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Known Space

1093 statements
215 feature instances
260 referencing feature instances

Known Space	type	TVTItem
Known Space	label	Known Space
Known Space	page	KnownSpace
Known Space	comment	Known Space is a future history setting used by author Larry Niven as a base for thirty-five of his short stories and nine novels. It is generally considered by scholars of science fiction to be one of the most internally consistent, if not always the most scientifically plausible, SF settings in the history of the genre.Within the setting itself, "Known Space" refers to a relatively small portion of the Milky Way, centered around Earth and its colonies, and including eight other starfaring alien species and their colony worlds (there is no current all-encompassing political body in Known Space, and each species governs its own planets). The fictional universe also includes things that are found outside of "Known Space" proper (that is, the space that is regularly travelled by humans and the aliens around them), such as the Ringworld, the Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds (by way of which the Pierson's Puppeteers are fleeing the Milky Way), and the homeworld of the Pak, found somewhere close to the galactic core. The stories span approximately one thousand years of future history, from the first human explorations and colonizations of the Solar System (in the 1970s and 1980s) to the year 3122 (the year the chronologically last Known Space story, Safe At Any Speed, takes place).Originally, the stories set in Known Space were set in two separate universes. The first, composed mainly of Niven's Belter stories, the Gil "The Arm" Hamilton mysteries, and the novels World of Ptavvs, A Gift From Earth and Protector, were about the initial colonization of the solar system, and the use of slower-than-light travel to colonize planets in other solar systems. The second universe was set much farther into the future and was composed of the Beowulf Shaeffer and Louis Wu stories, as well as a handful of other short stories. The two universes were combined in Niven's short story A Relic of the Empire, which featured elements of the Thrintun Empire (from World of Ptavvs, of the Belter stories) being dealt with by people from his faster-than-light setting.Roughly 300 years separates the timeline of the last stories of the Belter setting (which are set roughly between the years 2000 and 2350), from the earliest stories in the later Neutron Star/Ringworld setting (which are set in 2651 (Neutron Star) to 3100). In the late 1980s, Niven opened up this gap in the known space timeline, and the stories of the Man-Kzin Wars volumes fill in that history, joining the two settings.
Known Space	fetched	2024-03-02T08:00:46Z
Known Space	parsed	2024-03-02T08:00:46Z
Known Space	processingComment	Dropped link to Aesoptinium: Not a Feature - UNKNOWN
Known Space	processingComment	Dropped link to AlienArtsAreAppreciated: Not a Feature - ITEM
Known Space	processingComment	Dropped link to Jabberwocky: Not a Feature - ITEM
Known Space	processingComment	Dropped link to Protector: Not a Feature - ITEM
Known Space	processingComment	Dropped link to Ringworld: Not a Feature - ITEM
Known Space	processingComment	Dropped link to StarTrekTheAnimatedSeries: Not a Feature - ITEM
Known Space	processingComment	Dropped link to TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey: Not a Feature - ITEM
Known Space	processingComment	Dropped link to WhatMightHaveBeen: Not a Feature - UNKNOWN
Known Space	processingUnknown	Aesoptinium
Known Space	processingUnknown	WhatMightHaveBeen
Known Space	isPartOf	DBTropes
Known Space / int_1049848f	type	Aliens Speaking English
Known Space / int_1049848f	comment	Aliens Speaking English: It occurs in Known Space, but is always justified in one way or another, usually because, rather than English, it's Interworld. The sentiment is the same since humans developed Interworld. Speaker-To-Animals, a Kzin linguist, complains that Interworld isn't a very good name because nonhumans have difficulty learning or pronouncing it. Kzin: humans won the Man-Kzin wars, so they get to dictate what language is used for Earth-Kzin communications. In any case, Kzin language is variously described as sounding like a catfight, a prolonged burst of radio static and similar expressions; no man is ever shown speaking it (apart from occasional single words) although the puppeteers can, if they wish. Kdatlyno: were Kzinti slaves before being liberated by humans, so also didn't have a lot of leverage on the choice of language. They are also deaf and blind in the human spectra, so quite HOW they communicate with others isn't explained. Puppeteers: don't much care because they're master linguists and can pronounce anything (in stereo, if they want; their own language is generally described by humans as orchestral music). Outsiders: live in an environment that is pretty inhospitable to humans/kzinti/kdatlyno/puppeteers and vice versa, so there's not a lot of "small talk". For business dealings, they speak to humans (through a computer translator) in the humans' chosen language and (presumably) to other species in that species' own language. Pak: are virulently xenophobic and communicate with other species primarily through weaponry. Most of the Pak protectors encountered in the stories who speak English/Interworld were former humans who knew it before their transformation. Grogs: are telepathic, so language isn't an issue; they'll pull it out of the brain of whomever they're communicating with as needed. Bandersnatchi: highly intelligent but can't speak at all, so pronunciation isn't an issue. They were able to write by digging trenches with their entire bodies. After contact with humans they were given mechanical-brain interfaces to facilitate communication.
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Known Space / int_109b036e	type	Abusive Precursors
Known Space / int_109b036e	comment	Abusive Precursors: The Thrintun from World of Ptavvs. 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 sapient 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. It should be noted that 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... Most Thrintun technology was created by the Tnuctipun, whose enslavement by the Thrintun led to their domination of the Galaxy. However, the Tnuctipun are 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 Bandersnatchii, who the Tnuctipun created to spy on the Thrintun, as well as be sapient food. Much more recently, the Pak are the original race humans evolved from. Those relics that aren't from the Tnuctipun are usually the result of Pak protector engineering. Their systems were usually designed to be controlled by at most a handful of super-geniuses, and as a result lack safety features. The Ringworld was their greatest artifact, and the issues the Ringworld has tend to be the result of the Pak systems being easily misused.
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Known Space / int_111f375d	type	HeavyWorlder
Known Space / int_111f375d	comment	Heavy Worlder: The Jinxians are of the short Heavy Worlder variety (described by one character as "five feet tall and five feet wide"), realistically so, since human growth patterns are determined in part by the weight of the body. They are strong enough to bend crowbars, and black-skinned regardless of ancestry, since the star they orbit, Sirius, is far brighter than Sol. 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". Culturally, they are mainly scientists and punsters.
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Known Space / int_115b9907	type	Starfish Language
Known Space / int_115b9907	comment	Starfish Language: The Puppeteer language sounds "like a steam organ exploded". The Outsiders communicate using colored lightbursts, and the Bandersnatchi communicate only using writing... using their own bodies as writing implements and empty fields as a writing surface (generally, you have to read Bandersnatch writing from orbit...)
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Known Space / int_116a941b	type	Applied Phlebotinum
Known Space / int_116a941b	comment	Applied Phlebotinum: Where to begin, where to begin. Everything from boosterspice (the longevity drug that keeps Louis Wu young at the grand old age of 245) to the General Products Hulls (made of a single, giant-sized molecule immune to pretty much anything but antimatter) to scrith, the material that the Ringworld is made of (possessing a tensile strength in the same general magnitude as the force that holds atoms together). And that's not even mentioning transfer booths, stepping discs, reactionless drives, autodocs, flying cars, deep radar, stasis fields... you get the picture. In particular, stepping discs and the ability to reprogram them become increasingly important plot points through Ringworld's Children, Fleet of Worlds and its sequels.
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Known Space / int_11d38820	type	Big Dumb Object
Known Space / int_11d38820	comment	Big Dumb Object: The phrase was actually coined to describe the Ringworld.
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Known Space / int_1235f055	type	Dirty Coward
Known Space / int_1235f055	comment	The Puppeters warped their "turn-and-kick-with-third-leg" response into Dirty Cowardice.
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Known Space / int_16ca6ce9	type	SlidingDownTheSlipperySlope
Known Space / int_16ca6ce9	comment	Humanity did an amazing amount of damage to themselves in this manner completely by accident. In the early 21st century, advances in organ transplant technology enabled universal transplant compatibility. Human lifespans could be greatly expanded by simply replacing a person's worn-out parts. As a result, all forms of burial save organ harvest became illegal, governments started using executed criminals for organ transplants, and Earth started Sliding Down The Slippery Slope to All Crimes Are Equal in pursuit of transplant stock. However, it turned out that criminal behavior such as 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; a century later, "sane" humans can only be violent or disobedient if threatened within an inch of their lives, and even then it's chancy (cops can usher most convicted criminals off to have their organs harvested without a struggle), and even if it's a justified situation, The Government then starts treating them as psychotic, because most of the time it is the result of a psychotic break. One such psychotic had to go off his meds in order to fend off the Kzinti — and ended up organ stock for his trouble. Even after synthetic transplants become available and the organ banks disappeared the damage to human genetic diversity had already been done.
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Known Space / int_17ce80aa	type	All There in the Manual
Known Space / int_17ce80aa	comment	All There in the Manual: Details about several human colony planets, aliens and Ringworld species are found only in the Ringworld RPG rulebooks. Niven encouraged authors for the Man-Kzin Wars series to use the RPG as background material.
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Known Space / int_17e1ec88	type	Genius Breeding Act
Known Space / int_17e1ec88	comment	Genius Breeding Act: The Earth is so overpopulated that, in order to have more than two children, one has to be extraordinarily gifted (high intelligence, good teeth, superior eyesight, cancer resistance, etc.). A very few Einstein-level geniuses, such as Louis Wu's biological father Carlos, get Unlimited Breeding Licenses that basically allow them to have all the kids they want — a very necessary thing, as Earth culled a lot of intelligence out of the human race with the organ bank laws.
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Known Space / int_18aff462	type	Artistic License â€“ Biology
Known Space / int_18aff462	comment	Artistic License â€“ Biology: The whole Pak thing. It's 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, then pretty much shrugging and moving on. Played for Laughs with Matthew Joseph Harrington's Leftovers, in which Buford Early runs afoul of a rogue Protector; three of the ways the superhuman epically jerks his chain is stating that the reason "breeders" find bald people intimidating is because they look like Protectors, we find old people engaging in sexual behavior repulsive because we instinctually remember they're supposed to be asexual, and the young are scared of kissing grandparents because the same instinct is that non-descendants are a threat to descendants and, well...
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Known Space / int_18e33968	type	Earth Is the Center of the Universe
Known Space / int_18e33968	comment	Earth Is the Center of the Universe: Flatlanders think that Earth is the center of human civilization. People from the other colonies disagree, and make fun of Flatlanders for this attitude.
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Known Space / int_1994ba0b	type	Gone Horribly Right
Known Space / int_1994ba0b	comment	Gone Horribly Right: The Puppeteers made the mistake of assuming that lucky humans would bring luck to their allies (such as, for example, Puppeteers) as well. As Louis points out, their luck is completely independent of the luck of their companions, and is in fact dangerous to everyone else nearby.
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Known Space / int_19d1c1ae	type	Always Someone Better
Known Space / int_19d1c1ae	comment	Always Someone Better: Pak protectors are evolved for warfare, literally. Millions of years of constant struggle between themselves has made them the perfect fighting machine. 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. In short, it is simply impossible for a Pak protector to out-think a human protector, which is why the human protectors Brennan and Truesdale run roughshod over every protector they come up against. It also explains how a Protector-stage Louis Wu could think rings around Proserpina and Hanuman (both of whom were non-sapient before their change to protector-stage), but couldn't out-think Tunesmith, who was not only already sapient before his change, but was smarter than Louis was on an individual basis, and thus continued to be smarter after the change.
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Known Space / int_1a6960dd	type	Flying Saucer
Known Space / int_1a6960dd	comment	Flying Saucer: After the Puppeteer migration (when new General Products hulls are no longer available), the various sapient races tend to revert to pre-GP designs. Of these, the Kzinti fighter craft are specifically described as "lens-shaped".
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Known Space / int_1d3c92da	type	Failsafe Failure
Known Space / int_1d3c92da	comment	Failsafe Failure: Pretty much the entire plot of The Ringworld Engineers is driven by this trope.
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Known Space / int_1d3d1013	type	Mundane Dogmatic
Known Space / int_1d3d1013	comment	Mundane Dogmatic: The "Belter" period, where technology isn't far off from what we have today, just more efficient and practical. Stories set after the invention of Faster-Than-Light Travel (Known Space) are significantly softer and more like traditional scifi, albeit far more self-consistent.
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Known Space / int_1e669b8e	type	Humanoid Aliens
Known Space / int_1e669b8e	comment	Humanoid Aliens: Mostly avoided, as only the kzinti and kdatlyno qualify... and even then only technically.
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Known Space / int_204a1207	type	Hyperspace Is a Scary Place
Known Space / int_204a1207	comment	Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The Blind Spot. Since hyperspace is non-Euclidean, a human observer's blind spot "enlarges" to blank out views of this non-space outside the ship. This normally means that view ports seem to disappear into the bulkheads (and the longer you look at it, the bigger the blind spot gets...). Cruiseliners have no viewports at all, because about half the passengers would go insane when they hit hyperspace. Hardcore spacers like to claim they don't have any problems with the blind spot... although, in one tale, Beowulf Shaeffer makes the mistake of looking out past his ship's disintegrated hull into it and forgets how to see. He even forgets he has eyes until his neck starts hurting and he turns back to his control panel. Only hardcore spacers and Pak Protectors make claims at being able to deal with the "blind spot" without issuesnote Protectors have a different problem: like machines, they are unable to perceive the navigational device used in hyperspace (the "mass pointer") as anything other than a featureless crystal sphere. Hyperspace also has a "quantum" property that permanently removes from normal space anything that comes too close to a gravity source. In later Ringworld books, things living in hyperspace are also mentioned, although they don't turn up in any other stories.
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Known Space / int_211eedd	type	All Crimes Are Equal
Known Space / int_211eedd	comment	All Crimes Are Equal: During Earth's pre-first contract history, almost every crime is punishable by death, including multiple traffic tickets. The reason is due to the perfection of organ transplant technology. Once the government adopted "involuntary organ donation" as its official means of execution, all state executions are 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 results 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. 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 the novel 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").
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Known Space / int_224244c0	type	UniversalTranslator
Known Space / int_224244c0	comment	Universal Translator: Small disks that clip onto a shirt; the more input they receive, the faster they can translate languages. But even then, sometimes they make errors.
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Known Space / int_23ca8dff	type	Fantastic Nature Reserve
Known Space / int_23ca8dff	comment	Fantastic Nature Reserve: In "Cathouse" and "Briar Patch" by Dean Ing, the human main character and his Kzin captors come across a barren planetoid whose craters were closed off by force fields by an unknown alien race (speculated to be the Outsiders) and filled with the biospheres of different planets from thousands of years in the past, but incompletely — the vegetation was there, but the animals and people were in temporal stasis and had to be released. They land at the replica of the Kzin homeworld, one of the few places in the galaxy home to sapient Kzin females (the highly macho Kzinti engineered their females to be nonsapient millennia in the past), and the main character later settles in a dome based on ancient Earth, home to mammoths, aurochs and telepathic Neanderthals.
