Pierson's Puppeteer
Encyclopedia
Pierson's Puppeteers, often known just as Puppeteers, are a fictional alien race from American author Larry Niven
's Known Space
books.
and two snake-like heads instead of a humanoid upper body. The heads are very small, containing a forked tongue, extensive rubbery lips, rimmed with finger-like knobs, and a single eye per head. The Puppeteer brain is housed not in the heads, but in the "thoracic" cavity well protected beneath the mane-covered hump from which the heads emerge. They use the "mouths" to manipulate objects, as a humanoid uses hands. The Puppeteer's native language sounds like highly complex orchestral music, but they seem to be able to reproduce human language without difficulty or device, as well as the Heroes' Tongue (Kzinti), suggesting their vocal arrangement may resemble a pair of avian-like syrinx
rather than vocal cords. The sobriquet "Pierson's" comes from the name of the human who made first contact
in the early 26th century in the Known Space timeline. According to the Niven story The Soft Weapon
, Pierson was a crewman aboard a spaceship at a time when there was a camp
revival of the ancient Time for Beany
TV show featuring Cecil the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent
, an animated character based on a hand puppet; Pierson accordingly described the alien he had met as a Puppeteer, given some resemblance of the head and neck with Cecil. Most Puppeteers give themselves the names of centaur
s and other figures in Greek mythology
, such as Nessus
, Nike (mythology)
and Chiron
—at least when called upon to deal with humans.
Biologically, Puppeteers are highly intelligent herbivore
s; a herd animal
, Puppeteers prefer the company (and smell) of their own kind. Their cycle of reproduction is unusual, but Earth equivalents exist in the form of digger wasp
s: the Puppeteers consider themselves to have three genders (two male, one female), except their two "male" genders are the equivalent of human female and male (one has an ovipositor
, the other a penis
, of sorts) and the "female" is the (non-sentient) parasitised host into which the ovum
and spermatozoon
are deposited.
Puppeteers are also extremely long-lived. The exact length of a Puppeteer's lifespan is unknown, but it is at least several centuries—Nessus is over 300 years old during the events of the original book. This lengthy lifespan is also responsible for extreme crowding: the Puppeteer homeworld has a population of over four trillion, and four farming worlds are dedicated entirely to supplying the population with food.
Technologically, the Puppeteers are very advanced, centuries or millennia ahead of most other species (including humans). For example, humans invented a method of cheap teleportation
in the twenty-fifth century called a transfer booth, which requires an enclosed space at either end of the transmission. Puppeteers use a much more elegant and sophisticated booth-less "open" version in the form of stepping disks, which require no enclosure. More impressively, Puppeteers transformed their home world, and several other astronomical bodies, into a Klemperer rosette
, in order to flee a galactic catastrophe.
Socially, the two most notable traits of Puppeteers are their racial/cultural penchant for cowardice and their tendency to congregate in herds. The cowardice is thought in Puppeteer society to originate with the Puppeteer instinct for turning one's back on danger. However, the trait is thought by many to actually originate from their herd instinct
, as the instinct to turn one's back is linked to an instinct to kick the hind hoof at an attacker. In Ringworld
, when Nessus and the expeditionaries are threatened, the Puppeteer defends himself quite effectively:
Another noticeable behavioral trait is the coma
state, broadly a cognate of the human fetal position
–in the same way that ostrich
es are said to bury their heads in the sand, Puppeteers fold up into a ball, tucking their three legs and two heads underneath the padded cranial bulge. This is, in part, an explosion reflex
, learned during childhood. Their cowardice is also reflected in their architecture
and object design, as all the Puppeteer-designed rooms and vessels have no sharp edges, everything curves into everything else, giving a "half-melted" look and meaning that objects are less likely to damage someone inadvertently, through their own carelessness.
In Ringworld, Nessus, a Puppeteer, explains how his race's cowardice is partly a result of a science
experiment
(the details of which are not given) that proves the Puppeteers have nothing equivalent to an immortal soul
, and therefore death is, for their species, absolute and eternal
. As a result, the Puppeteer race is fanatically devoted to its own safety.
A courageous Puppeteer is not merely regarded as insane (as Nessus mentions "the majority is always sane"), though, but is insane, showing symptoms we would associate with human mental illness
, such as bipolar disorder, homicidal tendencies
, clinical depression
and so on. Incidentally, though, aside from the crews of the Long Shot
(in the novel Ringworld) and Explorer (in the novel Fleet of Worlds), no human has ever met a completely sane Puppeteer, as no sane Puppeteer would ever leave the safety of the Fleet of Worlds
(see below), and even those who do would not venture out without a painless method of suicide
, in case circumstances required it.
On occasion a Puppeteer will express its amusement by facing its two heads towards each other, in effect, looking at itself. This is described by Niven to be the closest to laughter a Puppeteer comes.
The leader of the Puppeteers is known as the Hindmost. Since Pierson's Puppeteers are foremost concerned with their own safety and the survival of their species, the most important Puppeteer is considered to be behind, or the protector of every other member of the species. It is a shortening from the more literal the one who leads from behind. A maddened, deposed Hindmost is responsible for Louis Wu's return to the Ringworld in the book The Ringworld Engineers
.
