He decides to re-establish contact with Citizen's Tree. Kendy manipulates a group into making contact with "The Admiralty", a neighboring civilization at Gold's L4 Lagrange Point (which they refer to as "the Clump"). The group explores this more advanced civilization with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. Although much of the story is a sort of "travelogue" exploring the Smoke Ring and the technology used in the unique environment, The Smoke Ring does spend more time on story and character development than The Integral Trees. One of the drivers for the story follows the latest operator of "the silver suit", the Citizen's Tree's working spacesuit. Few are capable of operating the suit due to its size, as most humans in the Smoke Ring have evolved to be much too tall to fit into it. The job goes to the occasionally born "dwarves" who are, in fact, humans of normal (for Earth) height and build. A major sub-plot develops around the latest silver suit operator's attempts to infiltrate The Admiralty to gain information, and The Admiralty's near obsession with capturing the Citizen's Tree's spacesuit. This story gives much more notice to the story of Kendy and the original mission. The chain of events that led to the colonization of the Smoke Ring through a "mutiny" on the ship is explored. After retrieving the crew's own records of the events, Kendy realizes that the crew had not mutinied at all, and that he had forced them off the ship, believing this to be in keeping with his orders from Earth. This was apparently blocked from his memory, and he suffers a form of breakdown when he learns (or re-learns) the truth.