Characters / Known Space

Species

Major Species of Known Space

Humans

The main species of the stories, culturally split between the Flatlanders on the homeworld, the Belters in the rest of the solar system, and the colonists scattered across extrasolar planets. Human space is a collection of primarily independent planetary governments, which cooperate in matters of interstellar policy or security but run their own internal affairs. Humans are an offshoot of the Pak, descending from a long-lost and failed colony, and retain the ability to become protectors; as a rule, human protectors are weaker overall than their Pak counterparts, but much smarter and more mentally flexible.

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• All Crimes Are Equal:
  • During Earth's pre-first contract history, almost every crime was punishable by death, including multiple traffic tickets. This was due to the perfection of organ transplant technology. Once the government adopted "involuntary organ donation" as its official means of execution, all state executions were done in hospitals, and people started voting to make more and more crimes capital crimes to keep up with the demand for transplant material. This resulted in a massive, irreversible change in Earth's culture, as, in Niven's universe, psychology is more nature than nurture; violence, deception and greed have a genetic basis that organ harvesting weeded out of the population, along with a great deal of humanity's self-preservation, self-motivation and self-interest. After a few generations of this, "flatlanders" are pacifistic, completely obedient to authority, and rather stupid. The Belters and the extrasolar colonies, who did not go through this process, also avoided the effects. This system collapses when artificial organs become cheap and effective, and, by the year 3000, the organ-based death penalty laws have vanished, but the cultural impact was pretty much permanent.
  • In A Gift From Earth, the government of the planet Plateau is propped up by the fact that the Crew (the "noble" class) control all the medical technology on the planet, including the organ banks (which are not only used to punish regular criminals, but also "punish" dissidents, "political" offenders, and the merely inconvenient as well), and thus have ultimate power over the Colonists (the "peasantry").
• Heavy Worlder: The people of Jinx, a world with higher gravity than those of other human colonies, are stronger, sturdier, and shorter overall than other human populations. They're described by one character as "five feet tall and five feet wide". They got this way after only four hundred years of selective breeding, but the downside is heart problems and short lifespans even with the life-extending drug boosterspice.
  Jinx? The natives are short, wide, and strong; a sweet little old lady's handshake can crush steel.
• Humanity Came from Space: Homo habilis were actually Pak breeders, from a planet closer to the galactic core. In the "breeder" phase of their life they are about as smart as chimps (who also evolved from Pak, apparently) but in middle age they become able to eat a root called tree-of-life that contains a virus which transforms them into superintelligent armored protectors single-mindedly obsessed with preserving their genes. When they colonized Earth it turned out that the soil couldn't support the tree-of-life and the protectors died off, without them and their instinctive culling of mutants the Pak colony evolved into Earth's great apes.
• In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: By the time of the later stories, Earth's humanity has blended into a racially and culturally homogenous whole. The leading factors of this are the establishment of a single planetary government and the invention of cheap, effective teleporters. By the time of Ringworld, going from New York to Nairobi or from Shanghai to Rio de Janeiro is simply a matter of a walk down the street and a bit of spare change, functionally breaking down all barriers of travel between all areas of the Earth.
• Lightworlder:
  • Wunderland and We Made It have lower overall gravity than Earth does, resulting in Wunderlanders and crashlanders tending to be very tall, often around seven feet in height, with slender torsos and limbs.
  • Earth's moon, Luna, is a more extreme case. The people who grow up there, "Lunies", average around eight feet tall and are said to look like fantasy elves.
• Weird Beard: Upper-class Wunderlanders traditionally wear asymmetrical beards. In "A Relic of the Empire", Richard Schultz-Mann rather liked the additional asymmetry that developed when patches of hair turned white when he was temporarily unable to afford boosterspice, and took to bleaching them back in once he could afford rejuvenant drugs again.

Kzinti

A Kzin warrior stands ready to die.^note Properly speaking, Kzin should only have four digits.

For two hundred and fifty years the kzinti had not attacked human space. They had nothing to attack with. For two hundred and fifty years men had not attacked the kzinti worlds; and no kzin could understand it. Men confused them terribly.

—Ringworld

Singular "Kzin". Aggressive cat-like aliens from the third world of 61 Ursae Majoris, they fought four brutal (and ultimately unsuccessful) interstellar wars with humanity. Only the males are sapient, and their government is called the Patriarchy. Kzinti society is highly stratified, with noble families at the top, commoners below them, and enslaved telepaths and aliens at the bottom. They're infamous in Known Space for their disdain towards other species and willingness to eat the flesh of other sapient beings. Individual Kzinti are called by their professions until they earn a name through their deeds.

