With one, small, off-the-cuff Easter egg, Picard has connected the Star Trek universe to the literary canon of Larry Niven.
With a single word from Riker in episode 7, “Nepenthe,” Picard referenced a 1973 episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series. And, in doing so, brought Larry Niven back into Trek canon, too. This may have slightly bigger implications than a deep-cut reference; in fact, the entire backstory of the Star Trek canon might have just been given a new spin, that is actually, very old.
Spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Picard episodes 1-8.
Historically, Star Trek films and TV series are replete with writers of prose, translating their talents to the final frontier. Currently, novelist Kirsten Beyer writes for Star Trek: Discovery, and Pulitzer Prize and Hugo Winning novelist Michael Chabon is the showrunner and primary writer of Star Trek: Picard. And while this was less common in the ’90s heyday of Trek, several original series episodes were written by SFF legends like Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, and George Clayton Johnson. And, of course, Nicholas Meyer was also a best-selling novelist before he directed (and re-wrote) The Wrath of Khan.
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But did you know that Larry Niven—the author famous for Ringworld and The Magic Goes Away — also wrote for Star Trek? One episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, “The Slaver Weapon,” was written by Niven and adapted from his short story, “The Soft Weapon.” And it’s here where the literary worlds of Niven first crossed over into Trek. Though the title of the episode refers to an ancient alien race called the “Slavers” (we’ll get to them in a second) its the cat-like aliens called the Kzinti that actually represent the only alien species entirely conceived of for an unrelated SFF universe, who subsequently joined the Star Trek canon. (For comparison, this would be a little like when Neil Gaiman wrote for Doctor Who, but in this scenario, he actually made Sandman part of Who canon or something. And also, pretend it was the ’70s.)
The Kzinti, a carnivorous, vicious, and furry group of aliens exists in a variety of Niven’s writing outside of just the short story “The Soft Weapon.” They belong to Niven’s larger “Known Space” shared universe of interconnected short stories and novels, of which, Ringworld was, eventually, reconciled with. The Star Trek canon didn’t get all of Niven’s Known Space canon with “The Slaver Weapon,” but it did get the Kzinti, and it seems, possibly one other concept Trekkies have forgotten about.
This brings us to Picard. In the episode “Nepenthe,” when Picard first meets with Riker, our beloved bearded Number One tells his former captain that they’ve been “having some trouble with the Kzinti.” Yep. This sounded a little like “Xindi”, those crazy multispecies aliens from Enterprise, but as confirmed by Michael Chabon in one of his Instagram talkbacks, the line was “Kzinti,” and yes, he specifically reached out to Larry Niven to make sure it was cool to make the reference.
Okay, just a random Easter egg, then, right? The Animated Series was considered apocryphal for a while, but these days it is pretty much straight-up canon. This means we have to turn around and look back at “The Slaver Weapon” again and how it might connect to Picard, beyond whatever Riker is dealing with in his neighborhood. Because if “Nepenthe” is name-checking the Kzinti for the first time since The Animated Series, then that means Star Trek is bringing back the rest of that episode, too. Don’t remember what it’s about? Here’s a one-line summary:
Spock, Sulu, and Uhura are transporting a stasis box—mysterious tech left behind by an extinct species called “the Slavers”—and, in trying to find a second stasis box, they are nearly ripped-off by a group of marauding Kzinti.
Here’s the most interesting part. At the top of the episode, Spock straight-up establishes that a mysterious alien race (the Slavers) ruled the entire galaxy about a billion years prior. In Niven’s Known Space stories and novels, its later revealed that the Slavers pulled this off mostly through long-distance telepathy. So, if we agree that the Kzinti are definitely part of Trek canon (thanks to Riker’s offhand remark) then we also agree that Spock’s knowledge of the Slavers is legit, too, and that at some point in the distant past of the Star Trek galaxy, a mysterious alien race—with an unknown name—ruled most of the galaxy.
