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random-thought-depository · 2 months

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One of the thoughts I had while writing that post on Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites, anti-predator defense, and the origins of the male gender role is if that model is correct it implies Larry Niven got the relationship between a sapient species's diet and culture/values pegged wrong, at least as far as the Kzin are concerned. Courage is the virtue of a prey species that engages in collective defense; a smart predator attacks the weak, avoids fights against strong opponents, and is quick to retreat from any fight in which it loses the advantage; a sapient species with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore apex predators would probably value/honor courage less than we do, so Kzin biology and implied evolutionary history is actually kind of an awkward fit with the kind of assholes the Kzin are. Asshole aliens with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore apex predators might be sneaky raiders with an unapologetic "if they outgun us, trade, avoid, or appease, if we outgun them, raid and pillage!" mindset, or something like that; they probably wouldn't have the prideful machismo, hotheaded aggression, and disdain for restraint of the Kzin (you could argue calling it machismo is an anthropomorphism because Kzintosh aren't men but lbr human machismo is very obviously what the Kzin attitude is modeled on).

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unrealistic for the Kzin to be the way they are, cause Kzin values could plausibly arise from intra-species competition and my rationalization for why the Kzin are as they are is a mix of that and "the Kzin are like that because their right-wing authoritarians won their history and got to shape their culture." But, as I said, I think the kind of assholes the Kzin are wouldn't logically flow directly from their ancestral subsistence strategy/ecological niche.

Which makes me wonder: if as a spec-bio exercise I tried to make a species which's biology would predispose them toward becoming approximately the kind of asshole Proud Warrior Race the Kzin are, what traits would they have?

Here's what I came up with:

First obvious thing is to give them a "harem" social system like gorillas, elephant seals, certain ungulates, etc.. This lends itself well to a species with a highly competitive male hierarchy in which male social and reproductive success is contingent on being able to make credible costly signals of being strong and badass.

One major obstacle to a species like that becoming a threat on the interstellar scale is control by a single dominant male is a pretty hard cap on group size. I propose that this species has overcome that by developing a social system with dominant bull coalitions, so instead of being limited to groups of one to three dozen individuals controlled by a single dominant male, they can have e.g. groups of a few thousand individuals controlled by a few hundred dominant bulls and so on; this eventually scaled up to an interstellar empire with billions of subjects and probably at least a few hundred million dominant bulls in loose coalition (that big dominant bull coalition is the empire's warrior-aristocrat class).

Unlike the Kzin, in this species the females will definitely be sapient and have lots of soft power; all the internal male social competition and external war and imperialism is largely about impressing them.

Another major point of difference from the Kzin: this species definitely should not have much evolutionary history of cooperative big game hunting. Pack hunting strongly incentivizes and rewards cooperation and solidarity (I suspect this plus the smaller group sizes of carnivores is why you see "harem" social organization more in herbivores), whereas I think to get aliens that are assholes in approximately the way the Kzin are we want a social system that's highly internally competitive. This probably implies a mostly herbivorous diet, though there might be some supplementation with small game; the important thing is this species has had basically no selection pressure for being effective predators of animals strong enough to require cooperation to take down.

Related and important point: the evolution of sapience in this species was more-or-less entirely driven by social competition and sexual selection, and they got too big to be tempting targets for the predators of their ancestral environment long before they developed sapience. So this is a species with no recent evolutionary history of being a prey species.

I guess we're maybe looking at something like a mix of gorillas and elephants here; maybe ancestrally browsers of the savanna and open woodland (though they'd gradually switch toward eating more richer food such as fruit, tubers, young shoots, meat, etc. as they developed more efficient food production). If we're doing the Mass Effect "more alien-looking than Star Trek forehead aliens but still implausibly humanoid" thing some kind of big beefy horned minotaur-looking humanoids would be a pretty appropriate look for the dominant bulls (with the subordinate males being more slender and the females being more slender and substantially smaller - this would be a species with way more sexual dimorphism than humans), not sure what I'd make them look like if I went the route of making them more realistically alien-looking.

