The Sword and Laser discussion

There are some really interesting concepts in Ringworld. I loved the idea of scrith - it was a brilliant creation for its necessity. Putting a Dyson sphere into a strip? Cool.

Kzinti? Really? Was that the best you can do? It seems like a cheat to have the opportunity to create a predator-based alien and pretty much just repackage a tiger. I can look at other works and even when the writing and science weren't top shelf, at least the other species had some creativity to them.

I was thinking about the last time I was this disappointed in the packaging of an alien species and I looked it up. (view spoiler)[Yeah, it was the dwarf elephants in Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. (hide spoiler)]

What other extremes have you seen in alien characters? I liked the sheer variety that Laumer put into the Retief series (certainly not high art in writing), for example. Or the races in Brin's uplift (Jophur are unique).

I like all the aliens in C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series. The knn especially are beings so alien that no one's ever talked with them. They zoom in and out, doing whatever they want and everyone else just stays out of their way.

There are a lot of crazy aliens in Niven's Known Space. The Puppeteers and Outsiders (I think they show up in Ringworld) are pretty crazy designs with a fairly different psychological make-up from humans.

For some reason there were a few felinoid aliens invented around that time. I don't know if thee was some causative event that sparked writers to do that, but there it is. The Kzin are probably the most famous from that era, but also Cherryh's Hani, Cordwainer Smith's character C'Mell, the Caitian of Star Trek, Anne McCaffrey's Catteni and Hrubbans, the Centrans by Christopher Anvil... and a bunch of others I can't think of right now.

As bland as the Kzin are, I feel like the Puppeteers more than make up for it

The Kzin figure into a good Niven short story called 'The Soft Weapon'. You may have seen it adapted for the old animated Star Trek series.



There's a whole long Kzin anthology series as well. They just reprinted the first book.

I do find the puppeteers pretty interesting. And the kzinti are pretty typical Proud Warrior Race guys, but I was less bothered by Speaker because he was competent at diplomacy and technical matters. I'm comparing him to similar archetypes in TV and film and maybe other novelists also do this, but it was nice to see a member of this archetype able to talk about something other than glory, war, and honour all the time.

I find it interesting that we as readers exhibit the same Terran preconceptions as the characters in the novel. Even though the character is only described as feline once in the book, we all picture them as big tiger people. The rest of the book repeatedly describes the way that the Kzinti are unlike Earth felines: the weird ears (1), the pear-shaped body, the naked tail, the absence of a neck...we all of us still picture something like that screen capture that Tamahome posted above, I bet. I know I was struggling to picture only what Niven described the whole time.

1 - What is the orientation of those ears? Do they open outward, like a trumpet flower, do they collapse inward like a cocktail umbrella, or do they extend and then swivel to face a sound, more like a radar dish? Do the Kzinti hear with the whole structure as a sensitive vibrating membrane, or does the "umbrella" part function as our outer ears do, to focus sound inward to an inner ear?

I always pictured them as opening up, when hunting prey or whatever and closed otherwise

Yeah, the kzinti are often referred to as "ratcats" by other characters because they have naked tails and a decidedly un-feline posture. Part of the problem has been the covers of the Man-Kzin Wars anthologies. All 13 collections essentially show bipedal tigers.

I read Ringworld long before I saw anyone draw a picture of a kzin, and I always pictured them as a mash-up of a rat, a bat and a cat. A rat's posture and tail, a bat's face, and a cat's body. Alien yet somewhat familiar, but altogether ugly.

I can't find a good depiction of how the kzin should really look, but I did find Warren Ellis' Tumblr on the subject. (I know, right?)

http://warrenellis.tumblr.com/post/37...

Yeah, I think the idea of basing the body on a bear template makes more sense, given Niven's descriptions: the physically imposing pear-shaped body with barrel chest, moving quickly on all fours, etc. Good link; thanks!

My old paperback copies of Niven's books had/has illustrations of various of Niven's aliens on the inside front cover and their skeletons on the inside back cover. So, my image of Kzin has always been that illustration.

The artist for my copy is Bonnie Dalzell and her version of the kzin is the second card on this page:
http://www.larryniven.net/get-well.shtml

It's a pretty alien-looking creature.

Ooh, nice. Much less huggable than the talking tigers they're usually depicted as.

You can't beat Douglas Adams super intelligent shade of the colour blue.

The Kzinti are described once at tiger like, another time as orange, and another time as having retractable claws and in overall behavior.

As far as aliens go, the Kzinti strike me as Malibu Stacey with NEW Hat rather than something novel.

Joshua wrote: "You can't beat Douglas Adams super intelligent shade of the colour blue."

You should try the northern hemisphere of the Well World.

My big problem with alien species is that most if not all could just as easily be repackaged as fantasy races - that is to say, they're waaay to clearly based on actual earth creatures. we have no idea of the conditions under which an alien species might evolve, so trying to guess what they'll look like is ultimately futile.

Having said that, on the whole I didn't see the kzin as being particularly bad. True, they are just a generic "proud warrior race," but that's a really interesting idea to play with in any genre. Having said that, I pictured them as a cross between a tiger, a red panda, an aye-aye, and a rat. With the pear-shaped, no-neck parts added, of course. Although, the way it was written (at least in Ringworld) it could be construed that the kzin have an organ analogous in appearance and location to what humans think of as a neck, but is not, in fact, a neck.

The seventies era Niven reprints had images of the aliens printed on the inside covers with x-ray images on the back cover. The Kzinti's basket rib cage was very odd and interesting. It looked like it was woven with alternating ribs.

Harold wrote: "I find it interesting that we as readers exhibit the same Terran preconceptions as the characters in the novel. Even though the character is only described as feline once in the book, we all pictur..."

Great point.