Guess what? Picard just established that exact thing. In episode 8, “Broken Pieces,” we learn that the Romulans discovered a warning left-behind by a mysterious alien race, tens of thousands of years prior. Commodore Oh tells her Zhat Vash recruits that “we don’t know the name of the race who left this warning.” This checks out with Niven’s canon about the Slavers. They weren’t really called that, it’s just what people called them way later when the culture had vanished into antiquity. In Niven’s work, these aliens were known as “Thrintun.” And although Niven details their mind-control powers throughout his writing, it’s not crazy to think that a Trek version of the Thrintun, could have ruled the galaxy through some kind of A.I.-amplified mind control.
Star Trek: Picard has firmly established that the distant past of the galaxy was populated by alien species with power that is much bigger than anything that has happened during the various centuries we’ve seen in Trek canon. In “The Slaver Weapon,” Spock, Sulu, and Uhura, barley dodged a matter-energy weapon that had the ability to blow up planets with the touch of a button. If we take the small Kzinti reference seriously then it seems like the all-powerful aliens who made “The Slaver Weapon,” might be out there, too. And if they are, their backstory may already have been written.
* * *
Note: If you want to get into the Niven version of the backstory of the Slavers/Thrintun, check out the novel The World of Ptavvs. It all starts there.
Ryan Britt is a longtime contributor to Tor.com and the author of the book Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths (Plume 2015.) His other writing and criticism have been published in Inverse, SyFy Wire, Vulture, Den of Geek!, the New York Times, and StarTrek.com. He is an editor at Fatherly. Ryan lives with his wife and daughter in Portland, Maine.
The creators of the Admonition can’t really be the Slavers/Thrintun of Niven’s Known Space prehistory, though, because a billion years is a lot longer than a couple of hundred thousand years. Long enough, in fact, for multicellular life on Earth to have evolved from food yeast created and seeded by the Tnuctipun slave race. If you move the Thrintun up to the more recent past, you lose that entire aspect.
In Picard, they say this ancient race set up the 8 star system 200,000 yrs or so ago. The Slavers died 1 Billion yrs ago, off by a factor of 10,000 or so. So they would have to change that timeline a bit to make it work.
@2: but that would directly contradict a very popular episode of TNG, and the canonistas would howl.
There’s no way the timeline established in “The Slaver Weapon” could fit modern Trek continuity. Sulu says the Kzinti fought four wars with Earth over 200 years before, but we now know that humanity’s first contact with aliens was only about 207 years before, and that humans only gradually expanded into space over the next century, being held back by the Vulcans for most of that time. There’s no room for four interstellar wars in that timeline. If the Kzinti do exist in the Trek universe, then the history of their interaction with humans would have to be massively different from what “Slaver” described. And that means we can’t assume the other aspects of the episode count either. (Yes, TAS as a whole is just as canonical as any other show, but other shows have individual episodes that have been ignored, like TOS: “The Alternative Factor” with its bizarre universe-destroying version of antimatter, ST V: The Final Frontier with its 20-minute jaunt to the center of the galaxy, or VGR: “Threshold” with its iguanafying version of transwarp drive.)
The weird thing about “The Slaver Weapon” is that it does the opposite of a usual adaptation. Generally when you adapt an existing story into a different fictional universe, you rewrite it to fit that universe, like Dennis Bailey & David Bischoff did when they turned their original novel Tin Woodman into the Next Generation episode “Tin Man.” But “The Slaver Weapon” does the opposite, keeping nearly all of “The Soft Weapon”‘s Known Space worldbuilding intact (aside from dropping the Tnuctipun) and retelling the novella almost verbatim (even keeping the violent ending that’s wholly uncharacteristic of Filmation’s usual work). And it changes the Trek cast to fit the story, leaving out most of the leads and plugging just one lead and two supporting characters into the roles of Nessus and the Papandreous from the original story. It tries to graft Spock into the role of a Pierson’s puppeteer by describing him as an herbivore and a pacifist, but that’s an awkward fit. Vulcans aren’t herbivores, they’re omnivores that choose a vegetarian lifestyle. And Spock is not a stranger to using deadly force when necessary.
So I don’t even think of “The Slaver Weapon” as a Trek episode anymore. It’s more like a Known Space pilot episode with three Trek characters acting out the roles of “The Soft Weapon”‘s leads. Or maybe Sulu and Uhura somehow convinced Spock to join them in a “Soft Weapon” holonovel on the rec deck from “The Practical Joker.”
