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Greedywoozle — Yellowstripe
Published: 2014-04-02 05:04:26 +0000 UTC; Views: 15263; Favourites: 142; Downloads: 51
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Yellowstripe the kzin really likes humans. They are quick but they are not quite as clever as they think they are. They are also quite filling.Kzinti are one of those forgotten sci-fi races no one ever seems to draw or talk about. Kilrathi are the same way. I've never seen porn of either race (save for the infamous "gay Kzinti" fanfic that got Niven so annoyed) and I'm the only one I know of who's drawn Kzinti vore.
Luckily we have the Charr these days, and they are pretty much Kzinti with the serial numbers filed off. They at least get drawn.
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To which a human would reply:
"My people have fought four wars with Kzin, and won each one. You'd think that they'd have learned better by now."
"Of the seventeen Kzin warships my cruiser has met, not a one has won its war against my lasers, mass drivers, and missile launchers."
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That's an easy claim to make when your fiction is written by human writers who fall uncompromisingly into the Humanity Is Superior mindset. To a ludicrous extent, really. Kzinti are portrayed as utterly inept and simply too stupid to live at least up through book five of the Man-Kzin wars. In five books no kzin won a fight with a human. Not hand to hand, not with weapons, not ship to ship. It was a complete one sided slaughter with the authors smiling smugly and saying "Oh yes, they are a threat, yet indeed" while writing them with no training and room temperature IQs. HOUSECATS have better impulse control than supposedly trained kzinti warriors in these books.
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Welll...what other races of writers are there on planet Earth, whom may have written an alternate take? Seriously, I've read/re-read most of the Man-Kzin novels multiple times, and my takeaway from each is that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the Kzinti's relative intelligence vis-à-vis Humans. What typically trips up the Kzin is their cultural/social attitudes and a certain rigidity in their thinking. Humans are superior by way of being more versatile, more flexible, more adaptive in their thinking. For a modern-day analogy, you can compare the Kzin to religious fundamentalists, and humans as...not. Or to put it another way, it's a study in the evolution of two races and their respective civilizations. Latter novels set around and after the 4th Man-Kzin War explicitly state (and to some extent, detail) the social evolution of the Kzin.
Chuut-Riit, Kzinti Military Governor of Wunderland (Alpha Centauri) is explicitly shown raising his sons to be more human-like (more flexible, more adaptive, more group/collective-cooperative) in their thinking.
Humans are having to cope with this by raising their own "Game," re-learning the Art(s) of War that they'd carefully suppressed (for our own good, simply because we were so darned good at it!) for some centuries.
An updated take on the Man-Kzin dynamic can be found in John Ringo's Gate series (2nd and 3rd books), where humanity, newly arrived on the Interstellar Scene, fights a militaristic civilization of Saurians (dinosaur people).
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I read five Man-Kzin Wars books and the overriding message as that kzinti are really, really stupid. They have no impulse control whatsoever and are easily goaded into suicidal attacks which they execute with such a laughable lack of skill they are effortlessly beaten. A good example is the kzinti captain who the protagonist carves up with a steak knife because the captain loses his temper and makes stupid, stupid attacks over and over. Give a man a steak knife and send him up against a tiger. The tiger would almost always win but a trained, supposedly intelligent kzin was a complete pushover.
What we see in the Man-Kzin Wars is the distillation of Humanity Is Superior and Humans Are Special tropes. They even went to the trouble of retconning in that kzinti had to steal their tech from others, because otherwise it was impossible to explain how such stupid, self destructive creatures made it off their homeworld.
I lost heart after five books and I hear they have some better showings later, but 60-IQ creatures with the impulse control of a toddler don't make very threatening adversaries across five books. When I met Niven at a con I asked him if they'd ever not be too stupid to live and his shining example of a smart kzin was one who put caps on his fingers so he could use a human laptop. A toddler could figure out how to do that, but apparently it's far beyond his furry space orcs.
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Never heard of them- are they from a TV series that got canceled or something?
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Kzinti are from Larry Niven's Known Space series, the best known book of whiich is Ringworld. They are the archtypal proud warrior race cat people, and were recycled in Wing Commander as Kilrathi, in Starfire as the Lyrans, and in Guild Wars as the Charr. Their only TV appearance was in an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series called The Slaver Weapon. Kzinti did eat humans, though not whole. 83
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So, not well known unless you're a major Sci-Fi fanatic- right?
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The Known Space series (especially Ringworld) is very well known in the sci-fi fandom. Ringworld is a hell of a book, the sequels less so, and there are thirteen Man-Kzin Wars books. Still, if you're not into sci-fi you'd never have heard of Kzinti, just as you'd never hear of Kilrathi if you haven't played Wing Commander (or see the awful movie).
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I guess I'm not that much into the Sci-Fi stuff- my Klingon would insult everyone.
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I know about five words of Klingon, like most nerds. 83
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