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• Aliens Are Bastards: The Kzinti regarded all other species as food. Their first impulse was always to attack, enslave, and eat. Humans finally stopped them, and a series of wars killed off all of the most aggressive Kzinti until the species as a whole finally became a little more cautious. Sometimes. Ringworld reveals that the Puppeteers manipulated events so that humans would encounter the Outsiders and be sold the secret of the FTL drive, which allowed them to win their first war against the Kzinti.
• Alien Invasion: The Man-Kzin Wars, all of which were won by humanity, thanks to the Kzinti inability to think before they leap.
• Alternative Number System: The Kzinti count in base eight, due to having four-fingered hands.
• Battle Trophy: Kzinti often take trophies from challenging or notable foes. After a Duel to the Death over honor, advancement or some insult, for instance, the victor often severs the loser's ears as a memento.
• Bizarre Alien Sexes: Kzinti females are non-sapient and much smaller than the males; they find species with equally sapient sexes to be bizarre. The stories eventually reveal that this is not actually their natural state; ancestral Kzinretti were as intelligent and aggressive as Kzintosh, and the current state of things is a result of ancient genetic engineering and an ongoing eugenics program. Reserves of Kzinti seeded before this event, such as those on the Map of Kzin on the Ringworld, still have sapient females.
• Cat Folk: The Kzinti are aggressive, warlike humanoid aliens that look like eight-foot-tall fat orange cats with ratlike tails and ears that look like pink parasols unfolding from the sides of their head.
• Code of Honour: Kzinti society is based on a complex code of martial honor, called Strakh, which determines social standing and serves as a currency of sorts, since Kzinti don't use money. Central features of this code are an emphasis on martial prowess, especially in service to the Patriarch, and on personal dignity and not letting wrongs against you go unfulfilled.
• Duel to the Death: Kzinti are characterized by their hair-trigger tempers and intense sense of personal pride. Personal insults can be washed off with an apology, but that relies on at least one party being willing to back off and admit to being in the wrong. Failing that, insulted or contesting Kzin will seek satisfaction through a duel to the death, and announce their intent to do this through a scream of rage and a leap to the jugular. Historically, this has served as their main method of population control — as population density rises, insults become increasingly more likely to occur, and duels rise in frequency until total numbers have dropped to a stabler level.
• The Empire: The Kzinti empire is ruled by a class of feudal warrior nobilities and expanded through ruthless conquest and subjugation of other sapient species, which were afterwards kept in line through ruthless brutality and used as slaves and food animals.
• Four-Fingered Hands: The Kzinti have four fingers on each paw, and developed a base-eight number system as a result.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Averted in practice, but the Kzinti are under the cultural bias that anything that isn't a carnivore is either inherently weak or stupid; "you don't need brains to sneak up on a leaf!" They've faced many nasty subversions to this expectation throughout the series; the "grass giants" on Ringworld, the hidden nastiness of Puppeteers, humanity, the Pak, and so on. In Ringworld, the group from space captures the leader of one tribe who is infuriated by the Kzin Chmeee suggesting that he is a coward because he eats grass. The human member thinks that this reveals that Chmeee has never met an angry bull.
• His Name Really Is "Barkeep": Kzinti are known by their professions until they earn the right to choose their own names.
• Humans Are Special: Orthodox Kzin society believes that Kzinti are the pinnacle of creation and fated to rule the universe. Their devastating losses in their wars against humanity seriously challenged this belief, and led to the formation of a cult known as the Kdaptists who believe that God made Man, not Kzin, in His image, and means for them to dominate the stars. This has led to some unusual practices, such as praying while wearing masks of human skin in order to trick God into thinking that the devotee is one of His human children.
• Immune to Mind Control: Black Priests are immune to telepathy due to the same gene that gives them their eponymous fur color.
• Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: Kzinti society relies rather heavily on its telepaths, whose unique abilities allow them to serve as unblockable long-range scanners and to bypass traditional defenses to interrogation. Kzinti society still treats them like filth due to being noncombatants — telepaths are forbidden to breed and to have their own names, and are so low in status that even some slaves are more highly regarded.
• Leeroy Jenkins: The Kzinti "scream and leap" fighting style. Their tendency to attack before they're quite ready is why they lost every one of the Man-Kzin wars.
• Named After Their Planet: Inverted. They traditionally refer to their homeworld as "Home", but in the post-Wars era it's more commonly known as Kzinhome.
• Proud Hunter Race: The Kzinti are sapient predators who firmly believe that the only proper way to obtain your food is to go out and kill it yourself, and have no problems whatsoever with hunting and eating other sapient beings. They find the concept of vegetarianism morally repulsive, and their traditional way of dealing with criminals from subject species was to let them loose in fenced preserves and hunt them for sport.
• Proud Warrior Race: The Kzinti are a civilization of highly militant imperialists who historically tended to treat "first contact" and "declaration of war" as largely synonymous. In their society, all males are expected to become part of the military and gain their names and status through martial service. Personal honor is also extremely important to them, and duels to the death over points of honor and pride are very common.
• Psychic Starship Pilot: The Kzinti never obtained the mass indicator technology humans use to navigate hyperspace, instead relying on a few rare Kzinti who can see in hyperspace, and the Patriarch made a concerted effort to mate with their female relatives to ensure his family would control Kzinti space travel.
• Real Men Eat Meat: Real kzin eat meat. And they eat it raw. When fresh meat is not available, they heat it up to about living temperature. At least, modern male kzin are this way; ancestral Kzin were omnivores that supplemented a meat-heavy diet with plant material such as tubers, but they used genetic engineering to make themselves into obligate carnivores because they found this more culturally desirable.
• Rite-of-Passage Name Change: Kzinti are not born with names, and need to earn them. As kits, they are referred to as their fathers' sons and by number of birth (e.g., "Fifth Son of Tsaar-Rrit"). On adulthood, they are instead referred to purely by their job or military designation ("Third Forward Gunner"). If they perform a deed of notable bravery or accomplish some valuable goal, they're awarded a partial name ("Chuft-Gunner"). A repeat of this will earn them the right to bear their family name ("Chuft-Rrit"). A single very impressive deed can catapult a Kzin directly from the second stage to the final one. Referring to a named Kzin by his old title is a profound insult.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: Kzinti have no compunctions whatsoever about eating other intelligent beings, and will happily go as far as hunting them for sport. Under the Kzinti Empire, "slave" and "livestock" were largely synonymous terms. True cannibalism is rare, but not unheard of either; in "Cathouse", a Kzinrett from a population of archaic Kzinti mentions that males cannot be relied upon to help raise young because they're too likely to eat the cubs.
• Screaming Warrior: In their own words, the proper response to a fighting-words insult in Kzin culture is "You scream and you leap."
• Space Orcs: The Kzinti are what you get when you take a bronze age culture and give it hyper-advanced technology with no adjustment period. Evolved from territorial predators, they had just worked out metalworking when a space-capable species, the Jotoki, culturally uplifted them to use as soldiers and bodyguards. This worked great until it didn't and the Kzinti overwhelmed the Jotoki, enslaved them and used their tech to create their own star empire. Modern Kzinti are extremely aggressive and warlike, routinely invade, conquer, enslave and eat other sapient species, have a society entirely focused upon martial prowess, and are so prone to dueling each other to the death that this serves as their main population limiter. They have however become far less vicious in the tail end of the setting's timeline, in large part because the Puppeteers contrived for humanity to gain a technological edge on them, causing the Kzinti to lose all their wars against them and cull off the most aggressive and warlike members of several consecutive generations.
• Technology Uplift: The Kzin were bootstrapped by another species to serve as mercenaries. Unfortunately, they then turned on and enslaved their patrons.
• Telepathy: Some Kzin are born with natural telepathic powers. They're enslaved by the Kzinti government using a drug derived from an animal's lymph, which enhances their abilities at the cost of being intensely addictive, causing muscle atrophy and making them twitchy and neurotic. In war, telepaths are used as a form of unblockable scanners and as interrogators; the experience of being mind-read is noted to be quite painful.
• Too Dumb to Live: Between their room temperature I.Q.s and their uncontrollable hair-trigger tempers, they lose every single fight they get into with anyone. The Man-Kzin Wars books are especially full of this trope; by the time of Ringworld, we get a main character Kzin who will sometimes look before he leaps and will forgive insults if he is outmatched. This is because all of the most aggressive and stupid Kzinti have all been killed off in wars against humans over the past 500 years, and only the Kzinti who were smart enough to not directly fight humans survived to breed. Think of it as natural selection in action.
  • In Destiny's Forge, the Patriarch makes the point that the expansion of the Patriarchy is an important safety valve to direct the aggression of the Prides outward, rather than focused on each other, and that he cannot dictate that the continued raids against humans stop without giving the Prides something of equivalent value that the humans are conceding.
  • The Man-Kzin Wars stories reveal that the Kzinti were enslaved in their early bronze age by another species who valued their martial abilities. The Kzinti rebelled and used their former masters' technology to reach the stars and also to tinker with their genetic code. Essentially they wanted an army of Bronze Age heroes and their women to not be so naggy. So the Real Men now rage and leap before they think, valuing bravery and strength over intelligence. The women were tinkered with enough to become near non-sapient over time, although there seems to have been a cultural aspect to that change as well as the genetic engineering. The Kzinti found on the Ringworld are noticeably less gender dimorphic (almost just as prone to going off pop, but also arguably more intelligent overall and with less of a bias against their tendency to produce lukewarm psychics). They've had longer to adapt to wider environments with more ape-like things willing to fight back. Also... getting the odd Protector maybe getting uppity in their general direction early on during relocation might've helped a bit.
• To Serve Man: Kzinti have hunted and eaten humans on colony worlds they conquered during the Man-Kzin wars. In the short story "The Soft Weapon", once they find out that Jason Papandreou knows the secret of the weapon, the Kzin decide to eat his wife Anne-Marie's arm — possibly both of her arms — in front of them in order to get him to tell.
• Transplanted Aliens: A few populations of Kzinti exist on far-off worlds where they moved by other civilizations in the ancient past. A Kzinti civilization exists on the Map of Kzin on the Ringworld, and the Man-Kzin Wars story "Cathouse" depicts another one in an alien "zoo" built by unknown powers. Both of these are very old — as a reference, the Map of Earth was originally home to australopithecines, while the Earth enclosure in "Cathouse" holds mammoths and neanderthals. As such, they were separated from mainstream Kzinti society early enough to retain sapient females.
• Unreliable Illustrator: Kzinti only somewhat resemble cats — their overall appearance is more feline than anything, but they also have long torsos more similar to a ferret's, parasol-like hairless ears held up by long ribs, and naked, ratlike tails. Illustrators still tend to draw them as just upright lions.
• Wingdinglish: The Kzin language is almost always described as hissing and spitting. But almost no published Kzinti words contain any sibilants, and very few consonant pairs that would produce a spitting sound.

