Thrint

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In Larry Niven's fictional Known Space universe, the Thrintun (singular Thrint) were a long-extinct species which ruled the galaxy through telepathic mind control. The Thrintun were destroyed about 2 billion years before the human era by the Tnuctip and one of their own devices created to amplify a telepathic suicide command on the galactic scope (which they called Suicide Night). The story is partially told in the novella The World of Ptavvs and the story Peter Robinson from the book Man-Kzin Wars X. Their original name was unknown before the setting of the novella, but traces of their culture had been discovered and they were simply referred to as the slavers.

The Thrintun are carnivorous, eat and excrete through the same orifice, and have a single faceted eye. Their clumsy hands have large fingers arranged in a mutually opposed fashion (like a mechanical grab), and large, round heads lined with sharp teeth. Niven is inconsistent about the actual size of a Thrint: in World of Ptavvs, the character Kzanol is about half the height of a human, whereas later fiction portrays Thrints as about 8 feet high. Thrintun have no internal mechanism for regulating appetite; for their own health and safety they learn at an early age to endure their constant, ravenous hunger rather than suffering from sickness due to overeating. Average Thrint IQ is about 80-90. That they are so lacking in intelligence and dexterity with tools owes to the enormous evolutionary advantage that their telepathic abilities give them; they simply have not had sufficient selective pressure to improve on what they have.

Thrintun refer to their own mental ability as The Power. Most of their religious traditions are centered around their manifest destiny to rule the galaxy, with the Power divinely granted to facilitate this. Powerloss is similar to exile or damnation in their society. Thrintun who have lost their Power are referred to as Ptavvs (a class barely above the slave races), and become the property of another. A Thrint's native Power can manage a few dozen human beings simultaneously. With an amplifier helmet, a Thrint can control an entire planet.

Females and juveniles are nearly mindless. Males come of age when they can effectively resist the Power of their father.

The Thrintun developed a mediocre philosophic tradition in response to their need for control over their aggressive drives. Aphorisms such as "haste is not speed" represent deep wisdom to a Thrint. The combination of strong and insatiable hunger with low intelligence also leads Thrintun to act rashly. In World of Ptavvs, Kzanol desperately wagers his future on Vipreen racing. Gambling is quite common among the Thrintun, and this isn't seen as unusual. Similarly, Suicide Night is a similar reaction by the entire Thrint species to the victorious Tnuctipun.

Thrint In History

The Thrintun evolved on a planet where nearly every animal species possessed telepathic ability. Selective pressures led to an ecology wherein no individual species possessed great advantage over any other, but defenseless offworld species were easy prey. The Slavers were neolithic hunters when their planet was visited by a starcraft piloted by an unnamed race. They quickly enslaved its crew, and then their civilization.

The Thrintun settled vast areas of the galaxy, seeding many planets with basic life forms (created for them by one of their controlled species, the Tnuctipun) to use as food sources. Once the photocycle was established, larger animals known to humans as the Bandersnatchi, and to the Thrintun as whitefoods, were introduced in an example of interstellar cattle-farming. Humans evolved from one such planet, which was abandoned when the Thrintun culture was destroyed, after photosynthesis had started, but before the Bandersnatchi had been moved in. The common chemical composition, genetics and environmental conditions found among species in Known Space are a consequence of this process -- most intelligent species in the series are presumably descended from Slaver food yeast. The diversity of life during the Slaver empire is not known.

A number of their technologies, in particular their engineered life forms, continue to exist in the human era. Among these are trees that mature containing solid rocket fuel in their trunks, originally used as cheap rocket boosters when planted in orchards, but now evolved to be able to seed themselves across star systems. Discovery of a slaver stasis vault, often containing new and tremendously valuable technologies, was a pastime of many gentlemen-adventurers.

In the 'present day' of the Known Space universe, the Grogs, a race of sessile furry cones which can control animals telepathically, turn out to be the mutated survivors of the Thrintun species.