Another Star Trek/Kzinti connection is the board game ‘Star Fleet Battles’. The playable aliens in the original version of the game were Gorn, Romulans, Federation, Klingons, Orions, and Kzinti. The Kzinti were the cat-like Niven aliens, and liked to use drones.
Quoth Ryan: “Currently, novelist Kirsten Beyer writes for Star Trek: Discovery, and Pulitzer Prize and Hugo Winning novelist Michael Chabon is the showrunner and primary writer of Star Trek: Picard.:”
Beyer doesn’t just write for Discovery, she’s the co-creator and supervising producer for Picard. So the newest show has two novelists in the writers room.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@5/moonglum: Larry Niven also used the Kzinti in “The Wristwatch Plantation,” a storyline he and Sharman DiVono wrote for the short-lived L.A. Times Syndicate Star Trek newspaper comic strip in 1982. Not only that, he also incorporated aliens from a different Niven universe, the Bebebebeque from his Draco’s Tavern series.
@6/krad: “So the newest show has two novelists in the writers room.”
I think the last time that happened was the final season of Enterprise, when novelists Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens were on the writing staff.
There are already Kzinti in Starfleet, they’re just called Caitians (maybe to avoid paying royalties/residuals to Niven).
species-spotlight-caitians
Think that was a background character from ST IV: Voyage Home.
Was in a battle near DS9 in STO last night with my new Jem’Hadar character. My mission was to capture the alien general on the attacking ship. Ran into Alliance crews on the ship which included Klingons and then Starfleet officers. Among the SF crew were a couple Caitians.
During an earlier mission on my SF character had to help cadets at Starfleet Academy during an Iconian attack on Earth and Spacedock. One of the cadets was a pretty freaked out Caitian. There’s also a couple badass looking ones hanging out in the First City’s Council Hall on Qo’nos in a couple scenes. They’re more armored and carry wicked looking backpacks.
Think they are a playable race, too, but require buying them to unlock.
@8/Sunspear: “There are already Kzinti in Starfleet, they’re just called Caitians (maybe to avoid paying royalties/residuals to Niven).”
That’s totally wrong. The Caitian character of Lt. M’Ress was introduced in TAS episode 6, well before “The Slaver Weapon.” She was obviously not meant to be Kzinti, because Kzinti females are nonsapient; also, she had a leonine appearance including a mane and a tufted tail, while Niven always described Kzinti as more tigerlike in appearance; and her ears are nothing like the Kzinti’s characteristic batwing ears.
Lincoln Enterprises (Roddenberry’s memorabilia company) did publish a “biography” of M’Ress in 1974 that claimed the Caitians were distantly related to the Kzinti, but given the timing, that was clearly retroactive continuity to link the two separately created felinoid species. It’s actually a pretty implausible retcon given the substantial anatomical and cognitive differences between the two.
Also, the name “Caitian” has never actually been spoken onscreen; it comes entirely from behind-the-scenes materials. So avoiding royalties was never an issue.
Bottom line, felinoid aliens are a stock trope in science fiction; there are dozens of them in various prose, screen, and comics SF universes, and Niven was far from the first to use them. So there’s no sense in assuming that any given felinoid alien is a direct homage to a specific other one. People just like basing aliens on cats, that’s all.
@CLB: tomayto, tomahto.
There’s nothing tigerlike in the header image. A cat is a cat, especially a cartoon cat it seems (except for Thundercats; those are differentiated). I don’t care about splitting cat hairs, but in context it doesn’t sound like the Kzinti were even necessary if Caitians already existed in Trek. Kzinti being mentioned seems like no big deal at all.
@10/Sunspear: “There’s nothing tigerlike in the header image.”