Pierson's Puppeteers

A sane Puppeteer, a sight that no alien will ever see.

"You caused all this," said Luis Wu, "with you monstrous egotism... how could you be so powerful, so determined, and so stupid..."

A technologically advanced race of three-legged herbivores who consider courage a type of insanity. The name "Puppeteer" is derived from their twin heads, which a Puppeteer uses as both mouths and hands that greatly resemble one-eyed sock puppets with knobby "fingers" around their lips. A Puppeteer's brain is located in its torso, about where the head of a human puppeteer would be if its heads really were sock puppets. They were originally a major force in and beyond Known Space, as their judicious use of espionage, economic power, and shadow politics allowed them to play other cultures off of each other and maximize their own influence. However, once Beowulf Shaeffer returned from the core with news of its explosion, their entire civilization packaged up and started fleeing the galaxy.

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• Aliens Are Bastards: The Puppeteers couldn't have a more appropriate title; they're all cowardly, manipulative bastards, fiddling with the economics, breeding, and whatnot of any neighboring races.
  • For a truly wonderful example, the fifteenth Man-Kzin Wars collection has a story about how they were the ones who got the Jotok to try to uplift the Kzin as mercenaries, fully expecting that the Jotok would be either wiped out or enslaved by their new mercenaries. This served two purposes — first, it got the Jotok out of the way before they could discover FTL travel (which the Puppeteers had a monopoly on), and second was that they had heard rumors of a threat at the galactic core. They wanted a race of warriors to fight in case it was a threat to them, specifically. At the same time that they were doing this, they set in motion plans to accelerate the development of human technology in order to serve as a foil to the Kzinti, with the intention that whoever wins will be easily manipulated by the Puppeteers.
  • The Puppeteers were also directly responsible for the collapse of the Ringworld's civilization. Having discovered the advanced and powerful City Builders, they decided that it would be very useful to them if they could neuter this potential rival and also gain themselves another client state in the process. Thus, they created a bacterium that fed on the superconductor material whose Ring-spanning grid the City Builders' advanced technology, including their flying cities, depended on. The bacterium destroyed the grid, causing the very literal fall of the City Builder's empire, with the idea being that the Puppeteers could then swoop in and offer to sell aid, technology, and knowledge to the hapless locals. They went through with the first stage of the plan and caused the total collapse of civilization on the Ring as planned, but then a more conservative political faction took power, decided that this was too risky to pursue, and just abandonded the project and left the Ringworld's people to their fate.
• Ancient Conspiracy: The Puppeteers are old hands at secretly manipulating other societies over the centuries. Among other things, they interfered in the Man-Kzin wars to try and breed docile Kzinti, secretly lobbied for the Birthright Lottery to breed lucky humans to use as agents, and secretly engineered the Ringworld's superconductor plague so that they could investigate the Ringworld safely and so that they could arrive in the nick of time and save everything, making a lot of money and getting a lot of power in the process. Then politics happened between sowing the plague and fixing it, and the fixing never happened.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: They have three legs, two heads that do not contain their brains but instead double as hands, and brains in a bony hump in the middle of their torsos.
• Bizarre Alien Sexes: They claim to have three "sexes", one of which is non-sapient and serves as a host for the embryo created by the two others. In actuality, this is a subversion. They're merely prudish about admitting that they're a parasitoid species whose larvae incubate inside a different species of herd animal altogether; their two actual sexes are so similar that aliens cannot tell them apart by either appearance or tone of voice. They're intellectually aware that the "Companions", as they call them, reproduce amongst themselves in a different way, and that "giving birth" to a Puppeteer is invariably fatal, but they still pretend to themselves that the Companions are willing participants in the process.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: They are, in the words of Louis Wu, a race of cowards. They evolved from skittish herd animals, and view cowardice as a virtue and bravery as a kind of insanity. Their leader is called the "Hindmost", implying that he's better at hiding behind the rest of the herd than anybody else. In Ringworld we discover that it's really because their enormous central leg can deliver a devastating kick to anyone standing directly behind a Puppeteer, but the instinct to turn around ended up being interpreted as "turn around and run away". Even talking with a member of another species is considered unduly risky, and thus all their ambassadors are clinically insane by their own standards.
• Chestburster: Louis suspects that puppeteers reproduce this way, although there is no definitive confirmation about whether he's right. Fleet of Worlds only confirms that gestation is always fatal to the "mother"/host.
• Dirty Coward: The puppeteers, although this is apparently a misremembered instinct — not to turn their backs and run away, but to turn their backs and attack with their powerful hind leg (and they can look backward easily, too). Given that the puppeteers exterminated every remotely-dangerous animal on their homeworld thousands of years ago, and don't tolerate any aggression towards one another, the fighting instincts that originally made them turn their back on predators have now become a liability. Selection pressure against violent behavior may have directly converted an obsolete fighting impulse to cowardice, because combative puppeteers weren't allowed to breed. The puppeteers that contact other races are considered insane, because they are prepared to leave the safety of their worlds, risk space travel, and meet alien species with psychotically cavalier attitudes to risk^note by Puppeteer standards, this translates to "any species that does not consider the phrase 'acceptable risk' to be an oxymoron". However, they are hailed for being extremely useful for the puppeteer civilization.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: While they'll never admit as much to alien, puppeteers reproduce by implanting their young within an animal host. The offspring's emergence is invariably fatal to its third "parent".
• Fictional Political Party: They have two political parties: Conservatives, who are isolationist, and Experimentalists, who favor interventionist foreign policy. As a rule, the Conservatives dominate the government until crises arise, at which point the Experimentalists are brought into power due to the Puppeteers' species-wide terror of everything that might threaten their survival, and remain there until the problem is resolved and the isolationism of the Conservatives starts to look like the safer option again.
• Handy Mouth: Puppeteers use their two mouths as hands. The mouths are perfectly suited for this, even possessing dry fingerlike projections.
• Higher-Tech Species: The Puppeteers are the most technologically advanced of the civilizations of Known Space, and maintain their political status by selectively selling high-tech goods to other cultures and by using their considerable technological power as a deterrent to would-be aggressors.
• Manipulative Bastard: Puppeteers were named because they physically resemble puppets, but the name is also apt because of their habit of manipulating and using other species for their own gain. They notably engineered the Man-Kzin Wars and the birthright lotteries on Earth as long-running eugenics programs on humanity and the Kzin in order to make the former a useful tool and diminish the threat of the former, but their history is filled with endless such stories of subtle control over other societies.
• Meaningful Name: The choice to call the aliens with the sock-puppet-looking head-hands "Puppeteers" proved to be more apt than humanity knew at the time. The Pierson's Puppeteers have secretly had their hands in nearly all the goings-on within Known Space for millennia, pulling the strings like an Illuminatus.
• The Migration: When Beowulf Shaeffer came back from the Core with the news that it had destroyed itself in a chain reaction of supernovas and that a wave of radiation was coming that would sterilize the galaxy, the Puppeteers packed up their entire civilization, secret homeworld included, and ran. The packing up was done within a month, and is ongoing by the time of the Ringworld cycle — they are aiming for the globular clusters or the Magellanic Clouds, where the deadly wave will not reach. That the doom isn't forecast for another twenty thousand years is immaterial to them; there's nothing to be gained by waiting around.
• Our Better Is Different: The Puppeteers value survival to the point of cowardice, so their leaders are "those who lead from behind" and the highest ranking one is called "the Hindmost". This has a hidden subtlety. As herd animals, the Puppeteers don't charge enemies the way territorial hominids do; they run away. So the hindmost member of a puppeteer herd is actually the rear guard, the most exposed and combative of the bunch. It's unclear if the title of Hindmost is actually meant to be read this way, or is a Cultural Translation into human terms.
• Parasites Are Evil: The puppeteers are embarrassed that they're parasitoids, requiring a livestock animal they infest with their larvae to propagate (which they insist is actually the third sex of their species). However, their extreme cowardice leads them to do such things as socially engineering their rivals on the galactic stage into ineffectuality and release metal-eating bioweapons (a type of yeast that feeds on room-temperature superconductors) into precursor ruins so that they can't ever become a threat, never mind that they could study such Lost Technology.
• Proud Merchant Race: They prefer to exercise soft and anonymous power due to their intense cowardice making them extremely averse to direct confrontations. As such, their main political arm in the General Products corporation, which sells extremely advanced products to other spacefaring societies and serves as the setting's main provider of advanced spacecraft hulls.
• Starfish Language: The Puppeteer language can only be spoken using two throats at the same time, and sounds like very complex wind instrument music.
• Xenophobic Herbivore: Puppeteers are thought to have engaged in genocide a few times and they're scared enough of other sapient races to keep their homeworlds' location a secret. Being brave enough to dialogue with other species is considered a sign of insanity.