Organized violence (i.e. war) developed in this species partly as a mating ritual. Large-scale battles gave males the same kind of opportunities to demonstrate strength and courage that fitness signalling duels did, but the much more complex tactical environment of a large-scale battle also offered opportunities for males to conspicuously demonstrate intelligence and cooperation. The switch from duels to battles as the primary arena of fitness signalling was a major selection pressure driving the evolution of sapience in this species. Originally the ultimate aim of war in this species was group fusion in which the dominant bull coalition of one group would defeat the dominant bull coalition of another group and the two groups would merge with the victorious dominant bull coalition being the dominant bull coalition of the combined group and the males in the defeated dominant bull coalition being either killed or demoted to subordinate status with their new lower rank being rubbed in by bullying and humiliation rituals. As the species developed bigger and more sedentary social groups this developed into territorial conquest with conquered communities remaining in their old homes under the rule of viceroys. But the thing where wars were partly giant mating rituals meant often neither side was particularly in a hurry to finish off their enemies as no more enemies to fight would mean diminished opportunities for social mobility and impressing females; there tended to be a "we have always been at war with Eurasia/Eastasia" dynamic where the conflict itself was effectively treated as having social value and actively maintained and subject to various forms of ritualization that limited its destructiveness so it could be kept going longer.

So, this is a species that's gotten lots of selection pressure from intra-species competition and violence, but has no recent evolutionary history as cooperative predators of animals with comparable size and strength to themselves and has no recent evolutionary history as a prey species. This species will have instincts and intuitions about violence totally optimized for intra-species violence that's mostly a mix of coalition politics propaganda of the deed and male fitness signalling rituals (and, of course, their culture will build on those instincts and intuitions and the dynamics that selected for them). I think this would lead plausibly to people who share one of the defining traits of the Kzin: being aggressive imperialist warmongering swaggering bullies who endlessly congratulate themselves on their ferocious warrior spirit and supposed mighty warrior prowess and supposed right to rule derived from that but are not actually all that good at war compared to a species like us that has been shaped by hunting and being hunted.

The thing about intra-species violence that's mostly a mix of coalition politics propaganda of the deed and male fitness signalling is it simultaneously incentivizes restraint more than inter-species predator/prey violence and incentivizes aggression more consistently than inter-species predator/prey violence.

On the restraint side, intra-species violence means potentially violence against relatives or potential mates, and in a social species violence against potential helpers. This obviously creates an incentive for restraint. Violent intra-species competition is where you get natural weapons and combat set up to probably not do too much damage (bighorn sheep knocking each other on their hard blunt horns instead of stabbing each other in the fleshy flank or face with sharp horns), notions of fair and honorable fights, "why don't you pick on someone your own size?," chivalry, rules of war, boxing gloves and rules against hitting below the belt, etc.. This post touches on some of the dynamics I'm talking about here.

I think plausible cultural development of this species might enhance this. A highly competitive "harem" social system means at least the males of this species are likely to be less cooperative than humans, and a less cooperative species will have a harder time forming effective equalizing coalitions. This species never got our probable evolutionarily significant period of living in mostly relatively egalitarian societies; compared to us their males at least are likely to be less wired for cooperative coalition-building and more wired for trying to individualistically climb their way up viciously competitive hierarchies; again, it seems likely this would make the formation of effective equalizing coalitions harder. The females are a bit of a wild card here, not sure what'd be going on with them, but considering they find aggressive, violent, domineering males sexy, I can see them not having instincts terribly promising for forming effective society-wide equalizing coalitions either. A species that's not very good at forming effective equalizing coalitions is likely to be not very good at coming up with ideologies of equality; equivalents of liberalism, democracy, socialism, anarchism, etc. may not exist at all in their philosophical tradition, or if they exist are likely to be obscure and marginal. The implication may be the political landscape of this species was a pretty dismal picture of oppressive oligarchies everywhere for pretty much the entire existence of their species. Like I said, I expect this species would develop a lot of practices to limit the destructiveness of war and focus its destructiveness on direct combatants. Defeat of a community in war would likely mean little change in the social or material conditions of most of the community's members; one oligarchic dominant bull coalition would replace another, and the only real change for most people would be a change in the names and faces (or scents or whatever they primarily recognize each other by) of their masters. Plausibly, the females of a conquered community would even approve of the change, seeing their community's new ruling dominant bull coalition as having proven themselves more desirable breeding material by winning. All of this would tend to encourage a sensibility that wars are basically social games between males and the only thing important at stake in them is the personal social and reproductive success of the direct combatants.