; since the human Bronze Age
, the Puppeteers have ruled this empire including every race in the 60-LY sphere of Known Space
. After the Puppeteer Exodus (see below), it is rumored that General Products is a front for Gregory Pelton, a character in the short story "Flatlander". One of the most important items sold by General Products is the General Products Hull for spaceships. As one might expect from a Puppeteer, such a hull is completely impervious to everything except antimatter
(which is not highly advertised but covered by a company warranty; the hull is transparent to visible light which can be alleviated by polarization or complete opacity; tidal forces and extreme gees will not affect the hull but can kill the occupants, unless nullified by variable cabin gravity.) The hulls are advertised as being capable of flying through the upper atmosphere of a star unscathed, although the contents will be cooked; as a protection against this particular contingency, the Puppeteers also provide a stasis field.
Exposure to antimatter is the only known method for destroying a General Products hull until the recent novel Fleet of Worlds
. In the story Flatlander, a GP Hull is exposed to a constant stream of diffuse antimatter during a visit to a star system with some exotic qualities. Whereas a conventional hull made of metal, for example, would simply have ablated under these conditions, the General Products hull instead simply unravelled. This was due to the fact that a GP Hull essentially consisted of a single incredibly large, highly complex molecule. Once a sufficient number of the atoms which constituted the molecule were annihilated by the antimatter, the molecule could not remain stable, and thus degenerated into a selection of less complex compounds and elements, effectively causing the hull to vanish in an instant. Fortunately, the vessel's pilot was sufficiently cautious to be wearing a vacuum suit at the time, and survived, as did the owner of the ship.
In Fleet of Worlds
, the characters tour a General Product factory and ask innocent-seeming questions of their tour guide, Baedeker. Baedeker reveals (apparently unintentionally) that the manufacturing process is extremely sensitive to gravity and impurities, that the hulls are constructed from a single super-molecule constructed using nanotech, and their strength is reinforced by an embedded power plant that reinforces the inter-atomic bonds. These facts provide the clues that allow them to later destroy a GP Hull from the inside and survive.
In Destroyer of Worlds
, a captured Pak Protector
analyzes the hull, deducing that it comprises a dynamically reinforced molecular structure and how to syphon energy from the structure.
to encourage cooperation. Blackmail is not immoral to a Puppeteer and Puppeteers have an established code of conduct surrounding the practice, making it perfectly safe for both the blackmailer and the victim, including that the blackmailer must turn over all their evidence against the victim and submit to a partial memory wipe, so they cannot betray the blackmail deal. The Puppeteers also use more personal manipulation; for instance, Puppeteers who have dealt with human males have utilized a voice that sounds like that of a seductive human female, and the Puppeteer Nessus utilized an implanted tasp, a device which could stimulate the pleasure center of the brain, thus allowing him to subliminally condition those he dealt with.
In Ringworld, it is revealed that the Puppeteer government meddled in human and Kzin
ti gene pools. They started a series of wars (the Man–Kzin Wars
) between the warlike Kzinti and humans, and guaranteed that the Kzinti lose each time, not least by using a starseed lure to guide an Outsider
ship into human space, introducing faster-than-light
travel to humanity. This was a mechanism to cause rapid Kzinti evolution, since the most aggressive Kzinti would die in battle, leaving the more docile individuals to breed, eventually suppressing their racial instinct for aggression.
Another Puppeteer breeding experiment was the Lucky Human Project. The puppeteer government concluded that humans' most notable quality was luck, and decided to improve this trait. Manipulating politics on Earth through bribery
and blackmail, the Puppeteers caused 'Birth Lotteries' on Earth around 2650, biasing human genetic selection (controlled, in the Known Space universe, by the "Fertility Board of the United Nations
") towards encouraging luck. The character Teela Brown
, who journeys to the Ringworld, is an outcome of this Lucky Human Project, though not quite the outcome the Puppeteers would have liked. Her luck was highly selective, bending probability so that the outcome most beneficial to her or her descendants would come to pass, without regard to its effects on those around her — which was contrary to the interest of the rest of the Ringworld expedition on more than one occasion.
The Puppeteers also influenced species on the Ringworld. After discovering the Ringworld, the Puppeteers sent probes with Room-temperature superconductor destroying fungus onboard in an attempt to gain a tactical advantage over the Ringworld. These fungi cause all superconductors (with the exception of those buried in Scrith) to rust into powder. The lack of a suitable alternative superconductor causes the fall of advanced civilization on the Ringworld.
was a great mystery. No entity in Known Space outside the Puppeteer race was aware of the location, despite extensive surveys, with the probable exception of Jinx-born pirate Captain Kidd. In the short story "A Relic of the Empire", he discovered the Puppeteer home system by accident, and returned in the ship Puppet Master to rob inbound Puppeteer vessels, rather than pursuing a formal blackmail arrangement. Kidd claimed the Puppeteers' home planet orbited a "red giant, undersized", in the vicinity of coordinates 23.6, 70.1, 6.0 (using an unnamed coordinate system). Before dying, he passed this location along to Richard Shultz-Mann, of the planet Wunderland.
Puppeteers were willing to pay large sums of hush money
in order to suppress even trivial details about their homeworld. In 2641 AD, it was discovered that the Puppeteers' homeworld had no moon, information deduced as a result of the solving of the mystery of the deaths of a crew of a ship investigating a neutron star. The ship, based on a General Products hull, was impervious to tidal forces
but the crew were not. Because the Puppeteers seemingly have no experience of tides, they were unable to anticipate the deadly tidal forces. (As told in Niven's short story, "Neutron Star") Crashlander reveals that the Puppeteers may have feigned their ignorance of tidal forces.