Minor Species of Known Space

Bandersnatchi

A curious Bandersnatch regards its observers.

Slug-like creatures the size of city busses, named for a line in "Jabberwocky". They were originally created by the Tnuctipun to be used as a food animal by the Thrintun. The Thrintun thought them to be unintelligent, but they are, in fact, just as intelligent as the average human being. The Tnuctipun had engineered them to be immune to the Thrintun telepathic control and used them as spies. Bandersnatchi have no manipulative organs and were engineered to be immune to mutation, so, after the Thrintun exterminated every other sapient species they spent a billion years with nothing to do but eat food yeast and philosophize until other sapient species evolved and came to sell them artificial hands. Nowadays they're found here and there on old worlds of the Thrintun empire, most notably Jinx; a few also exist on the Ringworld.

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• And I Must Scream: A variation. Bandersnatchi are intelligent beings, engineered by the Tnuctipun to be immune to the Thrint mind-control power. They were also engineered without hands and to be unaffected by random mutation. The reason they were so widely distributed throughout the galaxy by the Thrintun is that the Tnuctipun created them ostensibly as sources of meat that would remain reliably tasty due to their inability to mutate. They're actually at least as intelligent as humans, but had to hide that for generations while they were used as a food source. After the Slaver War destroyed all other sentients in the galaxy, they slouched around, eating food yeast — the only thing they can eat, and practically the only thing they can do without hands — and waited for someone other than Bandersnatchi to show up. For two billion years. At least one character is horrified to think about how lonely they must have been.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Their biology isn't built on a cellular structure — they're essentially giant masses of undifferentiated protoplasm containing some specialized structures serving as nerves and blood vessels, all of which are also made up of internally homogenous material.
• Fantastic Livestock: Gigantic slug-like beasts originally created to be perfect livestock for a long-gone alien empire.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: The Bandersnatchi sell hunting licenses for themselves to the Jinxians, which they use both as a source of money and as a form of population control. The hunters are given a very specific loadout of weapons, which gives them odds of about sixty-forty, and face harsh punishments if they try to give themselves an extra edge. The allowed equipment still amounts to what's essentially a tank, both because the lowlands of Jinx would kill an unprotected human and because bandersnachi take a lot of effort to kill.
• Immune to Mind Control: The Bandersnatchi were created as a food source for the mind-controlling Thrintun by one of their subject races. They were also created as spies immune to the Thrintun's powers. The result was that they were pretty much the only complex life to survive the Slavers' mass-suicide command and are therefore the oldest sapient race in the galaxy by at least a billion years.
• Lightning Bruiser: Bandersnatchi are twice the size of a brontosaur and look like something of a cross between a giant slug and huge bag of gelatin. They can also work up a surprising turn of speed and crush armored vehicles beneath their bulks.
  "You'd think they were the most helpless things in Known Space... until you saw one bearing down on you like a charging mountain. Once I saw an ancient armored-car crushed flat across a lowlands rock, straddled by the broken bones of the beast that ran it down."

Dolphins

A dolphin using prosthetic hands.

Earth's other native sapients, which humans did not recognize to be such until the 20th Century. Dolphins enjoy equal legal status to humanity, but mostly prefer to remain in the own communities in the seas.

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• Sapient Cetaceans: Dolphins are entirely sapient, have been engaged in a centuries-long legal battle over anthropogenic damage to the oceans, and helped colonize the planet Fafnir.
• Starfish Language: "Dolphinese" consists of complex screeches, whistles, clicks and creaks that humans cannot hope to reproduce.

Grogs

A female Grog telepathically instructs an illustrator.

Sessile, eyeless telepaths native to Down. Grogs begin life as small doglike animals; during puberty, females permanently attach themselves to rocks and became sessile predators who mind-control prey into walking into eating range, while males remain mobile and non-sapient. They're thought to be descendants of the Thrintun due to their powers, hunting strategy and extreme sexual dimorphism, although the wrong gender is sapient. They're generally friendly, but a human ship is kept stationed in orbit around the Grog homeworld's star ready to trigger an immense solar flare if they ever try anything. The more paranoid wonder if the Grogs can reach far enough to stop the ship if it ever tries to trigger a solar flare.