I’m talking about the originals from Niven’s prose fiction. Since M’Ress debuted well before “The Slaver Weapon,” presumably she was designed first, so if your belief about Caitians being based on Kzinti were true, her design would have to have been based on the Kzinti as described in Niven’s Known Space tales — barrel-chested 8-foot giants with long orange and black fur, membranous pink ears with a batwing appearance, and naked ratlike tails, in which only the males were sapient. Obviously M’Ress is nothing like that; she’s just a cartoon catgirl based on a lion (though with a masculine mane, oddly). Whereas the “Slaver Weapon” design fits the prose descriptions pretty closely aside from going for orange and brown coloring rather than orange and black. In this screencap you can see their giant size compared to humans.
“in context it doesn’t sound like the Kzinti were even necessary if Caitians already existed in Trek.”
Huh? Stories aren’t purchased based on quotas of alien types. There are several insectoid races (e.g. Em-3-Green from “The Jihad,” the antlike Elysian councillor in “The Time Trap,” and the Xindi insectoids), several reptilian races (Gorn, Sord from “The Jihad,” Saurians from TMP/DSC, Selay from TNG), etc. There’s no reason to think there’d be a rule limiting felinoids to only one kind, especially when felinoid aliens are such a commonplace sci-fi trope.
Anyway, TAS didn’t buy the Kzinti from Niven, they bought an adaptation of “The Soft Weapon.” It was the story they wanted; what mattered about the Kzinti was the threat they posed within the story, not the fact that they were felinoid.
I’ll never forget the mental whiplash I felt the day I watched that Star Trek cartoon, and had it transform into a Larry Niven story right before my eyes.
I don’t think this was an Easter egg for Picard but for the new Section 31 show. I have heard that will heavily feature the Kzinti. I am not sure why we are worried about merging cannons, both because TAS was written without a mind for anything apart from one off episodes, despite giving us so much cannon. Also because Trek (especially new Trek) doesn’t feel bound by cannon unless it is convenient.
I don´t know where the reference:
“Thrintun, could have ruled the galaxy through some kind of A.I.-amplified mind control” in the second to last paragraph comes from, but that could actually turn around the Idea of the Thrintun warning against A.I., except if they wanted to prevent other species from using it by misinformation. The last seems unlikely regarding the aforementioned time differences.
To me it appears more believable that a later species become aware of the danger of an “A.I.-amplified mind control” and used archived material to warn against the use of A.I. Maybe they are a species that was in some way connected/faction of the slavers and therefore made use of the tool of telepathy to transmit their warning. Or the data was only available as a “xyz.thought” file…
The octa-star system could have been build by the Thrintun for some purpose and later re-used by such a kind of Thrintun splinter faction descendants.
There’s a very big difference between “I called up Larry Niven and asked if I could use the word ‘Kzinti’ as an Easter egg and he said it was okay” and “We have built this entire story arc around Known Space concepts from the beginning.” It would’ve taken a lot more than a phone call to arrange that, and it would probably have required giving Niven an executive producer credit (or at least executive consultant) if the whole dang story arc were based on his work.
@11: I am still bummed out that Em-3-Green and Sord never got their own spinoff.
@CLB: “so if your belief about Caitians being based on Kzinti were true”
I didn’t say or imply that at all. I said Caitians already existed in Trek, including filmed content. Don’t care about getting into the weeds about obscure animation history. Would’ve been cooler to me if Riker had said Caitians. Mr. Niven is a cranky old libertarian (supporter of the current pres’ immigration policies) who’s said some idiotic cruel things about refugees recently. We should stop waxing nostalgic about his stupid cats. And Chabon should’ve known better.
Then again, waxing rhapsodic about libertarian utopias and how to handle refugees may fit right in with the current Federation.
@17/Sunspear: “I didn’t say or imply that at all.”
Yes, you unambiguously did. It’s right up there for everyone to read. “There are already Kzinti in Starfleet, they’re just called Caitians (maybe to avoid paying royalties/residuals to Niven).” In other words, you alleged that Caitians were meant to be Kzinti with their name changed. And that is simply not the case.
I don’t even know why you thought criticisms of Niven were relevant, since I wasn’t defending Niven. I was merely pointing out that the creation of Lieutenant M’Ress, and thus the Caitians, had nothing to do with Niven in the first place.
Also — “obscure animation history?” You do understand that Known Space is a prose series, right? The only thing I said that’s relevant to animation is that M’Ress was introduced half a season before the Kzinti. That single fact is all you need to know. No “weeds” here.
