Known Space - Overview - Species

Species

In the process of exploring space, humankind encounters several intelligent alien species, including the following:

• Kzinti: Large and very aggressive felinoid aliens with whom humans fight several brutal interstellar wars. Kzinti tactics are somewhat cat-like in nature, "scream and leap" being the primary mode of declaring a challenge. The first Man-Kzin War ended when the humans obtained the faster-than-light drive (FTL) from the Outsiders, after which the Kzinti ships stood no chance against the FTL warships. Throughout the rest of the wars with man, the Kzinti tended to always attack before they were ready, and subsequently lost all of them. As a result of this most of their empire was lost; in the peace treaties that resulted, colonies and slave planets were ceded to man or given independence. In Ringworld it is revealed that this was in part due to clandestine meddling by the Pierson's Puppeteers. They saw in the aggressive Kzinti a major threat, and orchestrated the events that led to the humans getting FTL ships and thereby ensuring the human victory of the first war. Each of these Kzinti defeats eliminated the most aggressive individuals from the Kzinti gene pool and thus made the Kzinti more "manageable" from a Puppeteer point of view. By the time Ringworld takes place, Kzinti are able to deal with other races diplomatically, rather than by attacking and enslaving them. Female Kzinti are not sapient, although among the archaic Kzinti found on the Ringworld some are. The protagonist Louis Wu thinks this indicates the Kzinti in Known Space have bred intelligence out of their females.

Niven himself wrote little about the Man-Kzin Wars, although many of his stories refer to them having taken place in the past. The Man-Kzin Wars short-story collections were primarily written by other authors. The Kzinti "crossed-over" in to the Star Trek universe in the animated episode "The Slaver Weapon", which was written by Larry Niven and is adapted from Niven's own short story "The Soft Weapon".

In the Man-Kzin Wars novel Destiny's Forge, it is revealed that the Black Priests, a powerful cult within the Patriarchy whose members all have completely black pelts, have been responsible for the breeding program to isolate the telepath gene and preserve kzinrret subsapience. Kits are tested while young; a female who displays too much intelligence is taken away and killed, and a male who displays knowledge they could not have gotten except by telepathy is taken away and addicted to sthondat lymph to become a Telepath. On Kzinhome, however, the czrav and forest nomad prides, outcasts from mainstream Kzinti culture, never accepted the Black Priests, and in consequence have fully sentient kzinrretti, although this fact is a carefully held secret.

• Kdatlyno: A slave species of the Kzinti until humans freed them, although some are still legal Kzinti slaves. Kdatlyno are huge, 10-foot-tall (3.0 m) bipeds with long arms. They have a thick brown hide, curved claws at knees and elbows, and retractable claws on the knuckles of their hands. Their heads are eyeless and noseless, with a gash of a mouth. Above that is a goggle-shaped tympanum (eardrum), which allows them to "see" by way of sonar. Kdatlyno create 'touch sculptures' as an art form. Other species need to touch this art, rather than look at it, to appreciate it properly.

• Whrloo: Meter-tall insectoids with long eyestalks, their homeworld has low gravity with a thick, dense atmosphere. They never saw the stars until they were enslaved by the Kzinti.

• Pierin: A slave species of the Kzinti. At the time of their conquest, they occupied several planets near p Eridani. No description is given, but the Ringworld RPG suggests they resemble horned birds and that their homeworld has low gravity. Presumably freed by humans, but this is not attested.

• Jotoki: Sentient starfish-shaped beings formed by the joining of the lobes of five non-sentient eel-like life forms into a single brain. Former rulers of an interstellar empire, they used Kzinti as bodyguards and mercenaries, but the Kzinti took over the Jotoki empire and built their own upon it, making the Jotoki slaves and food animals. Though superficially similar to the Gw'oth, they are unrelated.

