Kzin

The Kzinti (singular Kzin) are a fictional, very warlike and bloodthirsty race of felinoid aliens in Larry Niven's Known Space series.

Background and history

Template:Spoiler Kzinti evolved from a plains hunting cat, stole their current space-faring technology, and bred (most of) their own females into sub-sapience. They are larger than humans, standing around eight feet tall and weighing around five hundred pounds. These lion-sized bipeds have large membrane ears, a cylindrical torso without a spine, and large fangs and claws. A small percentage of Kzinti are stunted and exploited addictive telepaths, and they aren't legally allowed to breed. They speak in a hissing language called the Hero's Tongue.

Kzin females are sub-sapient, with a vocabulary of less than a hundred word/sounds and primarily instinct-driven behavior, and are treated as chattel property by males. The Ringworld series shows that that this was not always the case: archaic Kzinti were once transplanted to the Ringworld when the females were still sapient.

They are the first on-going alien contact that humanity has met within the Known Space universe. The first contact with humanity ends the human golden era of peace, where even history has been rewritten in a non-violent whitewash; organized violence was virtually eliminated, being reduced to roughly 1 in 1000 people, and there was no interpersonal violence, except occasional out-bursts in the asteroid belt where medical and psychological care were spread too thinly.

The Man-Kzin Wars

The series offers an intricate and evolving weave of character development that melds these beings into some of the most complex fictional creatures in any literature, period...
- Quantum, on The Man-Kzin Wars

The Kzinti, with vast technical superiority (including gravity drives, telepaths, and a large military empire), detected a human exploration ship in deep space, the Angel's Pencil. After the Kzin telepath learned that the humans were unarmed and didn't even understand the concept of weapons, they attempted to kill the human crew in a slow, painful manner using an inductive heating weapon hoping to capture their ship intact for intelligence purposes. However, one of the humans used the ship's powerful drive system (which doubled as a communications laser) as a weapon and destroyed the Kzin ship, beginning the First Man-Kzin War. The crew then warned Earth of the warlike aliens, although the transmissions were initially dismissed as an outbreak of psychosis. Then a similar encounter between another human ship and Kzin vessel led to the destruction of the more primitive human ship. However, one of the human prisoners, with the aid of a rogue Telepath, was able to escape to the Angel's Pencil and warn them of the danger from their increasing penetration into Kzinti space.

In the course of the First Man-Kzin War (the Kzinti refer to the conflicts as the "Wars-With-Men") the Kzinti invaded and occupied the human colony of Wunderland, in the Alpha Centauri system, using it as a staging point for an attack on Earth. However, the human science-genius Dimity Carmody escaped to the colony world of We Made It. In a replay of first contact, the peaceful humans used communications lasers, fusion drives, and mass drivers to cut the first invasion fleet to ribbons. Over the next several decades, three more fleets were launched against Earth, and all were beaten back. However, after near defeat by the fourth fleet, it was becoming clear to Earth's military leaders that the Kzinti were learning to wage war more effectively than their traditional 'scream and leap' tactics, and that the Solar System's defenses would quickly succumb to the Kzinti's superior numbers, firepower, and technology, were it only wielded with a modicum of tactical and strategic sense. In order to delay the next attack, a Terran Bussard ramjet starship was utilized as a relativistic kill vehicle. Using iron slugs accelerated to 99% of the speed of light, it devastated a portion of the planet, killing humans and Kzinti alike and delaying the launch of yet another Kzin fleet against Earth. A number of specialists traveled aboard this ship, using Stasis fields for lithobraking, and successfully assassinated the Kzin military genius Chuut-Riit who was leading the Kzinti on Wunderland. Yet, it was only a matter of time until the next assault fleet would come.

At this point, a passing Outsider ship sold the colony of We Made It the secret of hyperdrive, a technology unknown to the Kzinti. Dimity Carmody, the escapee from Wunderland, was instrumental in developing it. Hyperdrive ships were dispatched to Earth, where the faster-than-light drive was used to pre-emptively attack the Fifth Invasion fleet, liberate Wunderland, and go on to attack other Kzinti worlds. The FTL drive allowed the human fleets to coordinate and concentrate their forces beyond anything the Kzinti could manage, even letting them outrun and jam the news of each successive Kzin defeat. The first indication the Kzinti Patriarchy had that much of the Kzin empire was gone and that a significant percentage of all Kzinti had died was when human warships appeared in the skies above their homeworld.

Meanwhile, however, on Wunderland, now liberated by humans, a number of the surviving Kzin, led by Vaemar-Riit, last surviving kitten of Chuut-Riit, and with the co-operation of Dimity Carmody, Nils Rykermann, Leonie Rykermann and other humans, began to cautiously co-operate with humans and try to learn human ways, Vaemar-Riit even enrolling at a human University and obtaining a reserve officer's commission. These became known as the Wunderkzin, and some later proved to be human allies. This slowly growing Man-Kzin co-operation was bitterly opposed both by many other Kzin and by many revanchist humans on Wunderland, while others among the human and kzin communities on Wunderland sought to manipulate the situation for their own ends. There are also on-going human situations - for example Nils Rykermann, a Wunderland academic, in love with dimity Carmody, married Leonie Rykermann, one of his students, during the occupation, believing Dimity to be dead. This situation has not been resolved. There is also a growing relationship between Dimity and Vaemar-Riit which is somewhat ambiguous - the two are depicted together on the cover of Man-Kzin Wars XI.