The Puppeteers had to make some drastic alterations to their home system, during their history, as waste heat
due to overindustrialisation
was rapidly making their planet uninhabitable. They moved their planet further from their sun, to lessen the effects of global warming, but overindustrialisation forced them to move four of the other planets in their system closer to their world and terraform them into "farming worlds", arranging the five planets into a Klemperer rosette
(though Niven misspelled "Klemperer" as "Kemplerer"). Nessus explains this to Louis Wu
and the crew of the Long Shot thus:
Eventually, their sun converted from a yellow dwarf
to a red giant
, so the Puppeteers moved the "Fleet of Worlds", the five planets, to their system's Oort cloud
. This is one of the reasons the Puppeteers were so successful at keeping the location of their homeworld a secret — explorers would be looking for a yellow dwarf (as one could surmise that Puppeteers had evolved around a yellow dwarf from their biology and that they were comfortable on Earth-like planets without pressure suit
s) when their planet(s) were actually near a red giant.
In the short story "At the Core
", Beowulf Shaeffer
, who made the discovery about tidal forces five years previously, in "Neutron Star", discovers that the Galactic Core is exploding. This news prompts the Puppeteer Exodus, where the Fleet of Worlds flee the galaxy at just under light speed for the Magellanic Clouds
, in the hope that by the time the explosion reaches the Fleet of Worlds, the Puppeteers will have found a way to protect their civilization. This exodus prompts a major stock market crash
in human society; in 2864, the Fleet of Worlds leaves Known Space.
Beowulf notes, however, that the speed at which the Fleet of Worlds is moving (0.8c) would cause nearly as much damage as the Core explosion itself. This suggests radiation may not be the primary danger the Puppeteers flee, also that Puppeteers may, in fact, have a means to deal with radiation affecting entire worlds. In Crashlander
it is speculated that the Puppeteers are planning on moving to the now-uninhabited Core, isolated from potentially dangerous species - which would have either fled the galaxy entirely or been destroyed. Their initial path is revealed to be out of the plane of the galaxy, but no mention is made of Louis Wu noticing trajectory when flying there on the Long Shot in Ringworld.
Larry Niven
Laurence van Cott Niven / ˈlæri ˈnɪvən/ is an American science fiction author. His best-known work is Ringworld , which received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics...
's Known Space
Known Space
Known Space is the fictional setting of some dozen science fiction novels and several collections of short stories written by author Larry Niven. It has also in part been used as a shared universe in the Man-Kzin Wars spin-off anthologies sub-series....
books.
Biology and sociology
Pierson's Puppeteers are described by Niven as having two forelegs and a single hindleg ending in hooved feetHoof
A hoof , plural hooves or hoofs , is the tip of a toe of an ungulate mammal, strengthened by a thick horny covering. The hoof consists of a hard or rubbery sole, and a hard wall formed by a thick nail rolled around the tip of the toe. The weight of the animal is normally borne by both the sole...
and two snake-like heads instead of a humanoid upper body. The heads are very small, containing a forked tongue, extensive rubbery lips, rimmed with finger-like knobs, and a single eye per head. The Puppeteer brain is housed not in the heads, but in the "thoracic" cavity well protected beneath the mane-covered hump from which the heads emerge. They use the "mouths" to manipulate objects, as a humanoid uses hands. The Puppeteer's native language sounds like highly complex orchestral music, but they seem to be able to reproduce human language without difficulty or device, as well as the Heroes' Tongue (Kzinti), suggesting their vocal arrangement may resemble a pair of avian-like syrinx
Syrinx (biology)
Syrinx is the name for the vocal organ of birds. Located at the base of a bird's trachea, it produces sounds without the vocal cords of mammals. The sound is produced by vibrations of some or all of the membrana tympaniformis and the pessulus caused by air flowing through the syrinx...
rather than vocal cords. The sobriquet "Pierson's" comes from the name of the human who made first contact
First contact (science fiction)
First contact is a common science fiction theme about the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or of any sentient race's first encounter with another one....
in the early 26th century in the Known Space timeline. According to the Niven story The Soft Weapon
The Soft Weapon
"The Soft Weapon" is a science fiction short story written in 1967 by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe. It was the basis of the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode, "The Slaver Weapon"...
, Pierson was a crewman aboard a spaceship at a time when there was a camp
Camp (style)
Camp is an aesthetic sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its taste and ironic value. The concept is closely related to kitsch, and things with camp appeal may also be described as being "cheesy"...
revival of the ancient Time for Beany
Time for Beany
Time for Beany was an American television series, with puppets for characters, which aired locally in Los Angeles starting in 1949 and nationally on the improvised Paramount Television Network from 1950 to 1955...
TV show featuring Cecil the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent
Sea serpent
A sea serpent or sea dragon is a type of sea monster either wholly or partly serpentine.Sightings of sea serpents have been reported for hundreds of years, and continue to be claimed today. Cryptozoologist Bruce Champagne identified more than 1,200 purported sea serpent sightings...