• Chunquen: A slave species of the Kzinti, remarkable to their captors for the sentience of both sexes. ("They fought constantly.") Their homeworld is watery; they resisted the Kzinti invasion with missiles fired from submarine ships. Apparently exterminated before the Kzinti first encountered humans.

• Pierson's Puppeteers: A technologically advanced race of three-legged, twin-necked herbivores descended from herd animals, and noted for their so-called cowardice. Their commercial empire directly and indirectly controls events throughout Known Space and beyond, and Puppeteer plots are behind many of the larger events in Known Space. The name "Puppeteer" is purportedly derived from the twin "heads" (not enclosing brains) which perform as both mouths and hands, which strongly resemble sock puppets. The Puppeteer voice range is far greater than the human one, but for speaking to humans they adopt the tone of a very seductive female. It is also suggested that the "Puppeteer" name may derive from their social tendency to be very manipulative. The species were depicted in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials

• Outsiders: very advanced, fragile aliens shaped like cats o' nine tails that, according to Ringworld, probably evolved on a cold, low gravity world resembling Nereid. They mostly live on big ships, crossing the interstellar space at sublight velocities (according to A Gift From Earth, they find hyperspace vulgar), trading in information and technology. They possess inertial dampers and planetary drives. It was the Outsiders that sold humans the FTL drive, on a stop in the solar system of the human colony called We Made It. The Outsider ships' paths between the stars are determined by the starseeds, which they for some unknown reason seem to follow. The starseeds are gigantic, non-sentient space-dwelling animals that travel from the galactic core to the rim by their solar sails. At the rim they lay their eggs, then travel the 50,000 light-years back to the core.

• Pak: Interstellar ancestors of humanity (actually Homo habilis) whose life-cycle mimics the stages of human aging. Pak live through three stages of being: Child, breeder, protector. A Pak breeder who reaches 30 to 45 years of age will feel an irresistible urge to eat the sweet-potato-like root of a plant, Tree-of-Life, that is found throughout the Pak homeworld. A virus found in tree-of-life initiates the transformation into a protector. Protectors lose all sense of gender and reproductive desire, and exist solely to defend their clan bloodline. They are xenophobic, violent, hyper-intelligent and driven only by the fierce instinct to protect their descendants. This powerful instinct drove them to commit genocide on several planets where they tried to establish colonies, since every other sentient species was considered a potential threat. It also led to relentless internecine wars whenever two familial lines wound up with goals in conflict. When the Protectors reappear in The Ringworld Engineers and its sequels, it is strongly indicated that they constructed the Ringworld. A Pak colony failed on Earth 2.5 million years ago due to the soil's lack of thallium, which allowed Tree-of-Life to flourish but not the virus within its roots. As a result several million Pak breeders spread across the Earth, eventually evolving into Homo sapiens sapiens and all other primate life on the planet. Likewise, every hominid species found on the Ringworld is descended from Pak breeders, and all are susceptible to the virus of Tree-of-life. A protector-stage Homo habilis is more intelligent than a breeder-stage Homo sapiens, and a protector stage Homo sapiens is even more intelligent.

• Thrintun: An ancient species that ruled a large empire, including the region of Known Space, through telepathic mind control about 1.5 billion years ago. A technology created by one of their slave races was the stasis field, which makes its contents impervious to harm and provides indefinite suspended animation, which has figured in several Known Space stories. Thrintun were small (approximately 1.25 meters tall), highly telepathic but not particularly intelligent (with their mind control, they did not need to be), reptilian, with green scaly skin, pointed teeth, and a single eye. The species were depicted in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials

• Grogs: Sessile sentient creatures, shaped like furry cones. They are eyeless, earless, and have a prehensile tongue. They can also control animals telepathically. The Grogs are thought by some to be the descendants of the Thrintun species, after 1.5 billion years of atrophy.