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• Bizarre Alien Sexes: Grog males are non-sapient. The females become sessile when they become adults and stay alive because they can telepathically command food to jump right into their mouths (or at least in range of their prehensile tongues). The males stay mobile their whole lifespan but never develop intelligence or any telepathic powers, and are kept as a combination of sperm banks and pets by their sapient mates.
• Living Lie Detector: As a result of their telepathy, Grogs are impossible to lie to. One of the primary services that they provide in interstellar society is as lie detectors in courtrooms, and they are taken along during summits between humans and Kzinti to ensure that everyone involved stays honest.
• Luring in Prey: Female Grogs hunt by using their powerful telepathy to compel animals into walking close enough to be eaten.
• Mind Control: Female Grogs are exceptionally powerful telepaths, and can insert irresistible commands into the minds of others — they hunt by mind-controlling other animals into walking into their mouths. The target perceives these orders with intense clarity and follows them with utmost conviction, marking them as extraneous influences in the normal churn of doubt and distractions of the human mind. Grogs are perfectly personable in most circumstances, but this doesn't stop paranoid theorizing that they're aiming to take over Known Space.
• Multipurpose Tongue: A female Grog's tongue is long and prehensile, in order to better grab prey and drag it into her mouth.
• Paranoia Fuel: In-universe. Grogs are perfectly reasonable beings and happy to coexist with other sapient societies. This doesn't prevent the phenomenon of "Grogophobia" among those who deeply fear their powerful telepathy and mind control and think that the furry cones either seek to rule all space or already do.
• Telepathy: Grogs communicate with each other and with aliens entirely mind-to-mind. As a result of mostly "speaking" with wordless ideas and sensory impressions, they have no real concept of personal or place-names. A common human prank, "Slug-a-Grog", works off of this ability. A small group sets up a tent near a sleeping Grog, gets blackout drunk, and goes to sleep. Next morning, the Grog wakes, establishes a telepathic link with the newcomers to check out who they are and say hello, and gets blitzed out of her mind by the secondhand drunkenness and/or hangovers.

Jotoki

Bizarre aliens resembling five-armed starfish formed from the fusion of five eel-like larvae. The ancient Jotoki uplifted the then-primitive Kzinti to serve as bodyguards and mercenaries; this worked out great until it didn't and the Kzinti revolted and enslaved their former masters.

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• Bizarre Alien Biology: They're five-limbed multi-jointed amphibious creature who are actually composite organisms consisting of five semi-sapient limbs fused together and neurologically linked at the center. Individual limbs may be different sexes, and one limb typically stays awake to watch out for predators while the others sleep. Jotoki can be very indecisive when their brains are in disagreement. They temporarily split to mate, and their young are non-sentient tadpoles that grow into "sea snakes" which eventually fuse in groups of five to make an adult Jotok.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Jotoki breed in a swamp and hatch as tadpoles before combining into a five-limbed, five-brained alien that has a habit of arguing with itself.

Kdatlyno

A Kdatlyno's looming form.^note Properly speaking, Kdatlyno should only have four digits.

A humanoid, vaguely-reptilian species that "see" by way of sonar. They're a race of warrior poets who place great value on art and on vengeance. They had established a small sphere of colonies around their homeworld, Kdat, when were enslaved by the Kzinti. They remained in the Empire's bondage until they were freed by humanity in the Second Man-Kzin War.

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• Best Served Cold: Kdatlyno have a profound sense of personal honor that demands repayment for personal slights, but doesn't demand immediate action. As such, Kdatlyno will wait for years or even decades for the chance to get payback on those who wronged them, waiting for just the right moment to strike and plotting and replotting their revenge. It's said in the interstellar grapevine that the species as a whole is planning the mother of all vengeances on the Kzinti Empire.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: Kdatlyno "see" via sonar using a vibrating tympanum on their faces. Their statues are meant to be viewed in this manner, and make use of complex ridges, textured surfaces and resonating chambers to evoke specific aesthetic impressions in the "viewer".
• Blade Below the Shoulder: Kdatlyno have natural blade-like growths on their knuckles, elbows and knees.
• Heavy Worlder: Kdat has higher gravity than most of the other inhabited worlds, leading the Kdatlyno to being very large and strong compared to other species.
• Lightning Bruiser: Kdatlyno can reach four meters in height and a ton in weight, but are much faster and more nimble than their looming frames suggest.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Kdatlyno have a reproductive strategy similar to that of Earth animals such as cats, where the female mates with a succession of males, usually between five and fifteen, over a period of a month or two. She eventually produces several children whose fathers are uncertain — her mates are not even entirely certain whether their particular individual contributions made it to fertilization.
• Named After Their Planet: Their homeworld is called Kdat.
• Slave Race: They were overrun and enslaved by the Kzinti shortly after achieving spaceflight and toiled as slave laborers for centuries afterwards, mining out their own homeworld and building Kzinti spaceships.
• Warrior Poet: The Kdatlyno are an entire species of these. They have a long tradition of sculptural art; a museum on Jinx has several of a famous Kdatlyno sculptor's, which are designed to be felt (well, sensed with sonar, but humans don't have that sense, so...). A Puppeteer suggests a human try licking them, as his tongue is probably more sensitive than his fingertips.

Trinocs

A Trinocs amidst its world's methane-and-ammonia winds.

Trilaterally symmetrical aliens (including three eyes) who breathe methane instead of oxygen. They are culturally paranoid by human standards (in return, they find humans to be far too trusting and naïve). They control a large sphere of influence beyond Kzin space; they had been mutually known to the Kzinti for some time and the Puppeteers claim to have traded with them, but only come into contact with humanity some time before Ringworld when Louis Wu and a Trinoc ship investigate the same Slaver ruin.

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• Bizarre Alien Biology: Trinocs are unusual in not being descended from Thrintun food yeasts like the Kzinti, Puppeteers and Pak species family are. Instead, their ecosystem occurred naturally on a world similar to Titan, rich in a wide variety of toxic low-temperature chemicals. They breathe methane, have a complex system of three-dimensional folded chemicals instead of double-helix DNA, and their biology is based on complexly structured "protoplasm" instead of cells. After all that, their trilaterally symmetric heads are downright pedestrian.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Trinocs do not have distinct sexes and do not typically reproduce purposefully. Instead, every so often, a group of two or more Trinocs will exchange quantities of the protoplasm that makes up their bodies. Usually, this only refreshes them. Occasionally, however, one, some or all Trinocs involved in this process will grow polyps on their bodies, which are then detached and nurtured in a nutrient-rich bath. Not all polyps survive, but those that do become infant Trinocs.
• Named After Their Planet: Their homeworld is simply called Trinoc.
• Xenonucleic Acid: In place of the double-helix DNA of other species, Trinocs store genetic information with a system of chemicals that fold themselves in complex three-dimensional shapes.

Species Beyond Known Space

Pak

A childless protector studies in the Great Pak Library.

"Suppose you could save the Ringworld by killing one and half trillion inhabitants out of thirty trillion. A Pak would do that, wouldn't she? Five percent to save 95 percent. It seems so... efficient."