On the aggression side... Violent coalition politics involves lots of costly signalling, bluff, and martyrdom. The kind of violence a species like the one I'm describing here engages in is probably going to include a lot of violence that's basically an implicit statement of "I am exceptionally strong and brave and badass and would be an exceptionally good subordinate or ally, please give me a promotion!" And when it comes to male violence done as male fitness signalling to females, well, sperm is cheap and ova and wombs are expensive; in a "harem" social system demonstrating your mere viability will probably not be enough to impress females into mating with you, they are likely to require a costly signal of exceptional excellence before perceiving you as a desirable breeding partner, and if you die trying to make that costly signal, well, rolling the dice on a 65% chance of getting killed while young and a 35% chance of getting to breed might easily be selected for over contenting oneself with dying childless at a ripe old age.

Basically, I think you might plausibly end up with a species with bone-deep intuitions that:

- Violence is a performance, it is primarily communicative, using it to send a message to your opponent and/or to witnesses is at least an important secondary consideration and may even be more important than the actual concrete outcome of the fight. It is not enough to simply defeat your enemy, you must do so in a way that effectively communicates what you want to communicate.

- The most consistent purposes of violence are to show off your own strength, bravery, and fighting prowess and to terrorize and humiliate your opponent into submission.

- War is basically a game played among males. It's not a trivial game, it's literally deadly serious for the males involved in it and your society is largely organized around it, but it's fundamentally a game; the only people who have really big stakes in it are the direct combatants, and having fun and displaying good sportsmanship and putting on a cool performance are important secondary considerations and may even be more important than the actual concrete outcome. If you've ever read Ian Banks's Player Of Games, Azad (the game and the institutions and culture around it) in that book is the best analogy I can think of for what war would be to these people.

- Your enemies will be basically following the same rule book you have.

When these people develop interstellar travel and meet other sapient species, they'll apply the instincts and cultural institutions they developed for intra-species competition to those other sapients. I.e. they'll turn into nasty imperialists. Conquered aliens would get incorporated into their society in about the same social position as weak males. In their society weak males with little hope of rising to dominant bull status are kept around for labor and to assist with the care and education of the offspring of their female relatives and have a social status roughly equivalent to serfs; this would be the obvious niche to put conquered aliens in, with some modifications, e.g. conquered aliens would be expected to keep reproducing with each other.

Combine what I said in the previous paragraph with how much these people's social instincts would revolve around volatile male hierarchies reinforced by bullying and humiliation rituals, and I expect being a conquered subject of them would tend to be unpleasant to horrific. Being a primarily herbivorous species, these people wouldn't occasionally eat their slaves like the Kzin, but I could totally see the dominant bulls occasionally casually caving some poor slave's skull in out of a combination of some petty irritation and wanting to remind everyone who's boss.

Let's say we want these people to get approximately the same nasty surprise when they attack humans that the Kzin did. Model favorable to that:

In this setting, the most common pathway to sapience is through social and sexual selection. Sapient species usually evolve in environments without big predators, e.g. isolated islands, because serious predation pressure tends to prevent the very strong commitment to a long-lived slow-breeding very K-selected life strategy that leads to sapience. Sapient species usually do not have recent evolutionary history as big game hunters (the typical sapient is a physically not very strong omnivore, often primarily an eater of fruit, tubers, seeds, insects, and small animals, though also a lot of sapient species started with an ecological niche roughly equivalent of fish-eating birds that nest in large rookeries). Species that evolve sapience through this pathway usually have strong social and artistic intelligence, but lack instincts and institutions of organized violence (they aren't always peaceful, but if they do have significant intra-species violence it's murder, done by individuals or very small groups, not war).

