Miss using my twitter account because it was a place to dump media references that I don't have the energy to explain here. (I also miss the weird real time passive interaction with friends.) But since Twitter Central can't store more than 10 pages of posts, fuck'em.
Traversers in Brian Aldiss's Hothouse:
Millions of years in the future. The moon slows the earth's rotation to a stop. The moon also stops rotating. Earth continues to revolve around the sun. The moon leaves earth's orbit and trails earth at a "trojan point" in its solar orbit.
Only one side of earth and moon face the sun. Plant life dominates the daylit earth. Also descendants of wasps, termites, and humans.
Traversers are giant free-floating spider-like plants that went higher and higher in the atmosphere to escape wasps.
Eventually they adapted to space and live on radiation.
They use their webs as space elevators to climb out of earth's gravity well, then eject oxygen*, grow considerably in size and "traverse" space between earth and the moon, using their web ejection as propulsion.
Earth and moon have a permanent network of silky cables connecting them, and the traversers go back and forth.
On earth, traversers descend because they still need soil to live.
On the moon, they have brought plant life with them and the moon's day side acquires soil (from the decaying corpses of the giant spiders, initially) and an atmosphere.
Humans (much smaller, greener, and more primitive than us) also go back between the worlds using the traversers as space ships.
*in "globes" attached to the cables that are used later for descent to earth.