A species from the distant galactic core, with a bizarre metamorphosis into "protectors" driven by a virus found in yams grown in soil rich in thallium. Breeder-stage Pak are known as Homo habilis to modern science. Multiple failed colonies were established through the galaxy by ancient Pak, and descendants of abandoned breeders are fairly common across Known Space and beyond, including humanity and the Ringworld hominids. Surviving Pak are usually extremely hostile to these offshoots, since we have mutated so much from baseline Pak breeders that we smell horribly wrong. Any breeder of the right age will transform into protectors when exposed to the virus. Yes, even humans. "Protectors" who started out as H. habilis or other more primitive primates become highly intelligent and physically superhuman. Humans exposed to the virus, as they started out already sapient, become superhumanly intelligent and effectively extremely alien, or at least non-human, in their mental processes and fanatically loyal to their gene line. When the last of a protector's descendants dies (or at least becomes incapable of breeding), the protector loses interest in eating and dies. Some protectors are able to transfer their loyalty to more distant relatives (descendants of siblings, parents, grandparents, etc.) and remain alive for their sake, and a few rare individuals have been able to transfer it to the species as a whole.

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• Aliens Are Bastards: The Pak are pathologically incapable of peace. A Protector will screw over any allies it has when it sees a benefit to its family to do so; they're genetically hardwired into doing it.
• Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: The Pak never invented perfume, in part because of their reliance on scent to identify their descendants.
• Always Someone Better: Pak protectors are evolved for warfare, literally. Millions of years of constant struggle between themselves has made them perfect fighting machines. Problem is, humanity evolved from the Pak. When a Pak breeder (which starts out about as smart as a chimpanzee) makes the change to the protector stage, the ensuing being's intelligence is increased by a certain ratio; human breeders are much smarter than chimpanzees, and, when they make the change to protector, their intelligence increases proportionately. It's simply impossible for a Pak protector to outthink a human protector, which is why the human protectors Brennan and Truesdale run roughshod over every protector they come up against.
• Ancient Astronauts: They colonized and terraformed Earth a million years in the past. Humanity descends from the remnants of the failed Pak colony.
• Artistic License – Biology: Their biology one of Niven's mental exercises — why don't our bodies just give out immediately once we are no longer capable of reproduction? The idea of a third stage of life and the build of the protectors is a "Just So" Story to explain menopause, heart failure, arthritis, baldness and other signs of aging very neatly, but Niven freely admits that a distant origin for humanity when we clearly developed from Earth life doesn't really fly. Protector hangs a lampshade on it by bringing up the question, and then just shrugging and moving on.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Protectors are hardwired to do everything they can in service to their bloodlines. A childless protector whose lineage has died out will fall into a state of listless apathy, cease eating, go dormant, and die. Protectors seeking to avoid this fate generalize the entire Pak species as their children, but then need to find some way to actually benefit it or fall back into the death trance.
• Fantastic Diet Requirement: The tree-of-life's microscopic symbiotes need soils rich in thallium oxide, a mineral common in the galactic core and rare everywhere else, to live. In turn, protectors need to consume tree-of-life root as their primary food source, and will starve without it.
• Forever War: Pak society is stuck in an eternal state of war. Protectors are pathologically unable to cooperate with, or even passively tolerate, anyone other than their descendants and immediate relatives; as such, Pak families and tribes war endlessly as their protectors seek to exterminate all other Pak and secure space and resources for their descendants. Even if one tribe were to succeed, peace would last only until enough breeders have been born, bred, eaten the tree-of-life and transformed for the new protectors to view each other as too distant to be kin, restarting the cycle all over again.
• Great Big Library of Everything: The Great Pak Library, an immense building of unknown origin that stands in the middle of a desert poisoned with cobalt to prevent other Pak tribes from trying to settle it. It is staffed by childless protectors seeking some purpose in life to prevent themselves from falling into death by apathy and contains the collected records of thousands upon thousands of years of Pak civilization, including every advance in the hard sciences that they ever made, records of notable historic events, and assorted other bits and commentary.
• Immune to Mind Control: Pak protectors are immune to Thrint control, due to their multilobed brain structure. A Thrint who thinks it's controlling one actually only gets one of the protector's five brain lobes, reducing its irresistible commands to optional suggestions.
• Lightning Bruiser: A protector is blindingly fast and agile, covered in skin tough enough to deflect knives, and strong enough to lift ten times their own body weight and kill a human with a hard blow of a hand.
• Long-Lived: Under ideal conditions, protectors can live for thousands of years. In practice, most die a long time before that due to their extremely violent lifestyles. The journey of their original colony ship to Earth was notable because it took so long that its crew began dying of old age, a process so intriguing that they made sure to beam back data to the homeworld for the Library's records.
• Named After Their Planet: Their homeworld is simply called Pak.
• Neglectful Precursors: Unintentionally. When the Pak protectors left breeder-stage Pak on prehistoric colony worlds such as Earth and the Ringworld, they didn't mean to abandon them. Its just that, by the time they realized the plant needed to produce and sustain Protector-stage Pak couldn't survive outside of their homeworld's very specific conditions, they didn't have enough fuel or resources to go find a place that could. This resulted in them dying, leaving their breeder-stage descendants unprotected and unguided, to mutate over generations into horrific abominations almost unrecognizable as Pak — us.
• Restraining Bolt: The protectors have been shaped by evolution to be the perfect warriors and have genetically hard-written imperatives about protecting their own descendants. In one case, a protector-stage Louis Wu comes across a former antagonist who has become pregnant with Louis' grandson. He tells her flat-out that because she's carrying his grandchild, Louis couldn't raise his hand against her no matter how she attacks him.
• Super-Strength: Mature Pak protectors can lift ten times their own body mass over their heads.
• Uncertain Doom: Since the stars of the galactic core finished their chain reaction of destruction long ago, the Pak homeworld and any nearby colonies it might have had are long gone — all Pak encountered in the stories set out on relativistic sleeper ships long before the disaster ever began. What happened to the Pak themselves is unknown, and nobody is in a hurry to find out since, depending on what happened, you'd end running into either the deadly shockwave of radiation or a whole lot of fleeing protectors, neither of which would be good for one's lifespan.

Outsiders

An Outsider bask-feeding.

Fragile aliens shaped like cats o' nine tails that don't need to breathe air and live on huge sub-light starships, making endless migrations through the Galaxy that periodically take them through Known Space. They trade information and technology with other species in return for refueling rights. The Outsiders are the most technologically advanced of all the species in Known Space (and considering the Puppeteers, that's saying something). It was the Outsiders that sold humans the secret to Faster-Than-Light Travel. For some reason they refuse to use the hyperdrive themselves. The Outsiders are consummate information brokers. They are willing to sell any information for a price, although information about the Outsiders themselves carries such a high premium that no one has yet been willing to pay.