@CLB: you may not be defending him, may not be aware of his ideology, but you’ve brought up his story several times even before this article, hence the “waxing nostalgic.” Main point: Chabon shouldn’t involve him in Trek. Just an easter egg I can live with, but it would be a mistake include elements from a far-right writer in any future Trek projects.
I know what my intent was and it’s not your takeaway. The pic I posted looks much like the cartoon portrayal up top.
@19/Sunspear: Nostalgia has nothing to do with it. It’s simply describing the objective factual differences between Caitians and Kzinti, to explain why the former were not meant to be a version of the latter. This is a very simple point. I don’t know why you’re complicating it so much.
“it would be a mistake include elements from a far-right writer in any future Trek projects.”
You can’t boycott every creative work from someone who has unfortunate attitudes. William Shatner has said some pretty reactionary things over the past couple of years, insulting the #MeToo movement and “SJWs”; do we reject the entirety of TOS and TAS because of it? For that matter, Roddenberry was probably a sexual predator. So was Julius Schwartz, without whom the entire Silver and Bronze Ages of DC Comics wouldn’t have existed. John W. Campbell, who was the most influential editor of the Golden Age of science fiction and who made the careers of SF greats like Asimov and Heinlein, had right-wing and white supremacist beliefs. Throw out everything with creative input from anybody whose beliefs you don’t like and you’ll end up with very little left. It’s important to recognize that the art is not the artist, that it can have a life and value of its own independent of its creator. Even a person with bad qualities can create something good, something that is untainted by that darker side, or at least mostly so.
Besides, a lot of people become more conservative in their old age than they were in their youth. I wouldn’t have considered Niven in his prime to be far-right or libertarian; if anything, his 1972 story “Cloak of Anarchy” is one of the best deconstructions of libertarian ideas I’ve ever read, showing in microcosm how any system with “total individual freedom” inevitably decays into brute-force strongman rule by the few unless there’s a higher authority protecting everyone by force of law.
Neither Catians nor Kzinti are the first deli e species in sci-fi and they need not be mutually exclusive. M’Ress didn’t behave anything like the Kzinti in the books or TAS, so I doubt that she was meant to be one.
As for including Niven, well tht choice was made years ago when the TAS episode was made. The idea that he should be excluded because he is far right (if indeed he even is) goes against the very concept of IDIC, but I realize that doesn’t matter much to the FAR LEFT in New Trek / New Fandom.
@21/AFS1970: Please don’t generalize. I’m about as lefty as they get, and I think that censoring or suppressing fiction whose authors you don’t find ideologically agreeable is anthema to everything liberalism is supposed to be about.
@CLB: wasn’t trying to complicate it. Cats are cats.
You make some good points about boycotting. You’re right that you can’t boycott everyone who espouses odious ideologies, but I can try. It’s a sieve. There’s so much material being written by scribblers out there that it’s impossible to find the time to read even what I want to. Niven easily gets sorted out of the To Read pile. I read some of his early stuff, including Ringworld, but my political senses were not likely developed enough at the time to recognize the problematic aspects. Your detail about ” because Kzinti females are nonsapient” is about as anti-feminist as it gets. I have no problem filtering him out.
So yeah, there is a Sorting Hat for which authors I choose to read or pay attention to. It’s not just about ideology either. You may find a particular author annoying, or don’t like his/her online persona, so decide not to buy any of their books. That may sound unfair, but it’s still a creative enterprise under a capitalist system and people vote with their wallets, sometimes for a good reason, sometimes arbitrarily.
If you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening with certain awards, the consensus seems to be moving toward removing the types of objectionable people you mention away from the spotlight. Lovecraft’s bust was abandoned as the award given out for World Fantasy awards. Campbell’s name is being removed from the award formerly known after him. It’s okay to recognize that these people were benighted and that some are still among us.
Campbell award renamed
@23/Sunspear: “wasn’t trying to complicate it. Cats are cats.”
And as I’ve pointed out, there are hundreds of catlike aliens in SF, so it’s unreasonable to assume that any given one had to be based on another, especially when there are profound differences in the specifics.
