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.
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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.