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• Bizarre Alien Biology: They dwell in the vacuum of deep space and have biology based on liquid helium. They "eat" by placing their head in light and their whiplike tails in shadow, which sets up a temperature gradient that generates thermoelectricity. They move around in zero gravity by jetting tiny puffs of gas from their tails. They are very secretive about their reproduction, but it might have something to do with the Starseeds that they follow around the galaxy.
• Bizarre Alien Locomotion: As they live in zero gravity, they get around by expelling weak jets of gas from their tentacles.
• Eldritch Starship: Outsider ships typically consist of a cylindrical core housing the reactionless drive surrounded by a complex basketwork of thin ribbons winding in and around each other, creating a system of light and dark areas that Outsiders use when bask-feeding. Other species tend to find their ships disquieting.
• Fantastic Diet Requirement: Outsiders have an extremely unusual feeding system — they lie half in light and half in shadow, creating a thermal differential and "feeding" on the thermoelectric charges thereby created. It's not inaccurate to compare to biological batteries that need to recharge themselves every so often.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Outsiders have a peculiar relationship with FTL. They've got access to more advanced drives than anyone else, but only seem to use this information as something to sell to others. All their ships travel through at sublight speeds through regular Einsteinian space; they consider hyperspace travel to be "vulgar".
• Higher-Tech Species: The Outsiders are by a very wide margin the most highly-advanced of the know sapient civilizations. Even the Puppeteers come to them when they need to obtain extremely advanced tech in a hurry.
• Life in Zero G: The Outsiders appear to have evolved in some kind of asteroid or cometary environment. They are naturally suited for a life in either extremely light gravity at best — even Luna's forgiving pull would kill them, after a while — move by releasing light gas jets form their tentacles' tips, and do not require any kind of atmosphere around themselves. Their ships are elaborate affairs of twisting metal that are mostly exposed to the hard vacuum of interstellar space, and in planetary systems they prefer to lease small, airless moons as waystations.
• Proud Merchant Race: Outsider civilization revolves primarily around trading technology and information with other species. When they find a new group of potential costumers, they set up communications, rent out a suitable outer-system planetoid to use as a local base, and try to establish a long-term trading relationship. They offer technology millennia ahead of whatever potential costumers have, seemingly modulating their offers based by the their trading partners' tech level — they sold a simple hyperdrive to humanity, for instance, but offered one capable of moving entire planets to the Puppeteers — and information on science, galactography and history. In exchange, they accept information, resources, and credit. Unlike the Puppeteers, they deal fairly, if unyieldingly — they don't bargain or lower princes, but also don't resort to price hikes or blackmail.

Ringworld Hominids

In General

A tremendous variety of sapient and sub-sapient species descended from the ancient Pak colony of the Ringworld. After the death of the last protectors, the breeders began to mutate and evolve away from the ancient enforced Pak standard much like those that would become humanity. Unlike the Pak of Earth, the immense space of the Ringworld and its absence of native megafauna allowed these colonists to radiate into a wide spectrum of forms, from ones largely similar to modern humans to megafaunal grazers, arboreal dwarfs, nocturnal carrion-eaters, aquatic fish-hunters and many more.

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• Human Subspecies: A variant. They're not subspecies or offshoots of Earth humanity, but rather sister species descended from a common hominid ancestor.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: As they're all hominids in the cladistics sense, they all ultimately resemble variants on the human model but larger, smaller, hairy, aquatic, arboreal or whatever else.
• Transplanted Humans: A variant, in that they're descended from transplanted Homo habilis rather than transplanted Homo sapiens, but they're otherwise a fairly direct example of highly humanoid aliens who are so due to being a direct offshoot of the human family tree.

City Builders

A City Builder's austere face.

The rulers of an ancient Ringworld empire named after their propensity for creating flying buildings. At their height, they were the masters of the Ring and ruled an extensive interstellar empire, but their civilization was destroyed long before the books' time in an event called the Fall of the Cities.

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• Explosive Breeder: City Builders are extremely fertile, such that every act of mating within their species automatically results in offspring. Females also go into heat periodically, making abstinence all but impossible for them. They consciously subvert this trope by mating with other sorts of hominids with whom they're mutually sterile.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: The City Builders never developed FTL, and relied instead on slower-than-light ships to connect their interstellar empire. The relativistic speeds at which these ships traveled meant that, while each journey lasted for centuries, the ships' crews would only experience years. Many ships — the precise number is lost — were out on their routes when the cities fell, and still trickle back from time to time. Their crews have no knowledge of what happened to their old home and, at least those that manage to get past the now-inactive spaceports, find themselves as scattered relics of a bygone golden age in the wilderness that replaced their home.
• Floating Continent: Their most famous achievement, from which they got their name, is their ancient tradition of creating floating buildings in size from single houses to cities, which filled the Ringworld's skies before the Fall of the Cities. It's mentioned most advanced species could build these just as easily as the City Builders could, but choose not to for a number of reasons (the humans and Puppeteers find them too unsafe, and the Kzinti dislike heights).
• God Guise: The bygone glory of their empire looms large in the minds of surviving Ringworld cultures, who often remember the City Builders as having been gods. Surviving City Builders often make use of this, exploiting the tendency of less developed tribes to worship them as incarnate gods or holy symbols of the ancient golden age to secure comfort and safety for themselves.
• Hegemonic Empire: The City Builder empire ruled the Ring undisputed, despite being very widely spread out, through judicious use of soft power. Lacking the numbers for ruling through force, they instead controlled the Ringworld's other species through economic influence, access to material goods and comforts, a cultivated image of godlike awe, and careful manipulation of information and religions.
• Overly Long Name: City Builders, and races influenced by their culture like the Machine People, have names five to six syllables long.
• Precursors: They were the first people in the Ringworld to develop civilization after the Pak, and the only ones to ever relearn how to operate the Ring's technology and reach space. At their height, they controlled an interstellar empire larger than modern Known Space and ruled the Ring itself as untouchable masters in their flying cities. Many modern cultures, some wholly or partly descended from them, still worship them as gods.

Grass Giants

A Grass Giant tends to a field of Slaver sunflowers.

Towering and strong, the Grass Giants' ancestors evolved to fill the niche of herbivorous megafauna. They lead nomadic lives, as their tremendous food requirements would exhaust a permanent range, and their war parties are in endless conflict against herbivorous animals, hominid species who raise herds of livestock, and anyone else who threatens their ranges. They live in a clannish society led by kings.

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• Klingon Promotion: To become king of the tribe, a Grass Giant must challenge the old king in combat and defeat him. Any king who wishes to remain in power must thus defeat a constant stream of challengers, and is by necessity the toughest and strongest warrior in the tribe.
• No Nudity Taboo: Unlike humans or the Ringworld's other people, the Grass Giants have no cultural sense of body shame and wear no clothing or adornments.
• Our Giants Are Different: The Grass Giants are a very large, herbivorous race of Ringworld hominids evolved to fill the ecological role large grazers normally hold. Although large, they're large in a humanoid scale — typically they're around two to three meters tall, with larger males reaching the full three, and can engage in rishathra (sex with other hominids outside their species) without much trouble.

Night People

A Ghoul inspect the night's harvest.