, an animated character based on a hand puppet; Pierson accordingly described the alien he had met as a Puppeteer, given some resemblance of the head and neck with Cecil. Most Puppeteers give themselves the names of centaur
Centaur
In Greek mythology, a centaur or hippocentaur is a member of a composite race of creatures, part human and part horse...
s and other figures in Greek mythology
Greek mythology
Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...
, such as Nessus
Nessus (Pierson's Puppeteer)
Nessus is a male character in Larry Niven's Known Space universe, of the species Pierson's Puppeteer, an herbivorous species noted for two heads whose mouths act as capable hands...
, Nike (mythology)
Nike (mythology)
In Greek mythology, Nike was a goddess who personified victory, also known as the Winged Goddess of Victory. The Roman equivalent was Victoria. Depending upon the time of various myths, she was described as the daughter of Pallas and Styx and the sister of Kratos , Bia , and Zelus...
and Chiron
Chiron
In Greek mythology, Chiron was held to be the superlative centaur among his brethren.-History:Like the satyrs, centaurs were notorious for being wild and lusty, overly indulgent drinkers and carousers, given to violence when intoxicated, and generally uncultured delinquents...
—at least when called upon to deal with humans.
Biologically, Puppeteers are highly intelligent herbivore
Herbivore
Herbivores are organisms that are anatomically and physiologically adapted to eat plant-based foods. Herbivory is a form of consumption in which an organism principally eats autotrophs such as plants, algae and photosynthesizing bacteria. More generally, organisms that feed on autotrophs in...
s; a herd animal
Animal
Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...
, Puppeteers prefer the company (and smell) of their own kind. Their cycle of reproduction is unusual, but Earth equivalents exist in the form of digger wasp
Digger wasp
Wasps of the genus Sphex are cosmopolitan predators of the family Sphecidae that sting and paralyze prey insects. There are over 130 known digger wasp species. In preparation for egg laying, they construct a protected "nest" and then stock it with captured insects...
s: the Puppeteers consider themselves to have three genders (two male, one female), except their two "male" genders are the equivalent of human female and male (one has an ovipositor
Ovipositor
The ovipositor is an organ used by some animals for oviposition, i.e., the laying of eggs. It consists of a maximum of three pairs of appendages formed to transmit the egg, to prepare a place for it, and to place it properly...
, the other a penis
Penis
The penis is a biological feature of male animals including both vertebrates and invertebrates...
, of sorts) and the "female" is the (non-sentient) parasitised host into which the ovum
Ovum
An ovum is a haploid female reproductive cell or gamete. Both animals and embryophytes have ova. The term ovule is used for the young ovum of an animal, as well as the plant structure that carries the female gametophyte and egg cell and develops into a seed after fertilization...
and spermatozoon
Spermatozoon
A spermatozoon is a motile sperm cell, or moving form of the haploid cell that is the male gamete. A spermatozoon joins an ovum to form a zygote...
are deposited.
Puppeteers are also extremely long-lived. The exact length of a Puppeteer's lifespan is unknown, but it is at least several centuries—Nessus is over 300 years old during the events of the original book. This lengthy lifespan is also responsible for extreme crowding: the Puppeteer homeworld has a population of over four trillion, and four farming worlds are dedicated entirely to supplying the population with food.
Technologically, the Puppeteers are very advanced, centuries or millennia ahead of most other species (including humans). For example, humans invented a method of cheap teleportation
Teleportation
Teleportation is the fictional or imagined process by which matter is instantaneously transferred from one place to another.Teleportation may also refer to:*Quantum teleportation, a method of transmitting quantum data...
in the twenty-fifth century called a transfer booth, which requires an enclosed space at either end of the transmission. Puppeteers use a much more elegant and sophisticated booth-less "open" version in the form of stepping disks, which require no enclosure. More impressively, Puppeteers transformed their home world, and several other astronomical bodies, into a Klemperer rosette
Klemperer rosette
A Klemperer rosette is a gravitational system of heavier and lighter bodies orbiting in a regular repeating pattern around a common barycenter. It was first described by W. B...
, in order to flee a galactic catastrophe.
Socially, the two most notable traits of Puppeteers are their racial/cultural penchant for cowardice and their tendency to congregate in herds. The cowardice is thought in Puppeteer society to originate with the Puppeteer instinct for turning one's back on danger. However, the trait is thought by many to actually originate from their herd instinct
Instinct
Instinct or innate behavior is the inherent inclination of a living organism toward a particular behavior.The simplest example of an instinctive behavior is a fixed action pattern, in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a...
, as the instinct to turn one's back is linked to an instinct to kick the hind hoof at an attacker. In Ringworld
Ringworld
Ringworld is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. It is followed by three sequels, and preceded by four prequels, and ties into numerous other books set in Known Space...
, when Nessus and the expeditionaries are threatened, the Puppeteer defends himself quite effectively:
All in one motion, the puppeteer had spun on his forelegs and lashed out with his single hind leg. His heads were turned backwards and spread wide, Louis remembered, to triangulateTriangulationIn trigonometry and geometry, triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end of a fixed baseline, rather than measuring distances to the point directly...
on his target. Nessus had accurately kicked a man's heart out through his splintered spine. (Ringworld, Chapter 13, published 1970.)
Another noticeable behavioral trait is the coma
Coma
In medicine, a coma is a state of unconsciousness, lasting more than 6 hours in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light or sound, lacks a normal sleep-wake cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. A person in a state of coma is described as...
state, broadly a cognate of the human fetal position
Fetal position
Fetal position is a medical term used to describe the positioning of the body of a prenatal fetus as it develops...