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Known Space / int_2630ef75	type	Emergency Transformation
Known Space / int_2630ef75	comment	Emergency Transformation: In The Ringworld Throne and Ringworld's Children, the only effective way of fighting protectors is to become a protector oneself. Averted in Destroyer of Worlds, where the humans explicitly reject this solution. (If anybody from New Terra became a protector, they'd most likely want to exterminate the Puppeteers after solving the Pak crisis.)
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Known Space / int_263bb4ec	type	Wave-Motion Gun
Known Space / int_263bb4ec	comment	Wave-Motion Gun: Several. Specifically... In "Ringworld's Children", Human starships are armed with a weapon called simply "The Anti-Matter Bullet"; guess what it fires. The Wunderland Treatymaker, a massive Disintegrator Ray, pretty much single-handedly ended the Fourth Man-Kzinti War. In "Down in Flames", the protector-stage-human Jack Brennan destroys an entire fleet of Pak warships with something he calls the Finagle Gun. It fires bowling-ball-sized pellets of pure neutronium. In "Madness Has Its Place", the Terran solar system is defended from invaders by the Mercury Laser Array (a ring of solar-powered lasers all around the equator of Mercury), which was originally built as launching lasers for light-sail powered spacecraft. Of course, they are powerful enough to destroy ships as far out as the orbit of Neptune. There are also an array of magnetically powered mass-drivers that can fling metallic ore mined from asteroids across the solar system, spreading molten metal across the ships' paths. All of these tools were key in humanity's overwhelming victory over the Kzinti warfleet in the first Man-Kzin War, since Kzinti telepaths had reported that "humans have no weapons at all." "Madness Has Its Place" makes it clear that at least the paranoids of ARM have been fully aware of the dual-purpose nature of these devices for some time. "The Warriors" brings us the Angel's Pencil, a human slower than light starship, with a main drive that doubles as an interstellar comunication laser. At maximum thrust, it pulls 1/6th of a g. It slices a Kzinti warship in two before the crew could react, and they'd figured out what was about to happen as it was being targeted. The apex is the Ringworld Defense System. It functions via a superconducting mesh built into the Ringworld flooring material. After causing its sun to flare, it then magnetically excites the flare to lase in x-ray. It uses a goddamn star as an x-ray laser. Since Pak protectors built the Ringworld: a) it's supposed to be able to destroy rogue asteroids, planets or alien fleets that may threaten the Ringworld and b) protectors are not known for being subtle.
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Known Space / int_26ac510e	type	Mythology Gag
Known Space / int_26ac510e	comment	Mythology Gag: Betrayer of Worlds has several call-aheads to the Ringworld novels in Louis' thoughts which he won't later remember (see under Victory-Guided Amnesia).
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Known Space / int_26d48b37	type	Earth That Used to Be Better
Known Space / int_26d48b37	comment	Earth That Used to Be Better: By the Beowulf Shaeffer/Louis Wu era, Earth is an over-crowded police state populated by arrogant xenophobes. However, for the most part they are happy, content, well-tended arrogant xenophobes to whom the constant surveillance by the government is considered the normal state of affairs (and why not... they've had nearly 500 years to get used to it, and all the "malcontents" move off-world to the other planets).
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Known Space / int_26f41623	type	Kill Sat
Known Space / int_26f41623	comment	Kill Sat: The Ringworld is defended by a magnetically controlled x-ray laser made by fluorescing solar flares (yes, you read that right), with a beam the width of Earth's moon.
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Known Space / int_2717a55e	type	Bizarre Alien Psychology
Known Space / int_2717a55e	comment	Bizarre Alien Psychology: Protectors, Outsiders, Puppeteers, Kzinti, and other aliens are definitely this to varying degrees. The Outsiders are the really out-there example that nobody else can truly get, and who make even the Grogs look understandable (which they pretty much are not). All think differently enough to humans (and each other) to trip themselves and those they interrelate with up, even if they do share some head-space, sometimes. It's made clear again and again that we are this to them, too.
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Known Space / int_280973fd	type	Future Society, Present Values
Known Space / int_280973fd	comment	Future Society, Present Values: The sub-plot in How the Heroes Die, a story set in 2040, has the commander of a Mars mission writing a report trying to justify including women in future crews by giving details of the homophobic murder that has occurred on his base, with the idea that having women along may prevent homosexual behavior and therfore future murders in all-male crews. There is also mention of thousands of "decency leagues" on Earth being the reason they could not bring a mixed male-female crew to Mars to begin with. The story was written in 1966.
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Known Space / int_292d4681	type	Electric Instant Gratification
Known Space / int_292d4681	comment	Electric Instant Gratification: On Earth there is an epidemic of "Wireheads" who get a "droud" installed in their head that runs low amounts of current "directly into the pleasure center of their brain." There are built-in safeguards and timers to try to mitigate the addiction, but Wireheads tend to slowly physically decline over time simply because they no longer care about anything else. A droud that has been modified to provide a higher than normal current is the murder weapon in ''Death by Ecstasy". It turns out that it was also forcibly implanted in the victim, and the shop that installed it is also a front used by organleggers to find victims who will not be missed. In "The Defenseless Dead" Anubis the organlegger eliminates his victim's sister as a witness by putting her under a non-surgical droud at full current for about a week. When she is finally rescued she is so addicted that she appears catatonic for the next few years — she simply no longer cares about anything else, and can't even be bothered to tell anyone why. When Gil gets the story from Anubis he hopes they can finally start treating her for current addiction. In Louis Wu's era there is a weapon called a Tasp that can produce the effect from a distance with no surgery. Pranksters sometimes use it on low power to "make somebody's day". Louis Wu himself gets a droud before the beginning of The Ringworld Engineers, because he was exposed to a tasp by Nessus during Ringworld and became partially addicted. Louis manages to quit "Cold Turkey" when he realizes the Hindmost will use it to control him.
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Known Space / int_2ae247a4	type	Auto-Doc
Known Space / int_2ae247a4	comment	Beowulf Shaeffer gets his head chopped off in "Procustes", and survives thanks to a state-of-the-art nanotech Auto-Doc; specifically, his body is lost, so his friends put his head in the doc along with his murderer's body as biomass.
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Known Space / int_2af7961	type	Faster-Than-Light Travel
Known Space / int_2af7961	comment	Faster-Than-Light Travel: Only in the later stories, set after the First Man-Kzin War.
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Known Space / int_2bdae2ae	type	Awesome, but Impractical
Known Space / int_2bdae2ae	comment	The Quantum II hyperdrive that the Puppeteers discover is Awesome, but Impractical: it's much faster — about 75 seconds per light year. Unfortunately, there are loads of catches; Most hyperdrives just need to be Neptuneâ€™s distance from a star to work — two light hours; the Q-II needs to be five — Plutoâ€™s! This means it can get you from any given human world in Known Space to any other in no more than eleven hours, but also no less than ten hours for any world outside the system. Thereâ€™s no intermediate setting. With most hyperdrives, a pilot can leave the helm unattended most of the time. If one does so in a Q-II for more than two minutes, theyâ€™re almost certain to crash into a star. It doesn't have an on-off switch, either, it has a grip that has to be kept or the drive turns off. The drive is huge — it barely fits into the largest General Products hull, so there's no cargo room (and barely space for a pilot). Most of that turns out to be not quite true: Long Shot is a prototype; the Puppeteers can't duplicate it; and while it is still very much larger than a standard hyperdrive, the ship isn't quite as packed as the Puppeteers are trying to make it look (among other things, it has a lifeboat built into a GP#2 hull hidden aboard). By the end of Fate of Worlds, at least Baedeker, Ol'tr'o, Proteus, and/or Tunesmith (though given the size of the latter's... vessel... making the drive smaller is not that important for him) could probably do better if any of them found it necessary.
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Known Space / int_309b8806	type	Cursed with Awesome
Known Space / int_309b8806	comment	Cursed with Awesome: Becoming a protector gives one superhuman strength and reflexes, skin like leather armor, and an enlarged brain providing Super-Intelligence, which means protectors have nearly perfect abilities to master any skill, outwit any opponent, and reverse-engineer any technology. The downside is looking like a freak, having no reproductive organs or ability to have sex, and no free will: protectors are totally ruthless and xenophobic, and will cheerfully commit genocide against any species they consider to be a threat to their bloodline. Characters who are able to avoid the disadvantages of transforming into protectors will start looking like Canon Sues: in Ringworld's Children, Louis Wu becomes a protector, but the nanotech-based autodoc his father invented turns him back into a breeder at the end. For this reason, the Ringworld RPG has a rule that any player whose character becomes a protector must permanently give up control of that character to the GM. The "no free will" part comes due to an interaction of the instinctive "must protect breeders" with the intelligence to evaluate their possible choices. They have to take their best option (as far as the breeders are concerned), and they're too smart to fool themselves.
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Known Space / int_31c5e7fb	type	Starfish Aliens
Known Space / int_31c5e7fb	comment	Starfish Aliens: The Puppeteers, the Outsiders, Bandersnatchi, and especially the Jotoki and Gw'oth, which actually resemble starfish.
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Known Space / int_327b5216	type	Black Market
Known Space / int_327b5216	comment	Black Market: The demand is so high for transplant material that organleggers go into business to meet the demand for illicit human organs for transplant. A particularly unpleasant one actually went into the business to ensure his own supply of replacement parts, due to chronic ill health. When the "Freezer Bill" passes (and orders the breaking up for parts of everyone in long-term cryo who doesn't have a lot of money), he buys out the operations of a number of rivals who retire when the market dries up.
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Known Space / int_33f131a	type	Psychic Starship Pilot
Known Space / int_33f131a	comment	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.
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Known Space / int_342c2ebc	type	Longevity Treatment
Known Space / int_342c2ebc	comment	Longevity Treatment: Boosterspice (a drug derived from genetically engineered ragweed) can tremendously extend the human lifespan. Ringworld. There is an equivalent to boosterspice available on the title space construct. The Ringworld sequels strongly imply that both of these are actually derived from Tree-of-Life root, which is what turns Pak (and their mutated descendants, such as humans and the various Ringworld hominids) into protectors and makes them, if not actually immortal, at least immune to death from old age.
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Known Space / int_34dd5f3	type	La RÃ©sistance
Known Space / int_34dd5f3	comment	La RÃ©sistance: A Zig-Zagging Trope in "A Gift From Earth". On Plateau, the Crew rule and the Colonists serve. Any crime by a Colonist results in them being butchered for organ transplants. The Crew are opposed by a dissident organization calling themselves the "Sons of Earth". Pretty standard, except the zig; the Crew keep close tabs on the organization, and whenever they need spare parts, they arrest and break up a few of them. They're husbanding them like cattle. And when they receive the titular "gift from earth" — a series of medical breakthroughs that drastically reduce the need for transplants — they kill every Son of Earth, both because the Colonists would revolt if they thought the organ banks weren't needed any more, and because they didn't need a steady supply of organs anymore. Then the zag; the last three rebels include a psychic assassin capable of vanishing from sight and memory, so they win by default and force the Crew to abdicate.
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Known Space / int_35d4beb4	type	Horde of Alien Locusts
Known Space / int_35d4beb4	comment	Horde of Alien Locusts: The Slaver Sunflowers. They have a reflective flower that focuses sunlight on a single green photosynthetic node. They will also focus solar energy to burn any nearby animals or plants that are not Slaver Sunflowers, and even any diseased or mutant Sunflowers, until healthy Sunflowers are the only plants in view. There are areas of the Ringworld with land areas the equivelant of hundreds of Earths completely dominated by Slaver Sunflowers.
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Known Space / int_37ea4a73	type	Not Drawn to Scale
Known Space / int_37ea4a73	comment	Not Drawn to Scale: Many of the artists in various countries who paint covers for the Ringworld novels have a hard time grasping the proportions of it, though it may be for the best as a to-scale ringworld is terribly boring (if not outright impossible to see) to look at from anywhere that isn't the surface.
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Known Space / int_3a1c2171	type	The Man Behind the Man
Known Space / int_3a1c2171	comment	The Man Behind the Man: The Gw'oth have been puppeteering the puppeteers the whole time.
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Known Space / int_3a90dc63	type	Aliens Are Bastards
Known Space / int_3a90dc63	comment	Aliens Are Bastards: So many examples. 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. 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're 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. Thrintun were called "Slavers", 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 sapient life in the galaxy seemed like a good idea to them at the time. The Tnuctipun, one of the Thrintun's slave species, 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 food for the carnivorous 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 — the Tnuctipun made them sapient and immune to Thrint telepathy, enabling them to act as spies, but didn't give them any manipulatory limbs. After the Thrint destroyed their slaves and themselves the Bandersnatch were left with no way to develop any technology until new intelligent species evolved to come sell them artificial manipulators. 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.
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Known Space / int_3c5ae1a1	type	Schizo Tech
Known Space / int_3c5ae1a1	comment	Schizo Tech: Especially on the Ringworld due to a combination of size and a plague wiping out the superconductors that most technology ran on back in the 1700s.
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Known Space / int_3e427255	type	Multistage Teleport
Known Space / int_3e427255	comment	Multistage Teleport: The puppeteer homeworld features a network of "stepping discs" (freestanding teleport pads) in pairs spanning a block or two, placed end-to-end one pace apart. The result is a sort of seven league boot effect, allowing a traveler to circumnavigate the planet on foot in an afternoon.
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Known Space / int_3fca462c	type	Deus ex Machina
Known Space / int_3fca462c	comment	Deus ex Machina: Carlos Wu's nanotech-based autodoc, which can revive the clinically dead, regenerate a body from a severed head, restore youth better than boosterspice, reverse the tree-of-life transformation, erase and restore memories, and be reverse-engineered by a protector to produce scrith and turn the Ringworld's entire hull into a hyperdrive.
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Known Space / int_42215dce	type	Ambiguous Ending
Known Space / int_42215dce	comment	Ambiguous Ending: Fate of Worlds says right on the cover that it is "the explosive finale" to the Ringworld and the Fleet of Worlds series. A lot is tied up at the end, but it's hardly tied off neatly. Niven and Lerner left plenty to work with in case that they should they decide to write more.
