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story identification - Looking for title about a ship that seeds planets and then monitors them


I'm looking for the title of a book about a ship that has colonized several systems, and is now traveling from planet to planet, monitoring their progress.



The ship is AI/sentient. And much of the narrative is the from the ship.


One planet has the people turning into trees. Another has people who think they should only sleep 3 hours a day.


I know that's kind of vague but it was about 20 years ago when I read this.



Answer



This reminded me immediately of a book my son told me about, John Brunner's "A Maze of Stars". I haven't read it myself but online reviews do sound like it might be it:



A slow but interesting book about a colonization ship seeding humanity throughout the galaxy..or rather revisiting these planets at a point 500 years from the start of the work. Mostly a tale of what went wrong with each attempt..has all the big ones...genetic mutation, dictatorships, backwards societies and immortality ( at the cost of mindlessness through symbiosis ), etc... I think it would have been/could have been better if it actually explained some of the questions posed in the novel rather than explaining things by saying that there is/might be a gap in the ships knowledge banks..or that its programming would not allow explanations for 'that topic'.



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