–in the same way that ostrich
Ostrich
The Ostrich is one or two species of large flightless birds native to Africa, the only living member of the genus Struthio. Some analyses indicate that the Somali Ostrich may be better considered a full species apart from the Common Ostrich, but most taxonomists consider it to be a...
es are said to bury their heads in the sand, Puppeteers fold up into a ball, tucking their three legs and two heads underneath the padded cranial bulge. This is, in part, an explosion reflex
Reflex
A reflex action, also known as a reflex, is an involuntary and nearly instantaneous movement in response to a stimulus. A true reflex is a behavior which is mediated via the reflex arc; this does not apply to casual uses of the term 'reflex'.-See also:...
, learned during childhood. Their cowardice is also reflected in their architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
and object design, as all the Puppeteer-designed rooms and vessels have no sharp edges, everything curves into everything else, giving a "half-melted" look and meaning that objects are less likely to damage someone inadvertently, through their own carelessness.
In Ringworld, Nessus, a Puppeteer, explains how his race's cowardice is partly a result of a science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
experiment
Experiment
An experiment is a methodical procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results...
(the details of which are not given) that proves the Puppeteers have nothing equivalent to an immortal soul
Soul
A soul in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions is the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing or object. Many philosophical and spiritual systems teach that humans have souls, and others teach that all living things and even inanimate objects have souls. The...
, and therefore death is, for their species, absolute and eternal
Eternity
While in the popular mind, eternity often simply means existence for a limitless amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside time. By contrast, infinite temporal existence is then called sempiternity. Something eternal exists outside time; by contrast,...
. As a result, the Puppeteer race is fanatically devoted to its own safety.
A courageous Puppeteer is not merely regarded as insane (as Nessus mentions "the majority is always sane"), though, but is insane, showing symptoms we would associate with human mental illness
Mental illness
A mental disorder or mental illness is a psychological or behavioral pattern generally associated with subjective distress or disability that occurs in an individual, and which is not a part of normal development or culture. Such a disorder may consist of a combination of affective, behavioural,...
, such as bipolar disorder, homicidal tendencies
Homicide
Homicide refers to the act of a human killing another human. Murder, for example, is a type of homicide. It can also describe a person who has committed such an act, though this use is rare in modern English...
, clinical depression
Clinical depression
Major depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
and so on. Incidentally, though, aside from the crews of the Long Shot
Long Shot (Niven)
Long Shot is the name of a fictional spacecraft from the Known Space universe. It first appeared in the short story "At the Core" by Larry Niven, and played pivotal roles in several of his Ringworld novels....
(in the novel Ringworld) and Explorer (in the novel Fleet of Worlds), no human has ever met a completely sane Puppeteer, as no sane Puppeteer would ever leave the safety of the Fleet of Worlds
Fleet of Worlds
Fleet of Worlds are both a location and a book in Larry Niven's Known Space series.The series consisting of this book and its sequels is referred to by the same title.-Novel:The novel, co-written by Niven and Edward M. Lerner, was released in 2007...
(see below), and even those who do would not venture out without a painless method of suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
, in case circumstances required it.
On occasion a Puppeteer will express its amusement by facing its two heads towards each other, in effect, looking at itself. This is described by Niven to be the closest to laughter a Puppeteer comes.
Politics and relations with other species
Politically, the Puppeteers have a form of democracy with two major parties: the Conservatives and the Experimentalists. The Conservatives have held power for a majority of Puppeteer history; Experimentalist regimes only take power when a crisis threatens the safety of the Puppeteer race, and action is considered less dangerous than inaction.The leader of the Puppeteers is known as the Hindmost. Since Pierson's Puppeteers are foremost concerned with their own safety and the survival of their species, the most important Puppeteer is considered to be behind, or the protector of every other member of the species. It is a shortening from the more literal the one who leads from behind. A maddened, deposed Hindmost is responsible for Louis Wu's return to the Ringworld in the book The Ringworld Engineers
The Ringworld Engineers
The Ringworld Engineers is a 1980 science fiction novel by Larry Niven. It is the first sequel to Niven's award-winning Ringworld and was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1981.-Origin:...
.
General Products
The Puppeteers' renown for honesty in trading allowed the species to accumulate an expansive mercantile empire called General ProductsGeneral Products (Larry Niven)
In Larry Niven's fictional Known Space universe, General Products is a Pierson's Puppeteers company which produces various spacecraft components.-General Products hull:...
; since the human Bronze Age
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...
, the Puppeteers have ruled this empire including every race in the 60-LY sphere of Known Space
Known Space
Known Space is the fictional setting of some dozen science fiction novels and several collections of short stories written by author Larry Niven. It has also in part been used as a shared universe in the Man-Kzin Wars spin-off anthologies sub-series....
. After the Puppeteer Exodus (see below), it is rumored that General Products is a front for Gregory Pelton, a character in the short story "Flatlander". One of the most important items sold by General Products is the General Products Hull for spaceships. As one might expect from a Puppeteer, such a hull is completely impervious to everything except antimatter
Antimatter
In particle physics, antimatter is the extension of the concept of the antiparticle to matter, where antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is composed of particles...