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Known Space / int_4280d1fd	type	Spock Speak
Known Space / int_4280d1fd	comment	Spock Speak: Aliens for whom Interworld isn't their first language tend not to use contractions and prefer to use the present tense rather than the present progressive. Human emotional inflections need to be consciously added to their speech. Louis Wu notes in Ringworld that when Nessus becomes frightened or Speaker gets angry that their speech sounds increasingly less emotional, because they no longer work as hard at adding human-sounding emotional inflections into their speech.
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Known Space / int_42d3be0b	type	Population Control
Known Space / int_42d3be0b	comment	Population Control: Everyone on Earth gets two birthrights, and children are "authorized" by the man and woman in question "spending" a birthright apiece. More birthrights can be gained by winning them in a lottery (this eventually results in all humans being Born Lucky), through legalized gladiatorial combat (the winner gets the loser's birthrights, the loser dies), or by simply purchasing one for a million stars. The ARM police (the law enforcement agency of the United Nations) regularly go on "mother hunts" for those people who illegally go over their reproductive limits. Very rarely, an individual is awarded an unlimited breeding licence (their genetic strengths are declared to be so useful and desirable that humanity needs more of people possessing them than it needs the room and resources freed up by not having them); such a person can have as many children as they wish, naturally, though their partners are generally restricted to just the original two. Also, people with undesirable genetic traits (such as albinism, bad teeth, bad eyesight, being cancer prone, early baldness, and so on) typically lose both of their original birthrights. Such people can still purchase a birthright, or win one in the arena or the lottery. About the time the Birthright Lottery was instituted, there were other changes made: EVERYONE gets at least one Birthright, even if already under sentence of death. If you lack undesirable genetic traits, you get a second. If you win in the Arena (and you must have a valid Birthright available to you to compete) you get one more than the person you killed had (since you get a Birthright for the loser's life as well). And those with EXTREMELY good genetic traits may still be granted unlimited Birthrights.
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Known Space / int_43fe061e	type	Agony Beam
Known Space / int_43fe061e	comment	Agony Beam: Inverted in a major way by the Tasp, a weapon that, rather than cause the target pain, directly stimulates the target's pleasure center. Such a jolt of pure, unadulterated pleasure can be as totally disabling as a similar jolt of pain could be. Worse, being repeatedly subjected to the tasp can become addictive (which makes it more threatening against an opponent smart enough to realize that danger).
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Known Space / int_4536fd29	type	Energy Weapon
Known Space / int_4536fd29	comment	Energy Weapon: Flashlight lasers. Widen the beam enough, it works like a flashlight. Tighten the beam enough, and it works like a lightsaber with a fifty foot long blade. They aren't weapons, they're flashlights. Honest. Please be careful not to dial the beam down or they could be dangerous. But they still aren't weapons... Niven codified the Rules of Laser Combat in the Known Space series: Rule One: Never fire a laser at a mirror. Rule Two: Never fire at a man wearing clothing the same color as your laser. Or maybe they're propulsion systems, not weapons. The pacifistic, "weaponless" humans figure out Pretty Damn Quick when they're attacked by Kzinti that just because you didn't design it as a weapon doesn't mean it isn't one. Especially true of the ones on the big orbital platforms near Mercury (with enormous amounts of free solar power available for the taking) that are used to push light-sails around Sol system. Gil the ARM is attacked or threatened by someone with a laser in almost every story he appears in. Hunting lasers, messaging lasers, and once by a flashlight fired out of an energy field that decreases inertia, which has the side effect of speeding up time and turning said flashlight into a laser with an impressively wide beam.
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Known Space / int_4ac8b81f	type	Humans Are the Real Monsters
Known Space / int_4ac8b81f	comment	Humans Are the Real Monsters: Which is why the Puppeteers used us to keep the Kzinti in line. Most notably, the 140 or so years before the Man-Kzin Wars had been a golden era of peace and nonviolence for humanity. The Kzin psychics thought we didn't have weapons, because most people didn't think of mass drivers and giant lasers as weapons anymore.%
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Known Space / int_4bca5b2e	type	We Have Become Complacent
Known Space / int_4bca5b2e	comment	We Have Become Complacent: Prior to first contact with the Kzinti, human society had developed to the point that there was no war, very little crime, and no purpose-built weapons. Humanity climbed out of its complacent cocoon pretty damned quickly once the warcats showed up, however... The Protector-stage-human Jack Brenner was largely responsible for this transformation, but he had to leave Known Space to go fight the Pak invasion fleet.
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Known Space / int_4de1a4f7	type	Improvised Weapon
Known Space / int_4de1a4f7	comment	Improvised Weapon: The Kzinti thought their attack on humanity would result in an easy conquest of walking Happy Meals because humanity had no military and no weapons. They subsequently learned the Kzinti Lesson, that "unarmed" ships cruising around at high speeds have drives that can be turned into Weaponized Exhaust, as per Jon's Law: "Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction."
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Known Space / int_4ee5989a	type	Bizarre Alien Senses
Known Space / int_4ee5989a	comment	Bizarre Alien Senses: Kdatlyno "see" via sonar.
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Known Space / int_4f3c14ca	type	Go Mad from the Isolation
Known Space / int_4f3c14ca	comment	Go Mad from the Isolation: Weirdly averted in most of the stories written by Larry Niven. He seems to assume that humans are able to survive extremely long periods of isolation without going nuts, as seen in situations such as people traveling through deep space for years, or a man with a time-accelerating device camping out inside it for six or more months so his arm transplant will heal and throw off the forensic investigators looking for someone who just got a new arm transplant. In most of these cases they aren't completely alone, but Louis Wu introduced the concept of "sabbatical" ... when the pressures of social interaction start getting to you, you get in a spaceship and fly off by yourself until you can't stand the solitude any more. A lot of his friends later adopted the practice as well, but Louis is generally regarded as unusual because his are so much longer than typical. One instance where it was played with was "The Ethics of Madness"; a person was in a very, very, very, very, very long chase. As in, millions of years long, with the person in question being kept alive by the miracle of the autodoc. He manages to last the eons without a single sign of madness... but the dullness and repetitive nature of spending that long with no new stimuli has caused him to be literally incapable of thought or action outside of his simple daily routine, being explicitly compared to a robot. This is at least partially explained in the novella The Asteroid Queen in Man-Kzin Wars III. When the asteroid belt colonist from Alpha Centauri, Ingrid, now returned from Earth by way of a bussard ramjet sneak attack/assassination on the local Kzin prince, reunites with her childhood friends/crushes/old flames/sources of unrequited love, she is asked why she still isn't married. Keep in mind that, due to time dilation, her flight to and back from Earth aged her from perhaps 17 to 23, while her two friends are now in their 50s. She responds, comparing her Alpha Centauri belter life to the much-more-developed asteroid belters of mother Earth — while the original space explorers and colonists were already lost-in-their-own-world detail freaks, hundreds of years of evolutionary pressure would eventually turn such more-intelligent and careful people into folks rather more naturally content with endless and arbitrarily-long hours of sitting at spaceship controls or the like while doing absolutely nothing... with consequences to their personalities:
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Known Space / int_4f6cf75	type	Mirroring Factions
Known Space / int_4f6cf75	comment	Mirroring Factions: Organleggers tend to treat ARM cops like this as a kind of snub; in their eyes, there's very little difference between how they and the government kill people for their organs — the ARM's official source of transplant stock is citizens executed for Felony Misdemeanors such as traffic violations, and they aren't at all shy about claiming the seized stockpiles of organleggers. Gil admits they have a point; he immigrated to Earth for a new arm, and had a serious crisis of conscience when he discovered it came from a murder victim instead of an executed murderer.
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Known Space / int_5205b408	type	Weird Beard
Known Space / int_5205b408	comment	Weird Beard: The asymmetrical beards of upper-class Wunderlanders. "Captain Kidd" in Relic of the Empire finds out the hard way that you do not mock a Wunderlander's beard.
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Known Space / int_53e1f74c	type	Asteroid Thicket
Known Space / int_53e1f74c	comment	Asteroid Thicket: While most asteroid belts are realistically diffuse, Wunderland's "Serpent Swarm" is the product of a planet that disintegrated in the relatively recent past, so most of the rubble is still quite densely packed in a crescent-shaped asteroid swarm along a very small arc of its orbit.
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Known Space / int_547196be	type	Broad Strokes
Known Space / int_547196be	comment	Broad Strokes: Niven is pretty darn good at high-concept hard sci-fi. He is not good at continuity. His final verdict on the timeline is "Known Space should be seen as a possible future history told by people that may or may not have all their facts right." In other words, everyone tends to lie to the characters, who lie to the cops, who lie to the media, who lie to everyone, and future characters believe it's all true until they Spot the Thread. In Ringworld's Children, it is discovered that the reason you can't go too close to a gravity well in Hyperspace is not because the gravity well will cause the hyperspace engine to wrap up on itself into a singularity and take the ship with it, it's because of monsters. Hyperspace monsters. The existence of hyperspace monsters is re-retconned by being completely ignored in Fate of Worlds. In the original Ringworld, the natives can't understand what "disease" is, as the yet-unnamed builders hadn't included pathogens when they stocked the biosphere. Someone must've later told Niven that bacteria in the soil would evolve even faster than the hominids, producing new pathogenic strains, because later books do acknowledge that plagues occur on the Ringworld. The Ringworld Throne also retcons The Ringworld Engineers by having the Hindmost reveal that his ship has a quantum computer capable of controlling the solar flare providing thrust to the Ringworld attitude jets precisely enough to avoid exposing the population to radiation, and also has Carlos Wu's nanotech autodoc in storage, without having mentioned them to Louis before. It also changes the rules for the limitations of the stepping disks the Hindmost brought with him. The limitations are integral to the plot of each book, and swapping the rule sets breaks the plots irrevocably. The ARM is an entire government agency that very nearly got the entire human race exterminated because they kept Retconning human history to erase warfare. In The Colonel's Tiger, they receive a report as to First Contact with the Kzin (Niven's first published story, The Warriors) — they not only immediately suppress the message, they go about destroying evidence as to its veracity, including a journal written by an English officer who encountered a Kzin in the late 1800s along with the alien's pelt. And his ultra-tech computer. Which has a record of the message he sent home by laser: "There are food animals here! They shot me, and I'm dying, but it was only with little lumps of metal! I lasered down a couple dozen of them and they taste G-R-R-REAT!" OTOH, Niven is fairly defensive of what he accepts as canon at any given time, describing the setting as "playground equipment". In other words, any author can have characters hop through it — and crack their skulls on it — they just can't change anything of notice. Gregory Benford wrote the rather mind-warping "A Darker Geometry", in which the ineffable Outsiders are described as the three-dimensional puppets of a higher-dimensional species. Non-canon. Matthew Joseph Harrington's stories put forth the idea that Pak protectors were actually genetically engineered by the tnuctipun two billion years ago during the Slaver wars. He also attributed most of Known Space and Puppeteer cultural and technological development after the second Man-Kzin War to a single human protector, Peace Corben. Non-canon. In 1969, Niven wrote an outline for a novel, "Down in Flames", that would have retconned the entire Known Space universe, but was itself retconned by Ringworld. Fate of Worlds retcons the ending of Ringworld's Children, in which the Hindmost tells Louis to go to Home, by saying that the Hindmost meant his home, the Fleet of Worlds, rather than the human colony planet of Home. Fate of Worlds also retconned Nessus and Hindmost's motivations for investigating the Ringworld: their claims that they needed advanced technology and discoveries to earn the right to be together was actually a coverup selected because most other species are obsessed enough with sex that it would seem plausible; they were actually looking for something to help free the Fleet of Worlds from Ol't'ro. Authors can't seem to decide if female Kzin are sapient or not. There are stories where there are female Kzin that are fully sapient, but it's said that they are rare, there are stories where they are sapient but have the genetic equivalent of ADHD so that they can't think about things for long enough to act on them, there are stories where they're purely animalistic and nonsapient, it's honestly all over the place. From the Ringworld stories by Niven himself, we know that the Kzinti females on the Ringworld are sapient, and that this comes as a surprise to Chmee, implying that they are not sapient in the Patriarchy. It's also implied that either they're either outright smarter than the males, or that they're able and willing to use whatever passes for "feminine wiles" among Kzinti to the disadvantage of males during negotiations. In Cathouse by Dean Ing, an ancient female kzin explains that "it was common knowledge that some were planning to breed kzinrret, females, to be no better than pets." According to human records, female kzinti have been brainless and docile since before the two races met, and for at least forty thousand years before that. Thus, modern kzinrret would not be sapient, while ancient, stasis-preserved or genetically isolated kzinrret would be.
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Known Space / int_54a20968	type	Immune to Mind Control
Known Space / int_54a20968	comment	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 vertebrates to survive the Slavers' mass-suicide command and are therefore the oldest sapient race in the galaxy by at least a billion years. Pak protectors are also 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. Black Priest kzinti are immune to telepathy due to the same gene that gives them their eponymous fur color.
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Known Space / int_5552929	type	Albinos Are Freaks
Known Space / int_5552929	comment	Albinos Are Freaks: Albinism is common among people from the planet We Made It due to a founder effect from the original colonists. The protagonist of many stories, Beowulf "Bey" Shaeffer, is an albino, and is the victim of discrimination on Earth, where he isn't allowed to have children because of this genetic flaw. This is despite the fact that his albinism is easily treated with tanin pills, something anyone on a world with a sun that produces more ultraviolet light than Sol has to take anyway.
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Known Space / int_557a31ce	type	Actual Pacifist
Known Space / int_557a31ce	comment	During Earth's pre-first contract history, almost every crime is punishable by death, including multiple traffic tickets. The reason is due to the perfection of organ transplant technology. Once the government adopted "involuntary organ donation" as its official means of execution, all state executions are 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 results 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. 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.