“Your detail about ” because Kzinti females are nonsapient” is about as anti-feminist as it gets.”
Oh, come on. The Kzinti were villains. Depicting something doesn’t equal endorsing it, for Pete’s sake. I mean, good grief, just look at “The Soft Weapon” — or “The Slaver Weapon,” which retells its plot almost verbatim. The good guys are able to trick the Kzinti because the Kzinti underestimate the intelligence of the female lead. Their contempt for females is a blind spot, a disadvantage. That’s pretty clearly a pro-feminist allegory.
Granted, a lot of Niven’s portrayals of women haven’t aged well, but by the standards of a male SF writer in the ’60s and ’70s, it was no worse than average.
And yes, I’m all in favor of taking Lovecraft’s and Campbell’s names off of awards that exist to honor people that they would have preferred to exclude. But that’s not the same thing as refusing to ever read their work again, to try to erase everything they ever created from history. We can’t get better by ignoring the mistakes of the past. We need to be aware of our history, the good and bad alike, so we can see the mistakes that were made, learn from them, and strive to do better. And we can benefit from the good ideas that coexisted with the bad ones, like how TOS had valuable messages of openness and inclusion despite its frequent sexism. If we just hide ourselves completely from past creations, then we deprive ourselves of their positives as well as their negatives. We should trust our own judgment and ability to filter out the bad while learning from the good.
Riker: “We’re having some trouble with eight-foot tall sentient tigers, who are known for eating humans, but we let our surviving child roam the woods alone, armed only with a toy bow, because hmm.” I am not impressed by the amount of thought going into the writing.
I’m a Known Space fan, but I didn’t know the Kzinti had been written into TAS, and that throw-away line threw me right out of the episode — “wait, WHAT? WHO? HOW?” I wonder how many other people were in my part of the Niven/Trek Venn diagram.
@CLB: i don’t exclude awareness of the past work. It’s exactly that which allows for recontextualizing objectionable material. Consider the running column about “getting girl cooties on Lovecraft” on this very site. One Lovecraft story was made into a half-good Nicolas cage film recently. And Trek is different today than it was then, for better or worse.
I made a specific distinction, though. It’s not just the marketplace of ideas, it’s a marketplace. So while Niven books, any other past author/editor with racist, sexist, supremacist tendencies, may be in circulation, available at libraries, I will never buy a copy with their name on it.
I get that the Kzinti were villains in the cartoon. But do you really want to reintroduce a race into Trek that is ruled by the Patriarchy and considers its females “dumb animals”? That would be massively tone deaf. Saying anything connected to Niven is “pretty clearly a pro-feminist allegory” misses the mark (and pretty hilarious to boot). If anything, his creation is a parody of a feminist outlook. I haven’t seen the particular episode, but interpreting it as a feminist allegory would mean it’s writers pulled off something massively subversive.
Btw, you may or may not be aware of Chabon’s full comment:
I sent a fan email to Larry Niven – one of the writers whose work inspired me to want to become a writer, as a kid – and asked his permission to include a reference to his battle-and-honor obsessed Kzinti, who as you know crossed over in one episode of TAS – blowing my ten-year-old, Niven-and-Trek obsessed mind – and also, I’ve always suspected, helped inspire TNG’s reinvention of the Klingons. Mr. Niven very graciously said that would be okay.
That is nostalgia in a nutshell. Best to let go of it. If Trek needs cat villains, maybe use Ferasans.
#26. Absolutely they should reintroduce a species like that, because it gives Star Trek an opportunity to make all sorts of commentary on our society via alien species with backward, upside down ideas that hit too close to home. You can’t do that if everyone is well-behaved and fashionably woke.
@26/Sunspear: “I get that the Kzinti were villains in the cartoon.”
No, in the prose. The point is that Niven himself conceived and portrayed them as villains in their first two appearances, “The Warriors” and “The Soft Weapon.” Again, “The Slaver Weapon” is a nearly verbatim adaptation of the novella, astonishingly faithful aside from a couple of backstory simplifications.
“But do you really want to reintroduce a race into Trek that is ruled by the Patriarchy and considers its females “dumb animals”?”