(which is not highly advertised but covered by a company warranty; the hull is transparent to visible light which can be alleviated by polarization or complete opacity; tidal forces and extreme gees will not affect the hull but can kill the occupants, unless nullified by variable cabin gravity.) The hulls are advertised as being capable of flying through the upper atmosphere of a star unscathed, although the contents will be cooked; as a protection against this particular contingency, the Puppeteers also provide a stasis field.
Exposure to antimatter is the only known method for destroying a General Products hull until the recent novel Fleet of Worlds
Fleet of Worlds
Fleet of Worlds are both a location and a book in Larry Niven's Known Space series.The series consisting of this book and its sequels is referred to by the same title.-Novel:The novel, co-written by Niven and Edward M. Lerner, was released in 2007...
. In the story Flatlander, a GP Hull is exposed to a constant stream of diffuse antimatter during a visit to a star system with some exotic qualities. Whereas a conventional hull made of metal, for example, would simply have ablated under these conditions, the General Products hull instead simply unravelled. This was due to the fact that a GP Hull essentially consisted of a single incredibly large, highly complex molecule. Once a sufficient number of the atoms which constituted the molecule were annihilated by the antimatter, the molecule could not remain stable, and thus degenerated into a selection of less complex compounds and elements, effectively causing the hull to vanish in an instant. Fortunately, the vessel's pilot was sufficiently cautious to be wearing a vacuum suit at the time, and survived, as did the owner of the ship.
In Fleet of Worlds
Fleet of Worlds
Fleet of Worlds are both a location and a book in Larry Niven's Known Space series.The series consisting of this book and its sequels is referred to by the same title.-Novel:The novel, co-written by Niven and Edward M. Lerner, was released in 2007...
, the characters tour a General Product factory and ask innocent-seeming questions of their tour guide, Baedeker. Baedeker reveals (apparently unintentionally) that the manufacturing process is extremely sensitive to gravity and impurities, that the hulls are constructed from a single super-molecule constructed using nanotech, and their strength is reinforced by an embedded power plant that reinforces the inter-atomic bonds. These facts provide the clues that allow them to later destroy a GP Hull from the inside and survive.
In Destroyer of Worlds
Destroyer of Worlds (novel)
Destroyer of Worlds is a novel set in the Known Space series, by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner. It is a sequel to their previous novels, Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of Worlds...
, a captured Pak Protector
Pak Protector
Pak Breeders and Pak Protectors are two forms of fictional life in Larry Niven's Known Space universe. The Pak first appeared in "The Adults," which appeared in Galaxy in 1967; this story was expanded into the novel Protector by Larry Niven...
analyzes the hull, deducing that it comprises a dynamically reinforced molecular structure and how to syphon energy from the structure.
Foreign policy
The general foreign policy of Puppeteers consists of attempts to control the universe around them to ensure their own safety. As Puppeteers try to expose themselves to as little risk as possible, they try to use other beings as agents, utilizing a combination of bribes and blackmailBlackmail
In common usage, blackmail is a crime involving threats to reveal substantially true or false information about a person to the public, a family member, or associates unless a demand is met. It may be defined as coercion involving threats of physical harm, threat of criminal prosecution, or threats...
to encourage cooperation. Blackmail is not immoral to a Puppeteer and Puppeteers have an established code of conduct surrounding the practice, making it perfectly safe for both the blackmailer and the victim, including that the blackmailer must turn over all their evidence against the victim and submit to a partial memory wipe, so they cannot betray the blackmail deal. The Puppeteers also use more personal manipulation; for instance, Puppeteers who have dealt with human males have utilized a voice that sounds like that of a seductive human female, and the Puppeteer Nessus utilized an implanted tasp, a device which could stimulate the pleasure center of the brain, thus allowing him to subliminally condition those he dealt with.
In Ringworld, it is revealed that the Puppeteer government meddled in human and Kzin
Kzin
The Kzinti are a fictional, very warlike and bloodthirsty race of cat-like aliens in Larry Niven's Known Space series....
ti gene pools. They started a series of wars (the Man–Kzin Wars
Man-Kzin Wars
The Man-Kzin Wars is a series of military science fiction short story collections , as well as the eponymous conflicts between mankind and the Kzinti that they detail...
) between the warlike Kzinti and humans, and guaranteed that the Kzinti lose each time, not least by using a starseed lure to guide an Outsider
Outsider (Known Space)
The Outsiders are a fictional alien race in Larry Niven's Known Space series. They are many-limbed beings that are invariably described as a cat o'nine tails with a fattened handle...
ship into human space, introducing faster-than-light
Faster-than-light
Faster-than-light communications and travel refer to the propagation of information or matter faster than the speed of light....
travel to humanity. This was a mechanism to cause rapid Kzinti evolution, since the most aggressive Kzinti would die in battle, leaving the more docile individuals to breed, eventually suppressing their racial instinct for aggression.
Another Puppeteer breeding experiment was the Lucky Human Project. The puppeteer government concluded that humans' most notable quality was luck, and decided to improve this trait. Manipulating politics on Earth through bribery
Bribery
Bribery, a form of corruption, is an act implying money or gift giving that alters the behavior of the recipient. Bribery constitutes a crime and is defined by Black's Law Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or...
and blackmail, the Puppeteers caused 'Birth Lotteries' on Earth around 2650, biasing human genetic selection (controlled, in the Known Space universe, by the "Fertility Board of the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
") towards encouraging luck. The character Teela Brown
Teela Brown
Teela Brown is a fictional character created by Larry Niven in the Ringworld novels. Teela was a member of the crew recruited by Puppeteer Nessus for an expedition to the Ringworld. Her sole qualification was that she was the sixth generation of a line of ancestors all born because - in each case -...