• Nonesuch: A carnivorous species with telepathic abilities, that they primarily use for hunting prey and, most probably, for communication. The only predator of planet Haven. Not fully described, due to the fact that it somehow clouds the mind of its prey (that once included the human settlers). But it is intellectually handicapped, in that in combination with its telepathy, automatically assumes loss of ego when presented with a powerful telepathic feedback (i.e. from a human): It can assume a catatonic, unconscious state if a human it has telepathically linked thinks that it's just imagined a Nonesuch: thus the name. (from "Convergent Series")

• Gw'oth: Starfish-shaped beings inhabiting the ice moon of a gas giant. Gw'oth possess the ability to link their neural tissue and form incredibly powerful and efficient biological supercomputers, called Gw'otesht. Gw'otesht typically exist in collections of individual Gw'oth in multiples of 4, the largest known comprising 16 entities. Gw'otesht are capable of running many millions of complex simulations in a short amount of time, giving them the ability to plan ahead in great detail by analyzing every possible outcome. Evolving to sentience from colonies of carnivorous tubeworms living beneath the ocean of an ice moon similar to Europa, the Gw'oth broke through the ice and first experimented with fire only two generations previous to mastering nuclear fission. The Gw'oth continue to advance rapidly without need for trial and error learning. They know nothing of other intelligent beings in the universe until first encountering Humans and Pierson's Puppeteers in Fleet of Worlds. Though superficially similar to the Jotoki, they are unrelated.

• Tnuctipun: An apparently extinct ancient race of small carnivores contemporaneous with and enslaved by the Thrintun. They were known for their technological prowess, especially in genetic engineering. They secretly planned and executed the revolution to overthrow their Thrintun masters using many of their creations. When it appeared that the revolt would succeed, the Thrintun elders built and used a psychic amplifier that forced every sentient being in the galaxy to commit suicide, the signal repeating for centuries. The Thrintun that survived the revolt died out when all their slave races were dead.

• Bandersnatchi: Colossal slug-like creatures, originally created by the Tnuctipun as a food source for the Thrintun. Believed by the Thrintun to be unintelligent, the Bandersnatchi (known to the Thrintun as Whitefoods) were engineered by the Tnuctipun to be highly intelligent spies for their war on the Thrintun. At one time found on every Thrint estate throughout the Thrintun empire, the only known survivors in Known Space are on the planet Jinx, though they are later found on the Ringworld and on a forested planet called Beanstalk (in the Man-Kzin Wars story "Hey Diddle Diddle"). The Bandersnatchi were the only intelligent species which were immune to the Thrint mental power.

• Trinocs: Named for their three eyes; they also have three fingers on each hand and a triangular mouth. They are described as 5-foot-tall (1.5 m) bipedal humanoids, with long legs, short torsos, and improbably flexible neck vertebrae. An unconfirmed source states that they breathe a "primordial reducing atmosphere" mainly composed of methane and ammonia, and are culturally paranoid, at least by human standards. First encountered by Louis Wu in the short story "There is a Tide".

• Martians: Primitive but intelligent humanoids who lived beneath the sands. Martians burst into flames when brought in contact with water. Martians killed many of the early human explorers on Mars, principally because they concealed their existence, and they weren't suspected. In the novel Protector, the Martians were wiped out when Jack Brennan caused an ice asteroid to crash into the surface of Mars, raising the average humidity of the atmosphere. Some Martians still exist on the "Map of Mars" on the Ringworld.

• Morlocks: Semi-sentient humanoid cave dwellers on Wunderland. They, like humans, descended from a failed attempt by Pak Protectors to colonize Sol and nearby star systems. Named by humans for the creatures in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.

Also figuring in some stories are dolphins and other intelligent cetaceans, and various offshoots of Homo sapiens including the associate lineage of the hominids of the Ringworld. Most life in Known Space shares similar biochemistries, since they evolved from the Thrintun practice of seeding barren worlds with food yeast which they used to feed their slaves. Over a billion years, the Thrintun food yeast evolved into the different life forms in Known Space.