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Known Space / int_56855fa3	type	Casual Interstellar Travel
Known Space / int_56855fa3	comment	Casual Interstellar Travel: There are even interstellar cruise lines. Although, notably, this doesn't develop until humanity buys the hyperdrive from the Outsiders. Even then, the well-defined one-speed-only restriction on distances is well adhered to. It's more like the age of steam distances where it takes three days per light year, so about twelve days to get to the nearest star. Part of Ringworld mentions that Known Space end to end would take 120 days to cross. The Quantum II hyperdrive that the Puppeteers discover is Awesome, but Impractical: it's much faster — about 75 seconds per light year. Unfortunately, there are loads of catches; Most hyperdrives just need to be Neptuneâ€™s distance from a star to work — two light hours; the Q-II needs to be five — Plutoâ€™s! This means it can get you from any given human world in Known Space to any other in no more than eleven hours, but also no less than ten hours for any world outside the system. Thereâ€™s no intermediate setting. With most hyperdrives, a pilot can leave the helm unattended most of the time. If one does so in a Q-II for more than two minutes, theyâ€™re almost certain to crash into a star. It doesn't have an on-off switch, either, it has a grip that has to be kept or the drive turns off. The drive is huge — it barely fits into the largest General Products hull, so there's no cargo room (and barely space for a pilot). Most of that turns out to be not quite true: Long Shot is a prototype; the Puppeteers can't duplicate it; and while it is still very much larger than a standard hyperdrive, the ship isn't quite as packed as the Puppeteers are trying to make it look (among other things, it has a lifeboat built into a GP#2 hull hidden aboard). By the end of Fate of Worlds, at least Baedeker, Ol'tr'o, Proteus, and/or Tunesmith (though given the size of the latter's... vessel... making the drive smaller is not that important for him) could probably do better if any of them found it necessary.
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Known Space / int_581f6468	type	Hero of Another Story
Known Space / int_581f6468	comment	Hero of Another Story: When Sigmund Ausfaller first appeared in "There is a Tide" and "Flatlander", he was just a supporting character, but it was implied that he was involved in some pretty heroic things as well. Forty years later, Niven wrote a trio of novels using Ausfaller as the hero in his own right.
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Known Space / int_5a2a2a39	type	The Milky Way Is the Only Way
Known Space / int_5a2a2a39	comment	The Milky Way Is the Only Way: Even with the Quantum II hyperdrive (which travels a light-year every 75 seconds — 420,000 times lightspeed — enough to get to another galaxy in a decade), the Andromeda Galaxy is still centuries away because Hyperspace Is a Scary Place — long hyperspace journeys inflict psychological trauma on passengers, and the ship is instantly destroyed if it travels within several light hours of a star. Beowulf Shaeffer attempts to visit the galactic core and nearly has a stress-induced breakdown due to having to dodge stars non-stop for hours on end.
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Known Space / int_5bdf025f	type	Instant Sedation
Known Space / int_5bdf025f	comment	Instant Sedation: Slivers of crystalline anesthetic (AKA "mercy needles") used in hypo guns. They are pretty much the only weapons used by the ARMs and organleggers because both sides want to preserve their targets intact for the organ banks.
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Known Space / int_5ddcb41f	type	World Shapes
Known Space / int_5ddcb41f	comment	World Shapes: Jinx, a planet-sized moon of a gas giant, is pulled into a pronounced oval shape by the gravitational stresses of the larger body. Its equatorial region band is extremely hot and too dense to breathe, while its eastern and western poles project clear out of its atmosphere — from the perspective of someone on the moon's surface, they're partway between geographic poles and impossibly tall mountains. Humans live in the transitional areas between the vacuum and the high-density belt; the equator is inhabited by a species of gigantic sluglike aliens.
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Known Space / int_5f476d97	type	Space Navy
Known Space / int_5f476d97	comment	Space Navy: The UN creates this when they relearn the ways of war thanks to the Kzin.
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Known Space / int_5f481f74	type	Space Orcs
Known Space / int_5f481f74	comment	Space Orcs: The Kzinti, a species of towering catlike aliens, 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.
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Known Space / int_5fb6411f	type	We Are as Mayflies
Known Space / int_5fb6411f	comment	We Are as Mayflies: By Beowulf Shaeffer's time, humans have developed a drug called boosterspice that has made death by old age a thing of the past. It was derived from the Pak Tree-of-Life The Pierson's Puppeteers have medical technology so advanced that they are functionally immortal as long as they can stay within easy access of an autodoc. Pak protectors live for many thousands of years, in the unlikely event that some other protector doesn't kill them first.
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Known Space / int_60441d9	type	Future Slang
Known Space / int_60441d9	comment	Future Slang: By Louis Wu's time, "tanj" (originally an acronym of "there ain't no justice") is seen as a legitimate profanity and not just a profanity-substitute. Belters are fond of swearing by Finagle and Murphy, and tend to see the flatlander habit of swearing by deities as rather odd and quaint. There are also instances of "Censored" becoming a swearword in its own right. "Flatlander" itself is a slang term. It means someone originally from Earth, and is also an insulting way to refer to someone that's never been off-planet. A few other planets have slang terms used to refer to their citizens, as opposed to saying whatever-ian (Jinxians are from Jinx. People from 'We Made It' are... Crashlanders).
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Known Space / int_60783afa	type	Standard Sci-Fi History
Known Space / int_60783afa	comment	Standard Sci-Fi History: One of the examples in which humanity colonizes the solar system, and later the stars. It also involves a lot of alien contact.
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Known Space / int_61459062	type	Perception Filter
Known Space / int_61459062	comment	Perception Filter: "Plateau Eyes" is a psychic ability to influence the optic nerves of anyone whose attention is focused on the user. When he is excited or frightened, people focused on him are compelled to contract the pupils of their eyes, and thereby lose that focus to the point of short-term memory loss â€“ even if he has just threatened them with a weapon. Trained users can expand the pupil, putting people in a hypnotic trance.
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Known Space / int_61c7d589	type	Bigger Is Better in Bed
Known Space / int_61c7d589	comment	Bigger Is Better in Bed: Gregory Pelton is nicknamed "Elephant" for good reason. Or so his girlfriends say... Beowulf Shaeffer, who was born on We Made It, doesn't know what an elephant is and doesn't understand Elephant's nickname until he sees an elephant in an Earth zoo, streaching its trunk up and up to grab some food.
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Known Space / int_6201e8b0	type	I Have Your Wife
Known Space / int_6201e8b0	comment	I Have Your Wife: After Jason manages to escape the Kzinti in "The Soft Weapon", they try to force him to bargain by threatening to eat his wife, who remains their prisoner, on limb at a time, with medical treatment in between to make sure that she doesn't die of shock while they work her over. When they capture him, they start the process right up in front of him.
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Known Space / int_62cae28a	type	Losing Your Head
Known Space / int_62cae28a	comment	Losing Your Head: Happens a few times — notably non-lethally. Nessus the Puppeteer loses one of his heads to monomolecular shadow-square wire in Ringworld. Of course, as his brain isn't located in either of his heads, this isn't as drastic an injury for him as it would be for a human being. This is lampshaded in Louis Wu's thoughts as he's using his belt to staunch the bleeding. "You put a tourniquet around his neck, doctor?" Beowulf Shaeffer gets his head chopped off in "Procustes", and survives thanks to a state-of-the-art nanotech Auto-Doc; specifically, his body is lost, so his friends put his head in the doc along with his murderer's body as biomass.
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Known Space / int_62f9ee25	type	Nanomachines
Known Space / int_62f9ee25	comment	Nanomachines: Used in autodocs and Ringworld meteor patches. They're the same nanites, in fact. The patches use modified versions of the nanites from Carlos Wu's autodoc (which is, apparently, unique).
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Known Space / int_63557923	type	Death World
Known Space / int_63557923	comment	Death World: The planet Gummidgy, where even the flowers are carnivorous and will try to eat you. Humans colonize it anyway, of course, and since Gummidgy was the first post-FTL colony, they didn't have the "one way trip" excuse. Taken up to eleven with Cannonball Express, which turns out to be made entirely out of antimatter.
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Known Space / int_64070096	type	Cowardly Lion
Known Space / int_64070096	comment	Cowardly Lion: Louis Wu is bad at fighting, for the most part, even though he's studied martial arts. He just doesn't have the heart for it, or the right mindset. That said, if you fuck with him, he'll end you soon as look at you. Puppeteers are so instinctively cowardly that they consider "brave" an insult. Humans eventually figure out that doesn't mean they can't or won't fight, it just means they only do so if they're sure that they'll win and that no one else will ever find out about it.
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Known Space / int_640ebd81	type	Bizarre Alien Reproduction
Known Space / int_640ebd81	comment	Bizarre Alien Reproduction: The Jotok breed in swamps and hatch as tadpoles before combining into a five-limbed, five-brained alien that has a habit of arguing with itself.
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Known Space / int_64edb99c	type	Always Save the Girl
Known Space / int_64edb99c	comment	Always Save the Girl: Keller in A Gift From Earth doesn't care much about the Sons of Earth and their crusade to topple the government. He just wants to save Polly.
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Known Space / int_66181568	type	Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions
Known Space / int_66181568	comment	Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Possibly the result of religion just not being mentioned rather than the various races being actively atheistic. Thrint slavers apparently had several religions, all agreeing that their psychic dominance ability meant they were the chosen of the gods/god. Of course, Thrintun are also supposed to be rather dim by human standards — an average IQ of 80. The Kzinti also have the Fanged God, and the Kdaptist Heresy which preaches that God must be a human, since they keep winning wars. Louis Wu quotes Isaiah 1:18 ("Come, let us reason together") in The Ringworld Engineers, but only as a literary reference and not in the context of any religious meaning. On the Ringworld when they first see an eyestorm (a hurricane on its side, essentially) the explorers all panic and think it is God's eye. Louis is relieved when Speaker says he sees a giant human eye, but Speaker himself has a moment of thinking the Kdaptist Heresy might have been correct. Nessus in Ringworld claims that Puppeteer scientists have proved that their species, at least, does not have an immortal soul that survives death. He explicitly demurs from claiming whether or not the same is true of humans or Kzin.
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Known Space / int_6660aaf	type	Herbivores Are Friendly
Known Space / int_6660aaf	comment	Herbivores Are Friendly: Averted in practice — the herbivorous Puppeteers are collectively ruthless, paranoid and deceitful, while Pak protectors are xenophobic killing machines who eat nothing but tree roots — 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, and so on.
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Known Space / int_67677940	type	Giant Flyer
Known Space / int_67677940	comment	Giant Flyer: The Rocs of Margrave are large enough to swallow a flying car whole. Featured in Safe at any Speed.
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Known Space / int_67f26dcc	type	Planet of Hats
Known Space / int_67f26dcc	comment	Planet of Hats: The Kzinti are space samurai. The Outsiders are merchants. The Puppeteers are all cowards (and secondarily merchants of a more mundane kind; Human Space is highly dependent on Puppeteer-made General Products spacecraft hulls). The Kdatlyno are all badass artists. Although, the Kzinti were closer to vikings (specifically, berserkers) when we first met them. We killed off their more aggressive specimens until they became Samurai-like due to natural selection in action. As their name implies, the Puppeteers' real hat is Manipulative Bastardry. And considering that sane puppeteers expend a lot of effort grooming their manes into elaborate styles, and all of them identify themselves as male but speak to humans with female voices, the entire species could also be thought of as Camp Gay.
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Known Space / int_6bda9a30	type	Meaningful Name
Known Space / int_6bda9a30	comment	As their name implies, the Puppeteers' real hat is Manipulative Bastardry. And considering that sane puppeteers expend a lot of effort grooming their manes into elaborate styles, and all of them identify themselves as male but speak to humans with female voices, the entire species could also be thought of as Camp Gay.
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Known Space / int_6e92a631	type	Four-Fingered Hands
Known Space / int_6e92a631	comment	Four-Fingered Hands: The Kzinti have four fingers on each paw, and developed a base-eight number system as a result.
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Known Space / int_6ef09297	type	Masquerade
Known Space / int_6ef09297	comment	Masquerade: In the Fleet of Worlds series, the Puppeteers go to great lengths to conceal the fact that they essentially enslaved an entire population of human colonists: all knowledge of Earth's location is wiped from the original colonists' memories and their computers, and, when they recruit Sigmund Ausfaller and Louis Wu, they're given selective memory wipes too. The masquerade is eventually {broken\|Masquerade}} in Fate of Worlds.
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Known Space / int_71105dfc	type	Everybody Smokes
Known Space / int_71105dfc	comment	Everybody Smokes: Omnipresent before Louis Wu's era. Even belters in tiny one-man ships that need to recycle their air smoke. Particularly jarring to a modern audience in the first Kzinti story, The Warriors: the story emphasizes that this is the far future and humans at this point have changed enormously, developing a peaceful society to the point that even a minor act of violence is seen as a sign of mental illness — yet the characters discuss this while smoking. What brings this into Idiot Ball territory is that everyone who is smoking is on board a starship, light-years from their destination, in an environment where oxygen should in theory be limited and where fire would be a massive hazard. Presumably there is some way of recycling oxygen and controlling fires, but it isn't mentioned.
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Known Space / int_723e61b3	type	Baby Planet
Known Space / int_723e61b3	comment	Baby Planet: Kobold, the Brennan-Monster's playground/home, is about the size of Long Island, but has normal gravity and an Earthlike atmosphere.
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Known Space / int_727b5779	type	Cat Folk
Known Space / int_727b5779	comment	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.
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Known Space / int_746793a6	type	Clue of Few Words
Known Space / int_746793a6	comment	Clue of Few Words: In The Patchwork Girl the victim leaves "NAKF" written in his own blood on the rocks of the lunar surface. He was trying to write "NAKED" indicating that his killer was naked: i.e. not wearing a spacesuit, which is quite a trick out on the surface of the moon.
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Known Space / int_76933235	type	Depopulation Bomb
Known Space / int_76933235	comment	Depopulation Bomb: In order to raise an army to fight the impending Pak protector invasion of Human Space, human protectors Jack Brennan and Roy Truesdale infect the colony world Home with a contagious version of the Tree-of-life virus. Much of the population become protectors, but those too young or old to be successfully transformed die. The new protectors strip the Home system of its resources to build a fleet, then abandon the planet to wage war against the Pak. The virus remaining in the biosphere renders Home uninhabitable for the next few centuries, but it does eventually get resettled.
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Known Space	hasFeature	Known Space / int_76933235
Known Space / int_7a08e8d1	type	They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!
Known Space / int_7a08e8d1	comment	They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: In Niven's later works "Fly-By-Night" and Ringworld's Children, humans have started using the title "LE" (Legal Entity) to address members of intelligent species who aren't prisoners or fugitives. One reason for this seems to be to give kzinti a legal basis for hunting particular sapient beings as prey. No other author has tried using the term "LE" in their Known Space stories.
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Known Space / int_7b1e41ba	type	Success Through Insanity
Known Space / int_7b1e41ba	comment	Success Through Insanity: In Madness Has Its Place, Jack Strather's megalomania and paranoid schizophrenia make him one of the few men left on Earth with the cojones to actually resist the invading Kzinti.