, who journeys to the Ringworld, is an outcome of this Lucky Human Project, though not quite the outcome the Puppeteers would have liked. Her luck was highly selective, bending probability so that the outcome most beneficial to her or her descendants would come to pass, without regard to its effects on those around her — which was contrary to the interest of the rest of the Ringworld expedition on more than one occasion.
The Puppeteers also influenced species on the Ringworld. After discovering the Ringworld, the Puppeteers sent probes with Room-temperature superconductor destroying fungus onboard in an attempt to gain a tactical advantage over the Ringworld. These fungi cause all superconductors (with the exception of those buried in Scrith) to rust into powder. The lack of a suitable alternative superconductor causes the fall of advanced civilization on the Ringworld.
Homeworld — The Fleet of Worlds
For centuries, the location of the Puppeteer homeworldHomeworld
Homeworld is a real-time strategy computer game released on September 28, 1999, developed by Relic Entertainment and published by Sierra Entertainment. It was the first fully three-dimensional RTS. In 2003, Relic released the source code for Homeworld...
was a great mystery. No entity in Known Space outside the Puppeteer race was aware of the location, despite extensive surveys, with the probable exception of Jinx-born pirate Captain Kidd. In the short story "A Relic of the Empire", he discovered the Puppeteer home system by accident, and returned in the ship Puppet Master to rob inbound Puppeteer vessels, rather than pursuing a formal blackmail arrangement. Kidd claimed the Puppeteers' home planet orbited a "red giant, undersized", in the vicinity of coordinates 23.6, 70.1, 6.0 (using an unnamed coordinate system). Before dying, he passed this location along to Richard Shultz-Mann, of the planet Wunderland.
Puppeteers were willing to pay large sums of hush money
Hush money
Hush money is an informal term for financial incentives or rewards offered in exchange for not divulging information.Hush Money may also refer to:* Hush Money , a 1921 silent film directed by Charles Maigne...
in order to suppress even trivial details about their homeworld. In 2641 AD, it was discovered that the Puppeteers' homeworld had no moon, information deduced as a result of the solving of the mystery of the deaths of a crew of a ship investigating a neutron star. The ship, based on a General Products hull, was impervious to tidal forces
Tidal locking
Tidal locking occurs when the gravitational gradient makes one side of an astronomical body always face another; for example, the same side of the Earth's Moon always faces the Earth. A tidally locked body takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around its partner...
but the crew were not. Because the Puppeteers seemingly have no experience of tides, they were unable to anticipate the deadly tidal forces. (As told in Niven's short story, "Neutron Star") Crashlander reveals that the Puppeteers may have feigned their ignorance of tidal forces.
The Puppeteers had to make some drastic alterations to their home system, during their history, as waste heat
Waste heat
Waste heat sometimes called Secondary heat or Low-grade heat refers to heat produced by machines, electrical equipment and industrial processes for which no useful application is found. Energy is often produced by a heat engine, running on a source of high-temperature heat...
due to overindustrialisation
Industrialisation
Industrialization is the process of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial one...
was rapidly making their planet uninhabitable. They moved their planet further from their sun, to lessen the effects of global warming, but overindustrialisation forced them to move four of the other planets in their system closer to their world and terraform them into "farming worlds", arranging the five planets into a Klemperer rosette
Klemperer rosette
A Klemperer rosette is a gravitational system of heavier and lighter bodies orbiting in a regular repeating pattern around a common barycenter. It was first described by W. B...
(though Niven misspelled "Klemperer" as "Kemplerer"). Nessus explains this to Louis Wu
Louis Wu
Louis Gridley Wu, a fictional character, is the main protagonist in the Ringworld series of books, written by Larry Niven.Louis Wu was born in 2650 to Carlos Wu and Sharrol Janss. When he appears in Ringworld, Louis is 6'2" tall...
and the crew of the Long Shot thus:
"I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilization was dying in its own waste heat. Total conversion of energy had rid us of all waste products of civilization, save that one. We had no choice but to move our world outward from its primary."
"Was that not dangerous?"
"Very. There was much madness that year. For that reason it is famous in our history. But we had purchased a reactionless, inertiaInertiaInertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion. It is proportional to an object's mass. The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles of classical physics which are used to...
less drive from the Outsiders. You may have guessed their price. We are still paying in installments. We had moved two agricultural worlds; we had experimented with other, useless worlds of our system using the Outsider drive. In any case, we did it. We moved our world.
"In short, we found that a sun was a liability rather than an asset. We moved our world to a tenth of a light year's distance, keeping the primary only as an anchor. We needed the farming worlds and it would have been dangerous to let our world wander randomly through space. Otherwise we would not have needed a sun at all.
"We had brought suitable worlds from nearby systems, increasing our agricultural worlds to four, and setting them in a Kemplerer Rosette."
—(From Ringworld, Chapter 5, published 1970.)