In several different stories by other authors playing in the universe we see references to a total of five additional Man-Kzin wars take place. The net effect of these wars is summed by a retrospective comment from Louis Wu in the Ringworld novels: "The Kzinti aren't really a threat. They'll always attack before they're ready." With decreasingly impressive logistical and technological advantages, each Man-Kzin War results in the confiscation or liberation of one or more colony planets by the humans. In this way humanity contacts the Pierin and Kdatlyno, former slave species, and takes over worlds such as Canyon (formerly Warhead) and Fafnir (formerly Shasht).

Eventually (in Ringworld) we learn that the Kzin reverses were deliberately engineered by the Pierson's Puppeteers, who lured the Outsiders to We Made It in the first place. The Puppeteers had hoped that the culling of a quarter to a third of the more aggressive members of the Kzinti with every war would result in a more peaceful race, or at least one that was capable of coexisting with other species without trying to kill and eat them at every turn. This shift in Kzin attitudes succeeded spectacularly, although the Kzinti themselves do not think very highly of the changes, nor of the price they paid to achieve them. In fact, a fringe faction of the Kzinti known as the Kdaptists, frustrated with the reversals their race had suffered against humanity, went to far as to adopt the human concept that God had created humanity (not Kzinti) in His image, and that He favors and protects humans over other races.

As the Puppeteers expected, a form of "natural" selection occurred, with the more mindlessly aggressive Kzinti dying in ill-advised wars and the more moderate, intelligent, and cautious Kzinti surviving, presumably to think long and hard about the consequences of starting yet another war. By the time the Kzinti attained the level of sophistication and foresight needed to win against humans, they no longer had the numbers or the drive to do so.

At one point, Louis Wu, while visiting the Kzin homeworld and given access to the Kzinti Patriarch's game preserve, was confronted by a young Kzin and his father. When the youngster asked "Are they good to eat?", Louis Wu responded with a grin (baring of the teeth being a Kzin challenge to battle) and the older Kzin responded "NO". Wu muses that it would be safer for the young Kzin to eat arsenic than a human being.

Homeworld

The Kzin homeworld is called "Kzin" by all other races save the Kzinti, who call it "Homeworld." It orbits the star 61 Ursae Majoris, has stronger surface gravity and both a longer day and year than Earth. The Patriarch rules from a large palace on the world. At the end of the last Man-Kzin War, around 2618, Kzin was occupied and disarmed by the human armies.

Blood-of-Chwarambr City was located on Kzin(capital planet of the kzinti).

Kzinti in other science fiction

Template:Star Trek race The Kzinti also appeared, along with allusions to slavers and stasis boxes, in The Slaver Weapon, an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series written by Niven, as a proud and carnivorous species. They were incorporated into the Star Fleet Universe where they became a powerful empire known as the Kzinti Hegemony, mortal enemies of that universe's Lyran Star Empire - although it is alluded that the Kzinti and Lyrans share common ancestry, a claim both sides violently reject. They have not otherwise been mentioned in the mainstream Star Trek universe. (Rumors continue to persist that the Tzenkethi - who have been mentioned in various Trek television shows - were based on the Kzinti, but this appears to be a coincidence based mainly on the similarity of the two races' names.)

The instruction manual for the PC game Star Fleet Command clearly refers to the Kzinti by name in the background story for the rival race, the Lyrans. This race is introduced in Star Fleet Command II: Empires at War by simply changing the Kzinti Hegemony to the Mirak Star League.

Kzinti are thought to have influenced the creation of the similarly Felinoid Kilrathi, the primary antagonists of the popular Wing Commander video game series of early-to-mid-nineties. Whether this is true or not, a small part of Wing Commander II takes place in a region of space called the Niven Sector.

Kzintis in the Star Fleet Universe

Main article: Kzinti Hegemony

Please note that in the Star Fleet Universe, the Kzin/Kzinti distinction between singular and plural is replaced with Kzinti/Kzintis.

The Kzintis in the SFU - who have traits setting them apart (no bat ears, sentient females, Kzinti/Kzintis as singular/plural etc) from the Kzinti of Niven's works - have fought wars with all of their neighbours, the Federation, the Klingon Empire and their perennial nemesis, the Lyran Star Empire, and are long-standing allies - or more accurately, co-belligerents - of the Hydran Kingdom. The Hegemony eventually formed a tentative accord with the Federation and allied with them in the General War, but they have been involved in major wars with the Klingons and Lyrans, such as the Four Powers War and the General War itself, in which a substantial region of their territory was occupied by their Coalition enemies and two full-scale assaults were made on the Kzinti homeworld of Kzintai. Eventually with Federation assistance they forced the Coalition forces from their territory, but after the War ended they were involved in a Civil War as a disgruntled faction - which had been opposed to the Hegemony's ruling Patriarch and sought refuge and developed a power base in the WYN Cluster - launched an attempted coup of the Hegemony itself in the WYN War of Return.

In the fictional variant of the Star Fleet Universe as represented in the games Star Fleet Command II: Empires at War and Star Fleet Command: Orion Pirates from Taldren, the Kzintis were renamed as the Mirak.

External links

• Kzinti at Memory Alpha
• Kzin homepage at LarryNiven.org (fansite)
• Website for the Man-Kzin Wars novel Destiny's Forge
• Homepage of MKW author Paul Chafe
• Fan page about the Kzin language, including a Kzinti font (currently dead)
• Notes on the Kzin Language. Another fan page about the Kzin language and script, presented in a mock-scholarly article.
• Man-Kzin Wars Series-- Chronological Listing, Volume Listing, Author Listing, & Man-Kzin Wars Title Listing
• A Kzinti Reference Grammar
• Urhixidur Font Foundry - includes a Kzinti font