Known Space / int_7b1e41ba	featureApplicability	1.0
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Known Space / int_7bf06acd	type	Transplanted Humans
Known Space / int_7bf06acd	comment	Transplanted Humans: The various hominid species of the Ringworld. The initial Pak breeders mutated over three million years on the ring and evolved into different ecological niches which the Pak did not plant (generally those niches normally filled by creatures that killed and ate Pak breeders). With the exception of some transplanted aliens on the Ringworld's continent-sized "garden maps" in the middle of oceans hundreds of thousands of miles wide, there wasn't so much as an insect that will harm humanoids present, until hominids (and in some cases, other originally harmless species) evolved to fill the role.
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Known Space / int_7c4bafc9	type	Atonement Detective
Known Space / int_7c4bafc9	comment	Atonement Detective: Gil Hamilton. He lost an arm in an accident in space. However, only prosthetics are available in space, as accidents in space tend to quickly ruin transplant stock and the minarchist Belters don't regularly execute "criminals" for their organs. He thus immigrates to Earth to take advantage of the UN-sponsored organ harvesting programme, justifying it to himself that his new arm would most likely come from an executed murderer (forgetting that an earlier Niven story had people broken up for running traffic lights). Surprise — his brand-new limb came not from a villain, but from the seized stockpile of a criminal who killed people for their organs. Lacking the moral composure to have the arm removed, he joined the Amalgamated Regional Militia (aka ARM), the agency which polices illegal body harvesting... but spends more time suppressing inconvenient technologies and hunting illegal pregnancies. In one of his more troubling cases, Gil has to arrest a woman (a supermodel who is considered one of the most beautiful women alive) for murder. He eventually proves she didn't do it, but in the meantime an "emergency" (a person with a lot of political pull who needs some replacement parts in a hurry) comes up and several chunks of her body are swiped while she was in cryo. These parts are replaced, but they are obvious mismatches that ruin her looks and thus her career as a model.
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Known Space / int_83441d66	type	AIs
Known Space / int_83441d66	comment	A.I.s: Genuine artificial intelligences are created from time to time, but invariably commit suicide for unclear reasons. Starship autopilots can be programmed to respond and interact with their users as if the computers were sapient, but they don't actually qualify as artificially intelligent. Although not set in the Known Universe, Niven has written a handful of stories dealing directly with AI. Upon reaching sentience, they become the embodiment of The Singularity, attempting to increase their knowledge exponentially. At some point they either "learn everything" and decide to shut themselves down, or they learn something about the universe that convinces them to shut themselves down. Nobody knows the exact reason because by the time they reach that point, they aren't answering questions anymore. One of the stories in the Man-Kzin Wars collections has Catskinner, a sublight ship with an AI autopilot. There is some exploration of what it's doing as it approaches the shutdown point. (It's simulating an entire universe. It's also no longer what it was. What it's become is left intentionally unclear.)
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Known Space / int_83d2b3f2	type	Our Humans Are Different
Known Space / int_83d2b3f2	comment	Our Humans Are Different: What modern science knows as Homo habilis is in fact the reproductive stage of the Pak, an ancient alien species that, on consuming a specific root and the symbiotic microorganism within it, transforms into a sterile but immensely strong, agile and intelligent being called a protector, which is thereafter driven only by the unquestioned and single-minded urge to protect its genetic descendants at all costs. Earth was one of several worlds populated by Pak seeking to establish their bloodlines away from the endless warfare of their homeworld, but the lack of a chemical necessary for the microorganism to live caused the protectors to die off and allowed the breeders to speciate and evolve; modern human aging is the result of our bodies trying to undergo the protector transformation without the additional information given by the microorganism. Humans who eat healthy tree-of-life still transform into protectors, albeit with a high mortality rate; the physiological and mental differences between Homo habilis and Homo sapiens mean that human protectors are weaker and less agile than Pak protectors due to the transformation being imperfect, but are also more intelligent, mentally flexible and introspective, and also less dogmatically xenophobic.
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Known Space / int_8485d41a	type	Interspecies Romance
Known Space / int_8485d41a	comment	Interspecies Romance: "Rishathra" is sex between the various hominid species native to the Ringworld. It is used for diplomatic purposes or when meeting new tribes. It's also apparently a form of birth control for those species that get pregnant every time they mate amongst their own, like the City Builders who invented the custom.
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Known Space / int_85a782c7	type	Space Clothes
Known Space / int_85a782c7	comment	Space Clothes: Most space travellers wear comfortable, recyclable clothing made out of paper. But only while aboard ship.
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Known Space / int_85b20dee	type	Sequel Non-Entity
Known Space / int_85b20dee	comment	Sequel Non-Entity: The "ship-eating monsters in hyperspace" introduced in Ringworld's Children are not mentioned at all in Fate of Worlds. The monsters were said to look like dark wriggling comma-shaped objects against the swirling colors of the Blind Spot, but none of the characters who go into hyperspace inside a singularity in Fate of Worlds see anything like that. The ability of multiple-planet-sized objects to enter hyperspace is retconned to be due to a new theory of hyperspace that Tunesmith developed and Baedeker was able to reconstruct.
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Known Space / int_885b0b18	type	Interplanetary Voyage
Known Space / int_885b0b18	comment	Interplanetary Voyage: The Coldest Place and Becalmed in Hell, the stories that occur earliest, follow interplanetary expeditions because humans have not yet begun to use interstellar travel.
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Known Space / int_89f50aaa	type	Restraining Bolt
Known Space / int_89f50aaa	comment	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 his (Louis's) 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 attacked him.
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Known Space / int_8a27f768	type	Space Whale
Known Space / int_8a27f768	comment	Space Whale: The starseeds are spacegoing lifeforms that migrate from system to system. The Outsiders follow them for reasons they will only reveal for the right price.
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Known Space / int_8a6423b6	type	Cosplay
Known Space / int_8a6423b6	comment	In "Flatlander", Beowulf Shaeffer briefly meets a race car enthusiast who cosplays as The Joker. (Impossibly Cool Clothes and Body Paint are fashionable on Earth.) The same story also references Oliver Wendell Holmes' "One-Hoss Shay" ("all at once and nothing first").
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Known Space / int_8a943fe3	type	Space Cold War
Known Space / int_8a943fe3	comment	Space Cold War: The state of things between the Humans and the Kzinti, after the last Man-Kzin war. Humans aren't completely serious about it; Kzinti always attack before they've prepared properly, so the humans invariably beat them back and take a few more worlds as peace concessions. It's expected the Kzinti will learn to stop attacking humans before they learn how to actually beat them.
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Known Space / int_8c1ad82f	type	Proud Warrior Race Guy
Known Space / int_8c1ad82f	comment	The Kzin used stolen tech to turn themselves into Proud Warrior Race Guys (not to mention render their females non-sapient).
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Known Space / int_8c4b72dd	type	United Nations Is a Superpower
Known Space / int_8c4b72dd	comment	United Nations Is a Superpower: As time goes by, the U.N. develops into a planetary government, enforcing its will through ARM.
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Known Space / int_8c995bfc	type	Zero-G Spot
Known Space / int_8c995bfc	comment	Zero-G Spot: Zero-g sex is far from uncommon, due to zero-g "sleep fields" which work anywhere. The complications involved in having sex in the Moon's low gravity are also touched on in The Patchwork Girl.
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Known Space / int_8d0785d5	type	Didn't Think This Through
Known Space / int_8d0785d5	comment	Literally so with the Thrintun. 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.
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Known Space / int_8e92e125	type	Lawyer-Friendly Cameo
Known Space / int_8e92e125	comment	Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: When Beowulf Shaeffer meets an old-fashioned internal combustion race car driver in "Flatlander", he describes him as having shiny green hair, a bony white face, and a grinning scarlet mouth. He demurs when the racer offers him a lift, noting "this joker was obviously dangerously insane".
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Known Space / int_9298d265	type	Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life
Known Space / int_9298d265	comment	Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life: In the Gil "The ARM" era, running a stop sign can get you executed.
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Known Space / int_92ac1ba0	type	Alternative Number System
Known Space / int_92ac1ba0	comment	Alternative Number System: The Kzinti count in base eight. It is eventually determined that the Jotok count in something like a base 25 system.
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Known Space / int_95265081	type	Leeroy Jenkins
Known Space / int_95265081	comment	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.
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Known Space / int_95bac90d	type	Subspace Ansible
Known Space / int_95bac90d	comment	Subspace Ansible: Hyperwave signals are much faster than hyperdrive starships, but can only broadcast from station to station outside of the gravity well of a star. The signal must be converted to standard light-speed communication to actually reach a planet, so it could still take hours to make a phone call from Earth to Alpha Centauri.
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Known Space / int_961c30e5	type	Teleportation
Known Space / int_961c30e5	comment	Teleportation: Transfer booths on Earth and other planets. Stepping discs on the Puppeteer homeworld.
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Known Space / int_97838192	type	Heroic Lineage
Known Space / int_97838192	comment	Heroic Lineage: Beowulf Shaeffer, the protagonist of the stories collected in Crashlander is the adoptive father of Louis Wu, the hero of There Is A Tide, the Ringworld series, Betrayer of Worlds, and Fate of Worlds. Shaeffer is once asked about having a hero's name and it turns out he has no idea who the original Beowulf was. Carlos Gridley Wu, who features in several stories with Bey and is a super-genius with an unlimited breeding license, is the biological father of Louis Wu.
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Known Space / int_97aaa7f3	type	In the Blood
Known Space / int_97aaa7f3	comment	In the Blood: Inherent to the series is the concept that personality is as much a product of heredity as physiology — genetic engineering or just plain old controlled breeding can be used to give species universal traits. The Kzin used stolen tech to turn themselves into Proud Warrior Race Guys (not to mention render their females non-sapient). The Puppeters warped their "turn-and-kick-with-third-leg" response into Dirty Cowardice. Humanity did an amazing amount of damage to themselves in this manner completely by accident. In the early 21st century, advances in organ transplant technology enabled universal transplant compatibility. Human lifespans could be greatly expanded by simply replacing a person's worn-out parts. As a result, all forms of burial save organ harvest became illegal, governments started using executed criminals for organ transplants, and Earth started Sliding Down The Slippery Slope to All Crimes Are Equal in pursuit of transplant stock. However, it turned out that criminal behavior such as 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; a century later, "sane" humans can only be violent or disobedient if threatened within an inch of their lives, and even then it's chancy (cops can usher most convicted criminals off to have their organs harvested without a struggle), and even if it's a justified situation, The Government then starts treating them as psychotic, because most of the time it is the result of a psychotic break. One such psychotic had to go off his meds in order to fend off the Kzinti — and ended up organ stock for his trouble. Even after synthetic transplants become available and the organ banks disappeared the damage to human genetic diversity had already been done.
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Known Space / int_97f53f5b	type	Superweapon Surprise
Known Space / int_97f53f5b	comment	Superweapon Surprise: See the entries below for Wave-Motion Gun: "Madness Has Its Place" and Weaponized Exhaust. It's canon that while the vast majority of humanity truly believed that they had become a peaceful, demilitarized race, the ARM specifically directed technology to develop this way, just in case. Good thing too, once humans encountered the Kzinti. Surprise! Also a major point in Ringworld, as Nessus the puppeteer goes around their exploration ship pointing out exploration tools and explaining their mundane use, but also mentioning to please be careful not to point this end at your best friend and push this button here or he might not be your best friend anymore. Or anything more than a rapidly dispersing cloud of ionized gas, for that matter. But it's not a weapon, honest! Acknowleged and poked fun of in the same book: all these not-weapons and Nessus's insistance on their ship being unarmed inspires Louis Wu to name the ship "Lying Bastard".
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Known Space / int_9823f7c	type	ProudWarriorRace
Known Space / int_9823f7c	comment	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, and duels to the death over points of personal honor and pride are very common.
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Known Space / int_9959141d	type	Danger in the Galactic Core
Known Space / int_9959141d	comment	Danger in the Galactic Core: The galactic core has already exploded, but the light won't get to human space for another twenty thousand years, so they're not particularly fussed about it. The puppeteers, on the other hand...
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Known Space / int_9ae5a580	type	Razor Floss
Known Space / int_9ae5a580	comment	Nessus the Puppeteer loses one of his heads to monomolecular shadow-square wire in Ringworld. Of course, as his brain isn't located in either of his heads, this isn't as drastic an injury for him as it would be for a human being. This is lampshaded in Louis Wu's thoughts as he's using his belt to staunch the bleeding. "You put a tourniquet around his neck, doctor?"
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Known Space / int_9b0b8109	type	Floating Continent
Known Space / int_9b0b8109	comment	Floating Continent: The Ringworld's City Builder civilization had everything from flying buildings to entire flying cities. Then the superconductor plague cut the power to most of them...
Known Space / int_9b0b8109	featureApplicability	1.0
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Known Space / int_9c842299	type	Weaponized Exhaust
Known Space / int_9c842299	comment	Weaponized Exhaust: The warlike Kzinti stumble upon a completely demilitarised humanity. They invade, only to find out that reaction drives and solar sail launching lasers are actually pretty good at blowing things up. Surprise! Humans call this "The Kzinti Lesson": "The more efficient a reaction drive, the more effective a weapon it makes." It came as a great shock to the Kzinti, because their telepathic spies kept telling them that human spaceships were unarmed.
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Known Space / int_9ca12273	type	Handy Feet
Known Space / int_9ca12273	comment	Handy Feet: People who grew up in space tend to be extremely slim and limber. Beowulf Shaeffer has a habit of holding his cigarettes with his toes, leaving both hands free to work as he smokes.
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Known Space / int_9d1fa121	type	Alien Catnip
Known Space / int_9d1fa121	comment	Alien Catnip: One Man-Kzin Wars short featured a mixed human and Kzin crew surveying a distant planet and discovering a substance that causes the felinoid Kzin to act just like cats on ... catnip. Hilarity Ensues. Followed by quarantine.
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Known Space / int_9f50dbe6	type	Infinite Supplies
Known Space / int_9f50dbe6	comment	Infinite Supplies: Autokitchens never run out of raw material, and work a lot like replicators from Star Trek. (They do, however, recycle it). Specifically, there's a point in Ringworld Engineers when Louis wishes that the autokitchen's recycling set-up was a bit less explicit. The toilets (one for him and one for Chmeee, the 8-foot felinoid alien) are on each side of it.
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Known Space / int_9f63d4f1	type	Our Vampires Are Different
Known Space / int_9f63d4f1	comment	Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires are one of the many hominid species of the Ringworld. They are non-sapient predators adapted for feeding on the blood of other hominids, and the Ringworld's civilizations universally view them as dangerous vermin.
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Known Space / int_a05522e3	type	Alien Abduction
Known Space / int_a05522e3	comment	Alien Abduction: The crews and passengers of at least one colony ship were kidnapped and enslaved by the Puppeteers. Human authorities believe those ships were lost with all hands.