Eventually, their sun converted from a yellow dwarf
Yellow dwarf
A G-type main-sequence star , often called a yellow dwarf, is a main-sequence star of spectral type G and luminosity class V. Such a star has about 0.8 to 1.2 solar masses and surface temperature of between 5,300 and 6,000 K., Tables VII, VIII...
to a red giant
Red giant
A red giant is a luminous giant star of low or intermediate mass in a late phase of stellar evolution. The outer atmosphere is inflated and tenuous, making the radius immense and the surface temperature low, somewhere from 5,000 K and lower...
, so the Puppeteers moved the "Fleet of Worlds", the five planets, to their system's Oort cloud
Oort cloud
The Oort cloud , or the Öpik–Oort cloud , is a hypothesized spherical cloud of comets which may lie roughly 50,000 AU, or nearly a light-year, from the Sun. This places the cloud at nearly a quarter of the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun...
. This is one of the reasons the Puppeteers were so successful at keeping the location of their homeworld a secret — explorers would be looking for a yellow dwarf (as one could surmise that Puppeteers had evolved around a yellow dwarf from their biology and that they were comfortable on Earth-like planets without pressure suit
Space suit
A space suit is a garment worn to keep an astronaut alive in the harsh environment of outer space. Space suits are often worn inside spacecraft as a safety precaution in case of loss of cabin pressure, and are necessary for extra-vehicular activity , work done outside spacecraft...
s) when their planet(s) were actually near a red giant.
In the short story "At the Core
At the Core (story)
"At the Core" is an English language science fiction short story written in 1966 by Larry Niven. It is the second in the series of Known Space stories featuring crashlander Beowulf Shaeffer...
", Beowulf Shaeffer
Beowulf Shaeffer
Beowulf Shaeffer is a fictional character from Larry Niven’s Known Space series. Shaeffer is a crashlander, a native of We Made It, a planet circling the star Procyon...
, who made the discovery about tidal forces five years previously, in "Neutron Star", discovers that the Galactic Core is exploding. This news prompts the Puppeteer Exodus, where the Fleet of Worlds flee the galaxy at just under light speed for the Magellanic Clouds
Magellanic Clouds
The two Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies visible in the southern hemisphere, which are members of our Local Group and are orbiting our Milky Way galaxy...
, in the hope that by the time the explosion reaches the Fleet of Worlds, the Puppeteers will have found a way to protect their civilization. This exodus prompts a major stock market crash
Stock market crash
A stock market crash is a sudden dramatic decline of stock prices across a significant cross-section of a stock market, resulting in a significant loss of paper wealth. Crashes are driven by panic as much as by underlying economic factors...
in human society; in 2864, the Fleet of Worlds leaves Known Space.
Beowulf notes, however, that the speed at which the Fleet of Worlds is moving (0.8c) would cause nearly as much damage as the Core explosion itself. This suggests radiation may not be the primary danger the Puppeteers flee, also that Puppeteers may, in fact, have a means to deal with radiation affecting entire worlds. In Crashlander
Crashlander
Crashlander is a fix-up by Larry Niven published in 1994 , set in his Known Space universe. It is also a term used in the Known Space universe-Crashlander :...
it is speculated that the Puppeteers are planning on moving to the now-uninhabited Core, isolated from potentially dangerous species - which would have either fled the galaxy entirely or been destroyed. Their initial path is revealed to be out of the plane of the galaxy, but no mention is made of Louis Wu noticing trajectory when flying there on the Long Shot in Ringworld.
Other media
- Puppeteers were one of the species detailed in Barlowe's Guide to ExtraterrestrialsBarlowe's Guide to ExtraterrestrialsBarlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials is a 1979 science fiction book by artist Wayne Barlowe, with Ian Summers and Beth Meacham...
. - One of the Green LanternsGreen Lantern CorpsThe Green Lantern Corps is the name of a fictional intergalactic military/police force appearing in comics published by DC Comics. They patrol the farthest reaches of the DC Universe at the behest of the Guardians, a race of immortals residing on the planet Oa...
shown on the cover of the graphic novel Green Lantern: Ganthet's Tale written by Larry Niven, appears to be a Pierson's Puppeteer. It also appears in one panel of the graphic novel. - In Niven's collaborative novel Fallen AngelsFallen Angels (science fiction novel)Fallen Angels is a Prometheus Award-winning novel by science fiction authors Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn published by Jim Baen. The novel was written as a tribute to science fiction fandom, and includes many of its well-known figures, legends, and practices...
, a science fiction fan has a life-sized model of a Puppeteer skeleton; to escape prosecution from religious authorities, he claims that it is really a model of a demonDemoncall - 1347 531 7769 for more infoIn Ancient Near Eastern religions as well as in the Abrahamic traditions, including ancient and medieval Christian demonology, a demon is considered an "unclean spirit" which may cause demonic possession, to be addressed with an act of exorcism...
's skeleton. - A Pierson Puppeteer appears in the Marvel comic Uncanny X-Men #125, pg 16 (Popeye is also in the same panel)
- Although not identified as such, one of the aliens fought by Yuri in the manga Alien NineAlien Nineis a manga series by Hitoshi Tomizawa, which was later adapted into an anime OVA series by J.C.Staff. The manga was serialized in Akita Shoten's Young Champion magazine, spanning 3-volumes. In 2003, Tomizawa released a 1-volume sequel to the series called Alien 9 Emulators...
appears to be a Puppeteer.