Umm, ever heard of the Ferengi? What the hell is wrong with an adversary race having values we disapprove of? That’s how it’s supposed to work!
Anyway, I agree that Niven has said some objectionable things in recent years and that, on reflection, his work was probably more sexist than I recalled. But the work is not the writer, and not every concept in fiction is meant to be a polemic. Niven did the reverse of the Kzinti with the Chirpsithra in his Draco’s Tavern stories — all Chirpsithra are female, and it’s speculated that the males are the small, mindless creatures observed from time to time on their ships. Giving alien species unusual reproductive biologies isn’t meant to be a commentary on human gender roles, it’s just making them alien, giving them a diversity of traits like the different animals on Earth have.
“I haven’t seen the particular episode, but interpreting it as a feminist allegory would mean it’s writers pulled off something massively subversive.”
Not “episode.” Novella. Not “writers.” One writer, Larry Niven, for both versions. Once again, the episode is an almost exact retelling of the novella. The story is precisely the same in every aspect relevant to this point.
Excuse me, it’s been a lot of years since I read the Ringworld novels, but I would swear that in one the Kzinti member of the crew ran off and found his own kind on an island in an incredibly vast ocean where the islands were like planets in real space, laid out the same (and where the Kzinti had built ships and conquered everything, including the Earth-island). While there he mated with at least one female who, to his amazement, was a person, not an animal. I think he liked it. :) As I recall this caused some discussion over the idea that Kzinti females elsewhere were animal-like because they’d been literally bred to be stupid and docile by the male-dominated society for so long. So they aren’t naturally that way. Do I remember correctly?
Still don’t want them anywhere near Trek. There are more serviceable cat aliens from a licensed property that’s still active today. Leave them in the past where they belong. That was my original thought and I guess you can continue with your proselytizing sidetrack. Nothing you’ve said changes my mind that those cats are worthy of any inclusion. Jimmy Diggs I’m not.
The Ferengi? Caricatures of capitalists who treated their women as property. That’s not a stretch from some cultures on Earth. At least their females had intelligence and eventually changed their society. Do you really see one-note villains like the Kzinti as worthy of attention? I guess you do, since you won’t stop touting them.
@29
Yep. The was in The Ringworld Engineers. A couple of other places in Niven’s work some Kzinti express a degree of admiration for the idea of sentient females.
@30/Sunspear: Once again, my original point was simply that the Caitians were not based on the Kzinti, that they had nothing to do with Niven to begin with. If you’d just said “Oh, I get it now” and moved on, I would’ve left it at that. You were the one who decided to turn it into a political debate about Niven.
@21 – AFS1970: IDIC should not include far right supremacist ideas, racism, or whatnot. Check out the paradox of tolerance, by Karl Popper.
@CLB: so you took a conditional statement of “maybe” and floored the gas on it? I think that what bothered me was that your arguments seemed disingenuous. There were definitely legal issues about the use of Caitians and Ferasans in STO.
“The Ferasan playable species in the Klingon Faction in Star Trek Online are a stand in for the Kzinti in that game. Due to legal issues, the developers could not obtain the rights from Larry Niven to use the species in the game. As previously mentioned in the “biography of M’Ress” concerning the Kzinti, background information in the game reveals that the Ferasans and the Caitians were originally one single species. However, violent disagreements about how to employ genetic engineering forced the Caitians to relocate to another planet, Cait. Unlike Kzinti, Ferasan females are fully sentient.”
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kzinti
Also, I won’t ascribe intent, but from my end it looked like possible advocacy for Niven’s inclusion in future Trek content. Chabon gets a pass as it was just a minor easter egg. You expended much more verbiage in support of Kzinti inclusion, or at least legitimacy, than that. Not that you or anyone cares, but I participated in the Puppy Wars of a few year back. Guess I still have a trigger, maybe too much of a trigger, for anyone or anything that tries to insert insert odious values into what’s supposed to be a humanist vision of the future.
End rant. Btw, either I’m more aware of it, or I’m coincidentally running into more player Caitians, even a couple Ferasans, in game. Weird that.