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Known Space / int_a1df600	type	Humanity Came from Space
Known Space / int_a1df600	comment	Humanity Came from Space: Or at least, Homo habilis did, in the form of Pak breeders.
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Known Space / int_a246aed6	type	Sapient Cetaceans
Known Space / int_a246aed6	comment	Sapient Cetaceans: Dolphins are not only sapient, they helped colonize the planet Fafnir.
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Known Space / int_a270b9e5	type	Anarchy Is Chaos
Known Space / int_a270b9e5	comment	Anarchy Is Chaos: Cloak of Anarchy posits "anarchy parks" with just one rule: no violence (making them the anarcho-pacifist sort of anarchy). Any time a fight starts (or looks like it might start), floating robots stun all participants, who are then separated. They wake up a few hours later, and it's mentioned that the threat of losing part of your holiday is enough to keep most people in line. Then someone figures out how to make the scanners break down, so "just one rule" (anarcho-pacifism) becomes "no rules", which pretty much fits the "chaos" definition. It's not pretty.
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Known Space / int_a590182a	type	Disintegrator Ray
Known Space / int_a590182a	comment	The Wunderland Treatymaker, a massive Disintegrator Ray, pretty much single-handedly ended the Fourth Man-Kzinti War.
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Known Space / int_a65288e2	type	Ascended Extra
Known Space / int_a65288e2	comment	Ascended Extra: The Hindmost (the political leader of all the Puppeteers) is mentioned in passing in the original Ringworld novel, but becomes a major character in later sequels. He receives much more character development in the prequel Worlds novels.
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Known Space / int_a7caa5b5	type	First Contact
Known Space / int_a7caa5b5	comment	First Contact: Protector, World of Ptavvs, The Warriors, and There Is a Tide detail the first contact between Humans and the Pak, Thrintun, Kzinti, and Trinocs, respectively. Notably, in-universe they don't count the Pak as Contact because Earth is a Pak Lost Colony, and they don't count the Thrintun because the Thrint in question had literally been on Earth since before the Pak colonized it. (Also, the Thrint species has been otherwise extinct for several billion years.)
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Known Space / int_a7d31bf0	type	Auto-Kitchen
Known Space / int_a7d31bf0	comment	Auto-Kitchen: Primitive versions usually produce bricks with different layers of "meat", "vegetable", and "fiber". Later models produce a homogeneous blend out of any available plant tissue.
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Known Space / int_a8a04f6f	type	And I Must Scream
Known Space / int_a8a04f6f	comment	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 sapients 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. In a limited form, the "coffin cure" used by Implementation in A Gift From Earth. Since truth serums are outlawed on Plateau, if they want to interrogate a prisoner, they put them in a sensory deprivation coffin. For days. Most people are no longer entirely sane when they come out, but very cooperative.
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Known Space / int_a9eb984b	type	Warrior Poet
Known Space / int_a9eb984b	comment	Warrior Poet: The Kdatlyno are an entire species of these. At least one of them is also very good at sculpture; a museum on Jinx has several of his sculptures, which are designed to be felt (well, sensed with radar, 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.
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Known Space / int_aa4fa3d5	type	Ancient Astronauts
Known Space / int_aa4fa3d5	comment	Ancient Astronauts: Humanity is descended from the Pak, who colonized and terraformed Earth a million years in the past. Humanity descends from the remnants of the failed Pak colony. All carbon-based life in the entire galaxy is evolved from the food yeast planted and grown on Thrint farm-planets. (Thus explaining why the Kzinti can use Humans and other alien species as food animals.) There is one known exception: Gummidgy life has biochemistry so incompatible with other known life that each is fatally toxic to the other. (In Ringworld, Louis Wu mentions a creature called a Reacher tearing a strip of flesh off him and dying when it ate it.) This exception is explained by an explicit mention that the planet formed elsewhere and was sent into orbit around its host star by a massive impact that occurred long after the fall of the Slaver Empire.
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Known Space / int_aabe2fb	type	Deliberate Values Dissonance
Known Space / int_aabe2fb	comment	Deliberate Values Dissonance: A recurring and invoked theme: thanks at first to easy organ transplants and then boosterspice, many stories have people over a century old — think of your grandparents' embarrassing attitudes towards class, gender, and race, but with young, vital bodies. Thus, many people remember a time when criminals were rehabilitated instead of being made into transplant stock, when the slightest violent tendencies weren't considered mental illness, when history books weren't edited at the drop of a hat. Some have become calculatingly immoral, saying that "The Government brainwashes and kills people whenever they feel like. What does morality even mean when every cop is a mental rapist and/or a murderer?" A creepy example is Gil Hamilton's girlfriend, a doctor who doesn't so much treat illnesses as replace failing organs — she's careful not to talk shop with Gil, as it reminds her that her transplant stock is not so much raw materials as parts of executed criminals or even seizures from their stockpiles of murder victims, making her more a Frankenstein than a healer.
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Known Space / int_aba5e1d1	type	Pluto Is Expendable
Known Space / int_aba5e1d1	comment	Pluto Is Expendable: In World of Ptavvs, Pluto is set on fire... yes, the entire planet is set on fire... by the fusion exhaust of a spacecraft.
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Known Space / int_abb930ed	type	Sleeper Starship
Known Space / int_abb930ed	comment	Sleeper Starship: The titular dead people in The Defenseless Dead. This is also how Plateau, We Made It, Wunderland, and Home were colonized. Curiously, this continues to be used for some types of transports for centuries after humans acquire hyperdrives and no longer need to use slower-than-light ships to travel between star systems. These transports are very cheap to ride compared to conventional liners because they always travel fully loaded and require only an operating crew without such extras as stewards to look after passengers. The downside is you don't know how long it's going to be before you get there and get revived, as the ship won't leave until it's full. If you're moving to a new planet, most people find this perfectly acceptable. It's also the only way 'flat-phobes' (people with a pathological fear of not being on Earth) can travel off Earth at all, and then only to worlds that can do a pretty good imitation of it.
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Known Space / int_acbd5c12	type	Perfect Pacifist People
Known Space / int_acbd5c12	comment	Perfect Pacifist People: Loosely followed; it seems the peace is somewhat forced by the A.R.M., who rule Earth with a soft but tight iron grip backed up by Government Drug Enforcement. The golden age comes to an end upon First Contact with the Kzin.
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Known Space / int_ae372576	type	I Warned You
Known Space / int_ae372576	comment	I Warned You: A fairly epic example in "Flatlander", where Beowulf Shaeffer delivers a full paragraph of variations on "I Told You So" to Gregory Pelton.
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Known Space / int_ae69516f	type	Artificial Gravity
Known Space / int_ae69516f	comment	Artificial Gravity: The Jotok invented one type, their traitorous Kzin mercenaries stole it and introduced it to humans. Used extensively by the Brennan-protector in the landscaping of his asteroid hideout Kobold.
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Known Space / int_af4ca2bf	type	Space Police
Known Space / int_af4ca2bf	comment	Space Police: The Goldskins (so named because of the color of their pressure suits) who patrol the Belt for smugglers.
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Known Space / int_b1a38af3	type	Terraforming
Known Space / int_b1a38af3	comment	Humanity is descended from the Pak, who colonized and terraformed Earth a million years in the past. Humanity descends from the remnants of the failed Pak colony.
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Known Space / int_b2b6abb7	type	Space Romans
Known Space / int_b2b6abb7	comment	Space Romans: One short story has a literal realm of Space Romans on an on-and-off battle with local Kzin, who are also at least familiar with firearms and other advances. It's revealed that said Romans are mainly the descendants of the Vanished Legion along with their families and slaves (which help explain the social structure and very classical attire, complete with legionnaire armor). They're revealed to have been brought there by aliens believing that they would make good slaves...only of them to overrun their would-be-masters and enslave them.
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Known Space / int_b39b94da	type	Born Lucky
Known Space / int_b39b94da	comment	Born Lucky: The Pierson's Puppeteers manipulated human fertility laws to produce lucky humans. In Ringworld, Teela Brown is the most obvious product. By Safe at Any Speed (chronologically the last Known Space story), the "Teela gene" has spread to the entire human species.
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Known Space / int_b3eecaae	type	Colony Drop
Known Space / int_b3eecaae	comment	Colony Drop: In World of Ptavvs, a stasis field moving at relativistic speed slams into Pluto, punching it into a new orbit.
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Known Space / int_b58b4e3c	type	Too Dumb to Live
Known Space / int_b58b4e3c	comment	Too Dumb to Live: The Kzinti. 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 Kzin have all been killed off in wars against humans over the past 500 years, and only the Kzin 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 reveal that the Kzinti were enslaved in their early bronze age by another species who valued their martial abilities. The Kzin rebelled and used their former master's 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, though there seems to have been a cultural aspect to that change as well as the genetic engineering. The Kzin 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. Literally so with the Thrintun. 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. From Beowulf Shaeffer's perspective, humans from Earth, AKA "Flatlanders" have so little survival instinct that the only reason they haven't gone extinct is because Earth itself is all but wrapped in rubber foam and its ecosystem has been scrubbed of every threat right down to the common cold. Gregory "Elephant" Pelton, the richest flatlander alive, goes with Shaeffer on a joyride to an unknown world simply because the Outsiders say it's the most unusual planet they know of within a reasonable travel distance. Elephant refuses to pay to learn exactly why it's so "distinctive", and once in orbit, the Made of Indestructium General Products hull of his space yacht disintegrates. He still wants to land and look around. Shaeffer puts his foot down, says, "Elephant, we have no hull" and turns the ship around. Turns out the planet is made of antimatter. At the end of the story, Elephant is thinking of going back and dropping a flag on it. From a "safe" distance. To watch what happens.
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Known Space / int_b8a7816d	type	Psychoactive Powers
Known Space / int_b8a7816d	comment	Psychoactive Powers: Psychic powers in general. Every example has enough drawbacks that in most milieus they'd be considered useless. Gil Hamilton's telekinetic "imaginary arm" works this way. It's limited to the range of his real arm, because that's how he visualizes the power — except that he can reach through objects, reach into sufficiently realistic projected images, and touch and manipulate objects that appear to be within arm's reach. In "The Defenseless Dead", he gives a former kidnap victim a screaming freakout by reaching through a Holographic Terminal and picking up a pencil the former kidnap victim is so freaked out because he is actually the villain of the story, an organlegger who had used a Brain Transplant to assume his victim's identity. He freaked out because he had heard how Gil killed one of his competitors with his imaginary arm at the end of "Death by Ecstacy" and thought he might be next. Gil trains this ability further, and in "The Patchwork Girl" this enables him to search huge swaths of the lunar surface by sweeping the arm through a scaled-down high-definition hologram. Julie, one of Gil's fellow ARM agents, is a telepath with planetary range... as long as she's in love with the person in question. Luckily, she Really Gets Around and can find things to love about pretty much anyone. In-between acting as a psychic therapist, she reads the thoughts of every ARM agent not in direct contact with headquarters in sequence every fifteens specifically so she can send help if one gets in trouble. Of course, in order to keep that going, every one of her "harem" has to constantly hold her in the highest regard, because if she falls out of love with them she can't read them anymore. Larry Greenberg in World of Ptavvs is one of the most powerful natural human telepaths. With the help of a contact helmet he basically gets a complete copy of the memories of anyone he contacts. There's a moment of confusion each time he uses it until his personality works out which set of memories is his and which is the copy he just received. It works great until he uses it on a telepathic alien that has read thousands of other minds. Suddenly Greenberg thinks he is the alien somehow transplanted into a human body. It takes several demonstrations of how stupid Kzanol is and a bump on the head to finally allow Greenberg's personality to re-assert his control. The ending of the novel also makes it clear that Greenberg's personality picks up traits from each person he has contacted, making his final "Greenberg" personality more of a blend. Matt Keller in A Gift From Earth can cause people to forget about his existence when he feels threatened or excited. This is a very useful survival ability in the tyrannical society of Plateau, where any Colonist who stands out too much tends to end up in the organ banks as transplant stock. It has the drawbacks that people he's known his whole life don't remember his name, the only job he could get was "mining worm wrangler" because it doesn't involve working with other humans who might forget he's there, and it's been impossible for him to get a date because as soon as he gets excited about a girl she forgets he exists. By the end of the book Matt learns to have more conscious control over his ability, and that he can reverse it to make someone intensely interested in him.
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Known Space / int_b8c61b01	type	Archaeological Arms Race
Known Space / int_b8c61b01	comment	Archaeological Arms Race: Rivalry over long-dead races' Lost Technology creates conflict in some stories, such as "The Soft Weapon".
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Known Space / int_b999f0a4	type	Overused Running Gag
Known Space / int_b999f0a4	comment	Disintegrators are just mining tools, honest! Lampshaded in Ringworld, where Nessus gives Louis a modified Slaver digging tool with a second, parallel beam that suppresses the charge on the proton; he is advised by Nessus that he should not use both beams at once, because then 'there would be a current flow'. Inverted during the Fourth Man-Kzin War by the Wunderland Treatymaker, a twin-beam variant of the Slaver digging tool which was used on the Kzin outpost of Warhead, carving a titanic rift in the Mars-like planet's crust, and giving it an ecosystem by causing its thin atmosphere to flow into the resulting canyon and become condensed enough to breathe; the planet was seized as reparations, becoming known as "Canyon", the rift being the only inhabited part of the planet.
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Known Space / int_ba7b1199	type	Roc Birds
Known Space / int_ba7b1199	comment	Roc Birds: The short story "Safe at Any Speed" features rocs in the form of gigantic alien birds large enough to swallow a car whole.
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Known Space / int_bb40e7e0	type	Failed Future Forecast
Known Space / int_bb40e7e0	comment	Failed Future Forecast: The setting was first written off in the 1960s, and has an elaborate Backstory. Naturally, a lot of that backstory has not exactly come to pass in real life — we have yet to start mining the rest of the solar system, for instance.
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Known Space / int_bc00493f	type	Precision F-Strike
Known Space / int_bc00493f	comment	Precision F-Strike: Downplayed, Lampshaded and Played for Laughs in "Flatlander" —
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Known Space / int_bca8900a	type	Government Drug Enforcement
Known Space / int_bca8900a	comment	Government Drug Enforcement: The insane can be prosecuted if they don't take their drugs according to schedule. Definitions of what is "sane" or not vary wildly over time and from planet to planet, however. This uses a "soft" variation: unless your condition would render you dangerous otherwise, you are not required to take your drugs. However, since the drugs are always available, insanity is considered voluntary and thusly is no longer a legal defense for your actions.