Also known as Ghouls, the Night People are a nocturnal species of carrion-eaters and one of the most visually unusual of the Ringworld's people — their purple-black skin is covered in black fur, their ears are long and pointed, their teeth deadly sharp, and their hands tipped in wicked claws, and they're as comfortable on all fours as upright. They're the Ring's knowledge brokers and undertakers, selling information and claiming the corpses of the dead.

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• Knowledge Broker: The Night People range widely, enter all other species' settlements as they please, and pick over all corpses of the dead. As a result, they hear and see a very great deal, and derive most of their influence from buying and selling information, news, myths and hearsay across the Ring.
• Our Ghouls Are Different: They are a carrion-eating species of Ringworld hominid who are the Ring's garbage collectors, long-range communicators, information brokers and undertakers. Yes, they eat the dead. The other races usually don't object — that's their job — but when they do this has always resulted in aggressive negotiations by the ghouls, followed by extermination by the ghouls if said race doesn't get the point. No one knows how advanced the ghouls are and no one wants to find out.

Vampires

A vampire regards her prey.

A carnivorous species capable of secreting entrancing pheromones, and the only known Ringworld species not to be sapient. Other Ringworld species despise them, and kill them whenever they can.

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• Feral Vampires: Unlike all other Ringworld hominid species, vampires are not sapient — they're simply cunning animals motivated by a desire for food and shelter. They're a bit of an ecological oddity, being animals adapted for hunting sapient beings, but their mind-clouding scent handily lets them neutralize their prey's primary advantage.
• Kiss of the Vampire: They use pheromones to seduce victims into a crazed sex mood. They then take advantage of the fact that the victims are either having sex with the vampires or each other to eat to their heart's content.
• Living Aphrodisiac: "Vampires" are a nearly mindless branch of the Pak (ancestors of humans, and also of every humanoid species on the Ringworld) that secrete pheromones which are "close enough" to affect all other Pak descendants (it's implied there are some hallucinogenic properties as well). The pheromone-fueled orgy that follows serves as a distraction to allow the vampires to feed.
• Love Is in the Air: Vampires have super-pheromones that induce a very distracting mating frenzy in their victims. "Essence of Vamp" is a popular perfume among City Builders.
• Our Vampires Are Different: They are non-sapient, at least until transformation into a protector. They also attract their prey with pheromones and are technically a number of different hominid species that evolved convergently into the same niche.
• Pheromones: They are distinguished by their ability to secrete pheromones with which to lure and distract other hominid species in order to prey on them.
• Vampires Are Sex Gods: They emit a pheromone capable of seducing any humans or other Human Aliens that they encounter and then drink them dry during sex (true aliens, such as Kzinti, are not affected). However, they are also non-sapient, possessing about the same intelligence level as a chimp. Some perverted Human Aliens use defanged vampires for sex.

Historic Species

Thrintun

A Slaver commands its thralls to die.

Singular "Thrint". Green-skinned, vaguely reptilian, intelligent (although not very) carnivores with a single eye. Also known as the Slavers, because they could telepathically control any lifeforms with a nervous system. The Thrintun all went extinct long before humans evolved sentience, but their handiwork is still found throughout Known Space. Or, more accurately, the handiwork of their slaves the Tnuctipun. They are extinct because their slaves revolted and in retaliation they killed every sapient species their amplified telepathic abilities could reach. Without any slaves to command, the Thrintun then died out themselves.

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• Abusive Precursors: When their empire fell to a successful slave revolt, they went out in a blaze of spite, using a psionic amplifier to send one last command to every chordate in the galaxy: DIE. Given that the average IQ of a Thrint is roughly 80, they committed suicide at the same time as their slaves without realizing they'd ordered it. It took a billion years for sentient life to evolve from their food yeast — the source of panspermia in Known Space — with the only survivors being the telepathically blind bandersnatchii, which were engineered with mutation-proof genetics and thus remained the same for all that time. They also set up a mechanism to repeat this every so often in case they missed anyone. Over time it no longer killed everything with a spine, but only sapients...
• Aliens Are Bastards: Thrintun enslaved and dominated every species that they came across, and wiped out nearly all intelligent life in the galaxy rather than lose a war with their slaves. Of course, this is not just bastardry — apparently, the Thrintun were also so stupid and unimaginative that wiping out all sentient life in the galaxy seemed like a good idea to them at the time.
• Bizarre Alien Sexes: Thrint females are non-sapient. Or at least, the Thrintun believe that they are not sapient. They do not have the telepathic abilities the males do, which may color how the males regard them, since they consider anyone without the Power to be a slave.
• Cyclops: Thrintun had a single giant eye, with a complex system of internal faceting that allowed them to still have depth perception.
• Mind Control: Their most famous characteristic is the Power, their ability to dominate the wills of other creatures. This control is utter and absolute; if a Thrint commands a creature to die, the unfortunate will drop dead then and there. A side effect of this is that they never had any significant pressure to become intelligent — the Power allowed them to compel all other animals into doing what they want, bypassing the need for clever hunting strategies, and once they came into contact with aliens they were able to simply force them to do their thinking for them.
• Too Dumb to Live: The Thrintun can be charitably described as being dumber than so many bags of hammers. Once they developed their psychic mind-control powers, they lost most of the selection pressure to evolve intelligence any further. When other intelligent life discovered their world they lost the rest of that pressure, as they could get smarter slaves to think for them. When their slaves revolted they exterminated all non-Thrint sapient life in the galaxy in retaliation, not realizing before hand that they wouldn't be able to survive without their slaves.

Tnuctipun

A Tnuctip prepares for a journey in stasis.

Small pack predators. The most intelligent, most technologically advanced, and "most trusted" slaves of the Thrintun. Two billion years ago the Tnuctipun developed the Bandersnatchi, slaver sunflowers, stage trees, disintegrators, stasis fields, total energy conversion, and any number of other technological marvels beyond even current Puppeteer abilities. They eventually revolted against their masters and were exterminated.

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• Absolute Xenophobe: As a result of spending thousands of years as the telepathically-controlled slaves of the Thrintun, the Tnuctipun became intensely paranoid and xenophobic and came to view all other sapient species as threats.
• Abusive Precursors: They come off as sympathetic mainly because their enemies, the Thrintun, were even worse. They were themselves utter bastards, a race of pack carnivores whose surviving relics often have booby traps designed to kill Thrintun who use the technology in a stupid way. One of these inventions was the Bandersnatchi, who the Tnuctipun created to spy on the Thrintun, as well as be sentient food.
• Aliens Are Bastards: The Tnuctipun were superintelligent pack carnivores that considered other intelligent lifeforms to be talking food. Lucky for them, they were fighting the Thrintun and got to look like good guys. Unlucky for them, the Thrintun were sore losers. One particularly Bastardly example of Tnuctipun thinking was the Bandersnatchi; an engineered life form that turned yeast into an irresistible food source for Thrintun. Specifically, the part of "whitefoods" that Thrintun found irresistible were their brains, which meant they let the Tnuctipun engineer that organ to be as large as possible — thereby making them sapient, enabling them to act as spies.
• Slave Race: They were enslaved by the Thrintun's psychic powers and spent millennia as mind-controlled thralls, laboring to create and maintain the technological base of their indolent masters.

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