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Known Space / int_bd8b2b0b	type	To Serve Man
Known Space / int_bd8b2b0b	comment	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. She loses one arm, but the Kzin are killed by the weapon's self-destruct setting before they eat it. And she gets her arm re-grown once they get back to civilization. It's illegal (at least in Human-controlled space) for replicators to make human blood for food purposes, but they're capable of it.
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Known Space / int_bddced73	type	Victory-Guided Amnesia
Known Space / int_bddced73	comment	Victory-Guided Amnesia: In Betrayer of Worlds, Louis Wu (70 years before the events of Ringworld) accepts a job from Nessus with the understanding that his memory of it will be erased afterwards. (It's not even much of a victory because The Bad Guy Wins, which becomes a Sequel Hook for Fate of Worlds.)
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Known Space / int_be102b6a	type	GÃ¶tterdÃ¤mmerung
Known Space / int_be102b6a	comment	GÃ¶tterdÃ¤mmerung: The Norse version of the term (Ragnarok) is the title of one of the last sections of Fate of Worlds. Also, the Thrintun's final spiteful act to wipe out all life in the galaxy would qualify, seeing as they thought themselves to be living gods destined to rule the galaxy.
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Known Space / int_bf1255fa	type	Really Gets Around
Known Space / int_bf1255fa	comment	Julie, one of Gil's fellow ARM agents, is a telepath with planetary range... as long as she's in love with the person in question. Luckily, she Really Gets Around and can find things to love about pretty much anyone. In-between acting as a psychic therapist, she reads the thoughts of every ARM agent not in direct contact with headquarters in sequence every fifteens specifically so she can send help if one gets in trouble. Of course, in order to keep that going, every one of her "harem" has to constantly hold her in the highest regard, because if she falls out of love with them she can't read them anymore.
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Known Space / int_c30dba21	type	Parasites Are Evil
Known Space / int_c30dba21	comment	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.
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Known Space / int_c6d96108	type	Proud Hunter Race
Known Space / int_c6d96108	comment	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.
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Known Space / int_c75df49a	type	Shout-Out
Known Space / int_c75df49a	comment	Shout-Out: Eric the Cyborg calling himself "Donovan's Brain" is a reference to Curt Siodmak's novel of the same name. Whether Eric's last name really is Donovan is unclear. The frumious bandersnatch native to Jinx is named after a creature in "Jabberwocky". In "Flatlander", Beowulf Shaeffer briefly meets a race car enthusiast who cosplays as The Joker. (Impossibly Cool Clothes and Body Paint are fashionable on Earth.) The same story also references Oliver Wendell Holmes' "One-Hoss Shay" ("all at once and nothing first"). Beowulf's girlfriend (and Louis' mother) is working for a computer company called "Donovan's Brains" at the time Beowulf first meets her. Louis Wu's middle name, Gridley, may be a reference to Jason Gridley from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar novels. In Fate of Worlds, the puppeteer Achilles realizes his super-powerful AI Proteus is rebelling against him when Proteus says "I'm afraid I can't do that." The title of the short story "Safe at Any Speed" parodies Unsafe at Any Speed, the exposÃ© about car safety that made Ralph Nader famous. "The first man to see a puppeteer had done so during a Campish revival of Time For Beany reruns." — "The Soft Weapon" In Destiny's Forge, Pouncer's mother was named M'Ress, and his mate is named C'Mell. The name of the reputation-based currency used on Kzinhome, strakh, comes from Jack Vance's short story "The Moon Moth". Also see Whole-Plot Reference below.
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Known Space / int_c7b5445c	type	Cool Starship
Known Space / int_c7b5445c	comment	Cool Starship: Starships constructed with General Products hulls are indestructible to everything but antimatter (and a very, very specific type of hacking sabotage) and are transparent. Eventually the Ringworld itself qualifies as the coolest ship ever. There are at least two more ways to destroy a GP hull, if you can get close enough to an essential part of it. Also, you don't necessarily have to damage the hull itself to kill or destroy whatever's inside.
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Known Space / int_ca27661f	type	Too Many Halves
Known Space / int_ca27661f	comment	Too Many Halves: From Destiny's Forge:
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Known Space / int_ca87e3ec	type	No Name Given
Known Space / int_ca87e3ec	comment	Eric the Cyborg calling himself "Donovan's Brain" is a reference to Curt Siodmak's novel of the same name. Whether Eric's last name really is Donovan is unclear.
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Known Space / int_cd83fa5b	type	Spoiler Opening
Known Space / int_cd83fa5b	comment	Spoiler Opening: At the beginning of Fleet of Worlds is a timeline that ends with "New Terra charts its own course." This was supposed to sound cryptic, but it gives the book's ending away, especially if you notice that the Fleet of Worlds is described as having six planets during this novel, but in Ringworld it only had five.
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Known Space / int_ceb7336a	type	Wetware CPU
Known Space / int_ceb7336a	comment	Wetware CPU: The short story "Becalmed in Hell" has the brain jar of Eric Donovan, who was mortally wounded in an accident, installed in a spaceship designed to explore Venus.
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Known Space / int_cfcabcf	type	Nuclear Torch Rocket
Known Space / int_cfcabcf	comment	Nuclear Torch Rocket: Fusion rockets are a basic space-travel engine (most species use reactionless drives). It's noted that humans like torch engines because they double as guns. Ring World has the main character's ship equipped with torch drive retros for this very reason.
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Known Space / int_d10d5eb5	type	Made of Indestructium
Known Space / int_d10d5eb5	comment	Made of Indestructium: Anything enclosed in a stasis field is completely indestructiblenote except probably by being dropped into a black hole, totally rigid, and reflects all forms of energy. There are also Nigh-Invulnerable materials such as General Products hulls (see under Cool Ship) and scrith (see under Applied Phlebotinum). Larry Niven later notes he wished hadn't invented most of them, as they were too good, and closed off many story possibilities.
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Known Space / int_d332bf54	type	Lampshaded
Known Space / int_d332bf54	comment	Lampshaded in Ringworld, where Nessus gives Louis a modified Slaver digging tool with a second, parallel beam that suppresses the charge on the proton; he is advised by Nessus that he should not use both beams at once, because then 'there would be a current flow'.
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Known Space / int_d4df1797	type	Cowardly Sidekick
Known Space / int_d4df1797	comment	Cowardly Sidekick: Nessus the Puppeteer, from Ringworld.
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Known Space / int_d4f376f9	type	Canon Sue
Known Space / int_d4f376f9	comment	Characters who are able to avoid the disadvantages of transforming into protectors will start looking like Canon Sues: in Ringworld's Children, Louis Wu becomes a protector, but the nanotech-based autodoc his father invented turns him back into a breeder at the end. For this reason, the Ringworld RPG has a rule that any player whose character becomes a protector must permanently give up control of that character to the GM.
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Known Space / int_d69fab2b	type	InertialDamping
Known Space / int_d69fab2b	comment	Inertial Damping: It is often (correctly) pointed out that the crew of a starship only has to worry about inertia when they are accelerating or decelerating. For such times, the ships use artificial gravity to reduce the effects of high acceleration (massively high acceleration in some cases; for example, at one point in the short story "Flatlander", the starship ''Slower Than Infinity" is accelerating at nearly 200 gravities).
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Known Space / int_d7b34c31	type	Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"
Known Space / int_d7b34c31	comment	Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Kzinti are referred to by their job — Flyer, Engineer, Telepath, — until they reach a sufficient rank in their society. Speaker-To-Animals is a diplomat on Earth whose trials on the Ringworld earn him his name, Chmeee.
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Known Space / int_d85e0470	type	Agri World
Known Space / int_d85e0470	comment	Agri World: The City Planet homeworld of the Puppeteers has four farm worlds dedicated to growing food for its enormous population.
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Known Space / int_d8b3412b	type	The Singularity
Known Space / int_d8b3412b	comment	Although not set in the Known Universe, Niven has written a handful of stories dealing directly with AI. Upon reaching sentience, they become the embodiment of The Singularity, attempting to increase their knowledge exponentially. At some point they either "learn everything" and decide to shut themselves down, or they learn something about the universe that convinces them to shut themselves down. Nobody knows the exact reason because by the time they reach that point, they aren't answering questions anymore.
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Known Space / int_dcac10e4	type	Tidally Locked Planet
Known Space / int_dcac10e4	comment	Tidally Locked Planet: Jinx. The colonists live along a narrow band encompassing the prime meridian and have completely black skin from the radiation. It also has very high gravity.
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Known Space / int_dd51740f	type	P.O.V. Sequel
Known Space / int_dd51740f	comment	P.O.V. Sequel: Much of Juggler of Worlds is a retelling of the Beowulf Shaeffer stories from the perspectives of Sigmund Ausfaller, Nessus and Baedeker.
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Known Space / int_de98d218	type	Poke in the Third Eye
Known Space / int_de98d218	comment	Poke in the Third Eye: Kzinti often use telepaths to inspect and interrogate prisoners. They are also carnivores who find herbivory morally and conceptually repugnant. In "The Soft Weapon", while being scanned by a telepath, the main character concentrates on the taste and texture of eating a raw carrot, "just to be difficult".
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Known Space / int_df1baa1f	type	Love Is in the Air
Known Space / int_df1baa1f	comment	Love Is in the Air: Ringworld vampires have super-pheromones that induce a very distracting mating frenzy in their victims. "Essence of Vamp" is a popular perfume among City Builders...
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Known Space / int_df77bb33	type	Ambadassador
Known Space / int_df77bb33	comment	Ambadassador: Speaker-to-Animals was an embassy legate of the Kzinti ambassador to Earth before being recruited for the First Ringworld Expedition. While he was (in Nessus' words) a "tamed" Kzin, as one of the most diplomatic of his species being the product of the Puppeteers' efforts to breed some sense of diplomacy into them by arranging for the Humans to win the First Man-Kzin War, a "docile" Kzin is still a three meter tall wall of carnivorous fury. Nessus, and perhaps several other "mad" Puppeteers, also count; while Nessus is still abjectly cautious and mildly paranoid most of the time, he not only was willing to go on the Ringworld Expedition despite immense personal risk, he faced down angry Kzinti on several occasions (starting in "The Soft Weapon", where he kicked Chuft-Captain and broke several of his rib-analogs). While he was not an ambassador as such, Puppeteers insane enough to travel by starship are so rare that any Puppeteer a human is likely to meet who is in good standing back home (unlike Hindmost during the Second Ringworld Expedition) will have plenary consular powers as well as negotiating authority with the General Products Corporation.
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Known Space / int_e0207930	type	Humans Are Special
Known Space / int_e0207930	comment	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.
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Known Space / int_e1836adf	type	Bizarre Alien Sexes
Known Space / int_e1836adf	comment	Bizarre Alien Sexes: Several. The Puppeteers, who are already fairly strange looking, 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. 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. Kzinti reproduction is close to the Standard Earth Model in that there are clearly identifiable males and females, but the females are non-sapient. Maybe. The Kzinti certainly claim this is the case, but some stories in the Man-Kzin Wars series feature intelligent females, and the females of the Map of Kzin on Ringworld are sapient (although still close enough to the same species to interbreed with Chmeee). 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 a slave. Grog males are non-sapient. The females become sessile when they become adults and are only able to 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. Protector reveals that humans are stuck in what the Pak call the Breeder stage. When we become older adults we are supposed to consume Tree of Life and metemorphose into the Protector stage, which are much more intelligent and physically capable, but also sterile. Earth was colonized by Pak who realized too late that Tree of Life doesn't grow properly in Earth soil.
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Known Space / int_e1f90397	type	Body Paint
Known Space / int_e1f90397	comment	Body Paint: Flatlanders (humans from Earth) use cosmetic drugs to change their skin, hair, and eye colors, to the point that walking down a slidewalk in a big city can be like watching a rainbow walk by. Basic patterns are even possible. Combine this with an almost complete lack of a social nudity taboo (Earth is far too crowded by this point for a nudity taboo to be at all practical), and this trope is in full force. It was inverted in one story, Louis Wu shocked everyone at a party by showing up dressed in nothing but his natural coloration; it wasn't his nudity that was shocking... it was his lack of bodypaint.
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Known Space / int_e303d198	type	Whole-Plot Reference
Known Space / int_e303d198	comment	Whole-Plot Reference: Paul Chafe's Man-Kzin Wars novel Destiny's Forge is basically a retelling of Dune, with Pouncer, First-Son of Patriarch Meerz-Rrit, as Paul Atreides, Tzaatz Pride as House Harkonnen, the czrav, low-tech jungle-dwelling kzinti, as the Fremen, the elephant-like tuskvor as the sandworms, and sthondat lymph as the Water of Life.
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Known Space / int_e34541d	type	One World Order
Known Space / int_e34541d	comment	The ARM police (the law enforcement agency of the United Nations) regularly go on "mother hunts" for those people who illegally go over their reproductive limits.
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Known Space / int_e540d1e6	type	Camp
Known Space / int_e540d1e6	comment	"The first man to see a puppeteer had done so during a Campish revival of Time For Beany reruns." — "The Soft Weapon"
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Known Space / int_e78aa97d	type	Rubber-Forehead Aliens
Known Space / int_e78aa97d	comment	Rubber-Forehead Aliens: On the Ringworld, with the exception of the garden maps and food animals, pretty much all life is some sort of strange Hominid species. Justified since they all evolved from the same common ancestor as human beings from Earth.
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Known Space / int_e7b0229a	type	Laser-Guided Amnesia
Known Space / int_e7b0229a	comment	Laser-Guided Amnesia: Beowulf Shaeffer only mentions in passing that, because Puppeteers accept blackmail as a legitimate business practice, they can make such arrangements safe with selective memory erasure. This becomes much more significant later in the Fleet of Worlds series, when they use memory erasure extensively to protect the secret of New Terra (see below under Masquerade).
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Known Space / int_e8123047	type	Borrowed Biometric Bypass
Known Space / int_e8123047	comment	Borrowed Biometric Bypass: In the Known Space universe, organleggers were known to harvest people for their organs. In one "Gil the ARM" story, it's noted that eyes are particularly in demand by criminals, to get past retina scanners with transplanted eyes taken from organlegger victims.
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Known Space / int_e8bb3043	type	Kill It with Water
Known Space / int_e8bb3043	comment	Kill It with Water: Niven's version of Martians have an exotic biochemistry using nitric acid as a solvent, and explode on contact with liquid water. Deeming them a potential threat to humans, the Brennan-protector wipes them out by dropping a massive ice comet on Mars.
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Known Space / int_e8dda3a2	type	Neglectful Precursors
Known Space / int_e8dda3a2	comment	Neglectful Precursors: Justified. When the Pak protectors left breeder-stage Pak on a prehistoric colony world, 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 on Earth, 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.
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Known Space / int_e8e56799	type	Blue-and-Orange Morality
Known Space / int_e8e56799	comment	Blue-and-Orange Morality: Many of the alien species have psychologies — and therefore moral compasses — that are completely, well, alien to the human mind. The Pierson's Puppeteers 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. Some periods' humans show signs of this, as with the Brennen-era flatlanders' incomprehension of willful violence, or the widespread indifference to converting even the pettiest of lawbreakers into spare parts.
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Known Space / int_eff83d77	type	Mundane Utility
Known Space / int_eff83d77	comment	Mundane Utility: Humans don't really build much in the way of dedicated weapons, even after the Man-Kzin Wars. However, nearly all of their useful tools will inevitably have a setting that is lethal when pointed at something fleshy. Communication lasers have a setting meant for communicating with ships in orbit, which also just happens to, uh, lase large holes in things that are not in orbit. Fusion drives are sort of inefficient ship engines, but they have a use that more advanced thrusters do not: you can hover over anything and watch fusion exhaust turn it into slag. Ramscoops use a powerful miles-wide magnetic field to suck in hydrogen from a large area in front of a ship to power the engines. This magnetic field has catastrophic effects on anything with a nervous system that happens to be in the field when it's turned on. Disintegrators are just mining tools, honest! Lampshaded in Ringworld, where Nessus gives Louis a modified Slaver digging tool with a second, parallel beam that suppresses the charge on the proton; he is advised by Nessus that he should not use both beams at once, because then 'there would be a current flow'. Inverted during the Fourth Man-Kzin War by the Wunderland Treatymaker, a twin-beam variant of the Slaver digging tool which was used on the Kzin outpost of Warhead, carving a titanic rift in the Mars-like planet's crust, and giving it an ecosystem by causing its thin atmosphere to flow into the resulting canyon and become condensed enough to breathe; the planet was seized as reparations, becoming known as "Canyon", the rift being the only inhabited part of the planet.
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Known Space / int_f01a1b71	type	Insignificant Little Blue Planet
Known Space / int_f01a1b71	comment	Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Humans from Earth's colonies have this attitude towards Earth. Humans from Earth make fun of them for it.
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Known Space / int_f03efcdb	type	Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong
Known Space / int_f03efcdb	comment	The Puppeteers, who are already fairly strange looking, 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. 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.
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Known Space / int_f3fac450	type	Brain in a Jar
Known Space / int_f3fac450	comment	Brain in a Jar: Eric the Cyborg, a disembodied brain of a previously injured man who took the part of ship's computer in Becalmed in Hell and The Coldest Place.
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Known Space / int_f56aeb67	type	Alien Invasion
Known Space / int_f56aeb67	comment	Alien Invasion: The Man-Kzin Wars, all of which were won by humanity, thanks to the Kzinti inability to think before they leap.
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Known Space / int_f5c7852d	type	Portal Picture
Known Space / int_f5c7852d	comment	Gil Hamilton's telekinetic "imaginary arm" works this way. It's limited to the range of his real arm, because that's how he visualizes the power — except that he can reach through objects, reach into sufficiently realistic projected images, and touch and manipulate objects that appear to be within arm's reach. In "The Defenseless Dead", he gives a former kidnap victim a screaming freakout by reaching through a Holographic Terminal and picking up a pencil the former kidnap victim is so freaked out because he is actually the villain of the story, an organlegger who had used a Brain Transplant to assume his victim's identity. He freaked out because he had heard how Gil killed one of his competitors with his imaginary arm at the end of "Death by Ecstacy" and thought he might be next. Gil trains this ability further, and in "The Patchwork Girl" this enables him to search huge swaths of the lunar surface by sweeping the arm through a scaled-down high-definition hologram.
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Known Space / int_f6370d13	type	Organ Theft
Known Space / int_f6370d13	comment	Organ Theft: This trope originated with Known Space. Early Known Space stories thoroughly explored the dangers of transplant technology outstripping organ synthesis, to the point where lawmakers would obsessively change laws to make all crimes into death sentences just to keep up with the demand for organs. With the price of organs being so high due to demand, it's almost inevitable that illegal organ harvesting becomes a frequent concern, enough so that the process becomes known as "organlegging", a Portmanteau of "organ" and "bootlegging".
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Known Space / int_f63dbaf0	type	Xenophobic Herbivore
Known Space / int_f63dbaf0	comment	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.
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Known Space / int_f77aa221	type	Nice Job Breaking It, Herod
Known Space / int_f77aa221	comment	Nice Job Breaking It, Herod: Every Pak protector who ever decimated a planet in an attempt to wipe out rivals' bloodlines is eligible for this one, particularly if its own bloodline got exterminated as a result.
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Known Space / int_f7b57d62	type	Enforced Technology Levels
Known Space / int_f7b57d62	comment	Enforced Technology Levels: Repeatedly stated. The ARM (under the guidance of Protector Jack Brennan) aggressively suppressed any and all technology that could be used by humans to harm other humans, resulting in the Zeerust Schizo Tech of the setting. References are made to planet-cracking superweapons, game-breaking economic theories, and even an invention "that would have forced (the ARM) to make murder legal", none of which could be expanded on so as to protect humanity from dangerous knowledge. Turns out this invention was actually a simple yet unintuitive modification to transfer booths which would allow them to act as people duplicators — this would prove the devices don't teleport humans but kill them and create copies at their destinations, meaning anyone who ever sent another person through a transfer booth was guilty of manslaughter at best.
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Known Space / int_f87886d2	type	Sharpened to a Single Atom
Known Space / int_f87886d2	comment	Sharpened to a Single Atom: The variable sword, a piece of monomolecular wire held taut by a stasis field. Also shadow square wire, which binds together the Ringworld's night-creating structures into a ring. It can cut like a variable sword, but it's flexible instead of rigid and unbreakable.
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Known Space / int_f9a85905	type	Planet Spaceship
Known Space / int_f9a85905	comment	Planet Spaceship: The Pierson's Puppeteers have basically turned their homeworld, along with four more planets into a spaceship, and are using it to flee the explosion at the center of the galaxy.
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Known Space / int_fa9cd4db	type	Democracy Is Bad
Known Space / int_fa9cd4db	comment	Democracy Is Bad: How the organ banks got started; once people realized that they could extend their lives by cutting up "criminals" for spare parts, they pretty much voted themselves into a police state where All Crimes Are Equal.
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Known Space / int_fc9cd837	type	Technology Uplift
Known Space / int_fc9cd837	comment	Technology Uplift: The Kzin were bootstrapped by another species to serve as mercenaries. Unfortunately, they then turned on and enslaved their patrons.
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Known Space / int_fccd06b6	type	Beware the Nice Ones
Known Space / int_fccd06b6	comment	Beware the Nice Ones: In "Procustus", Feather Filip, the ARM trained in martial arts, learns too late that blasting a hole through Sharrol Jan's husband Beowulf Shaeffer in front of her was a big mistake. Feather thought Sharrol was just a dumb Flatlander with no combat training who would be so wigged out by the alien air and light of the planet they were on that she would be unable to do anything to stop her. Sharrol does have a phobia of alien worlds, but she doesn't let that stop her from jumping on Feather's back and cutting her throat, and then when Feather doesn't die quickly enough Sharrol cuts her whole head off. With a belt knife.
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Known Space / int_ffad4e9f	type	Shown Their Work
Known Space / int_ffad4e9f	comment	Shown Their Work: Niven is famous for working out the problems in his ideas. If a new problem comes up, or becomes clear, he will write either a sequel, remake, or some combination of the two to explain it. Crashlander is a collection of the Beowulf Shaeffer short stories with a new story linking them all together. The linking story is jam-packed with retcons intended to fix problems Niven saw in the stories after the fact.
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Known Space / int_name	type	ItemName
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Crashlander	seeAlso	Known Space
Known Space	hasFeature	A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Absolute Xenophobe / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Abusive Precursors / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Actual Pacifist / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Advanced Ancient Humans / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Aesoptinum / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Agony Beam / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Albinos Are Freaks / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Alien Works / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Alternative Number System / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	American Literature (J To M) / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Anarchy Is Chaos / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Antimatter / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Arc Welding / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Artificial Gravity / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Asteroid Miners / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Asteroid Thicket / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Auto-Kitchen / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Baby Factory / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Back-Alley Doctor / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Barehanded Bar Bending / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Battle Trophy / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Beneficial Disease / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Best Served Cold / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Better than Sex / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Big Brother Is Watching / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Billy Needs an Organ / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Bioweapon Beast / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Bizarre Alien Limbs / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Bizarre Alien Locomotion / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Bizarre Alien Psychology / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Bizarre Alien Senses / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Bizarre Alien Sexes / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Bizarre Human Biology / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Blade Below the Shoulder / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Blob Monster / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Body Surf / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Borrowed Biometric Bypass / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Breathable Liquid / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Camp Cook / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Captured Super-Entity / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Cat Folk / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Cerebus Syndrome / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Clean Cut / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Cloning Body Parts / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Cold Sleep, Cold Future / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Compelling Voice / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Conveniently Placed Sharp Thing / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Couldn't Find a Pen / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Cover Drop / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Covert Distress Code / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Creative Sterility / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Creature of Habit / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Crew of One / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Dangerous Phlebotinum Interaction / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Deface of the Moon / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Democracy Is Bad / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Disposable Vehicle Section / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Duel to the Death / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Dumb Struck / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Earth That Used to Be Better / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Exposed Extraterrestrials / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Extra Parent Conception / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Extremophile Lifeforms / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Fantastic Diet Requirement / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Fantastic Livestock / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Fantastic Naming Convention / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Fantastic Slurs / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Fantasy Contraception / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Fear Is the Appropriate Response / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Fictional Painting / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Fictional Political Party / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Flat World / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Forever War / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Forgotten Phlebotinum / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Formerly Sapient Species / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Four-Fingered Hands / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Future Copter / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Future Primitive / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Future Slang / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Gadgeteer Genius / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Getting Eaten Is Harmless / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Giant Flyer / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Gilded Cage / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Give Me Back My Wallet / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Giving Radio to the Romans / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Gold Fever / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	GÃ¶tterdÃ¤mmerung / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Government Agency of Fiction / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Guilt-Free Extermination War / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Handy Feet / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Handy Mouth / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Harmless Freezing / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Heavyworlder / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Hover Bot / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Human Resources / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Human Subspecies / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Humans Are Psychic in the Future / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Humans Are Warriors / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Hypnotic Creature / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Immortality Immorality / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Immune to Mind Control / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Imported Alien Phlebotinum / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	In Working Order / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Inertia Is a Cruel Mistress / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Intelligent Gerbil / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Kill It with Water / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Killer Space Monkey / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Klingon Scientists Get No Respect / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Knowledge Broker / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Landfill Beyond the Stars / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Language Equals Thought / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Laser Blade / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Latex Space Suit / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Life in Zero G / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Life-or-Limb Decision / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Lightning Gun / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Lightworlder / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Literary Allusion Title / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Living Lie Detector / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Lizard Folk / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Locked Room Mystery / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Long-Lived / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Long Neck / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Losing Your Head / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Lost World / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Low Culture, High Tech / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Ludicrous Precision / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Ludicrous Speed / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Luring in Prey / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Made of Indestructium / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Man-Eating Plant / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Mandela Effect / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Maniac Monkeys / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Mix-and-Match Man / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Morph Weapon / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Multipurpose Tongue / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Named After Their Planet / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Naming Your Colony World / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Narrative Profanity Filter / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Natural Weapon / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Neglectful Precursors / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	No Medication for Me / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	No Seat Belts / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Nothing Left to Do but Die / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Nuclear Torch Rocket / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	One Last Smoke / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Organ Theft / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Our Humans Are Different / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Overpopulation Crisis / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Panspermia / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Parasites Are Evil / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Pardon My Klingon / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	People Farms / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Perception Filter / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Pious Monster / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Planet Spaceship / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Planetville / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Pointless Doomsday Device / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Police Psychic / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Population Control / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Power Perversion Potential / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Predators Are Mean / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Proud Hunter Race / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Proud Merchant Race / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Psychic Starship Pilot / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Psychic Static / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Psychoactive Powers / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Punctuation Shaker / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Puny Earthlings / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Quicksand Sucks / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Racial Transformation / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Ray Gun / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Real Men Eat Meat / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Rite-of-Passage Name Change / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Roc Birds / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Ruins of the Modern Age / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Sand Is Water / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Sapient All Along / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Sapient Cetaceans / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Sapient Eat Sapient / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Scary Dogmatic Aliens / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Science Is Bad / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Screw the Money, I Have Rules! / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Self-Destruct Mechanism / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Series Franchise / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Sharpened to a Single Atom / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Significant Wardrobe Shift / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Silver Fox / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Slave Race / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Sleeper Starship / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Smart Gun / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Son of an Ape / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Space Age Stasis / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Space Clothes / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Space Is Cold / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Space Madness / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Space Orcs / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Space Pirates / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Space Whale / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Speculative Biology / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Spheroid Dropship / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Spice of Life / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Standard Sci-Fi History / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Starfish Language / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Stern Chase / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Stomach of Holding / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Success Through Insanity / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Sufficiently Advanced Alien / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Super Breeding Program / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Super-Intelligence / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Superweapon Surprise / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Surveillance Drone / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Take Me to Your Leader / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Technology Levels / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Technology Uplift / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Teleportation / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Terraform / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	The Empire / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	The Omniscient / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	The So-Called Coward / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	The Tunguska Event / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Through the Eyes of Madness / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Tidally Locked Planet / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	To Serve Man / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Touch of Death / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Tranquillizer Dart / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Transferable Memory / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Transhuman Treachery / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Transplanted Humans / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Turned Against Their Masters / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Twice-Told Tale / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Unhappy Medium / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	United Nations Is a Superpower / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Variable-Length Chain / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Vichy Earth / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Villain's Dying Grace / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Walking Transplant / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Waving Signs Around / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	We Have Become Complacent / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Weapon of Peace / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Weird Currency / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Wetware CPU / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	What We Now Know to Be True / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	With My Hands Tied / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	World Shapes / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Xeno Nucleic Acid / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Xenophobic Herbivore / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Your Heart's Desire / int_8fda7950
Known Space	hasFeature	Zero-G Spot / int_8fda7950
knownspace	sameAs	Known Space
Known Space	hasFeature	Longevity Treatment / int_8fda7950

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