When the warmonger aliens I've spent most of this post describing meet species like this it usually goes similarly to what happened when the Maori met the Moriori, or at least like that event as described in a book I read once. The warmonger aliens will roll up and be like "Yo, what's up, losers! You are now our slaves! We're awfully fond of presents called 'tribute' which you'll be giving us regularly from now on, and you'll be obeying our orders from now on! You can start by performing these humiliating submission rituals to acknowledge our superiority!" and this will be kind of an OCP to their victims, who will usually either basically surrender immediately or try to resist but fold pretty quickly cause they aren't well-equipped for war psychologically, culturally, institutionally, or materially. The warmonger dominant bulls honestly find it kind of boring, to the point that they fight a lot of highly ritualized flower war style conflicts among themselves as a mix of oligarch class dispute resolution, bloody enrichment, and live fire training to keep their warrior skills sharp.

Basically, the galaxy is full of weedy theater kid nerds, and these warmonger aliens are the meathead jock bullies of the galaxy going around shoving those nerds into lockers and stealing their lunch money.

The exceptions to this pattern the warmonger aliens met before us were a mix of 1) other species like themselves, 2) sapient species with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore more-or-less apex predators (who are basically sneaky raiders). The warmonger alien dominant bulls tend to hate the latter and bitch endlessly about how they "have no honor," but savor tangling with the former in a "finally, worthy opponents!" way.

Then they met humans.

Humans have a long enough evolutionary history of big game hunting that this may have subjected us to significant selection pressure for increased cooperativeness that the warmonger aliens didn't get. But that isn't special in this context, the warmonger aliens have tangled with sapients descended from big game hunting carnivores before.

The thing that makes humans relevantly special is our relatively recent evolutionary history of being a prey species that engaged in collective defense, and the instincts we have that formed in that context but can be activated in other kinds of conflict.

Going back to that "real fights" thing earlier:

"but how often are you ever going to be in a fight where you’re willing to rip the other guy’s cheek out, gouge out his eyes and so forth?"

A fight against a predator that wants to eat your child looks like that.

If you're fighting a member of your own species, the entity you're fighting might be a relative, potential mate, or potential helper, so there's an incentive for restraint.

If you're a predator hunting, well, a carnivore species needs their prey species, that's their food source; smart lions wouldn't want to wipe out their prey species, they need their prey species, they would prefer their prey species thrive and be abundant and healthy; again there is an incentive for restraint; very plausibly one of the first lessons a sapient carnivore species would have to collectively learn after becoming sapient is restraint, learning that it would be all too easy to use their new, better weapons to kill too many of their prey and that they need to consciously avoid doing that.

Prey defending themselves from predators are the ones who'd have more-or-less zero incentive for restraint. If you can hurt or kill the lioness that's trying to eat your child, there is basically no reason to not go for it except self-preservation. Predators need their prey, but that's not symmetrical; prey don't need their predators, and sapient prey smart enough to do birth control and cull any dumber competitor species would probably be unambiguously much better off if all their predators dropped dead (Pleistocene humans could have done semi-reliable birth control by abstinence, outercourse, and lactational amenorrhea).

Humans are a slow-breeding species. A pride of lions could easily gradually eat a small early human band into extinction, and would have little incentive to avoid doing so cause humans aren't even their primary prey so when they ran out of humans they could just eat more of the antelope and so on that are already most of what they're eating anyway. The warmonger aliens have no evolutionary history of conflicts so existential.

The warmonger aliens have an idea of self-sacrificial heroism, but their version is entirely oriented (in an "adaptation executor, not fitness maximizer" way) toward burnishing the reputation of surviving close male relatives by association and thus increasing their reproductive success. They would have nothing in their recent evolutionary history like the experience of standing between a child and a hungry lioness. They would not grok "get away from her you bitch!" (that essay talks about the role of males in anti-predator defense but, yeah, women would have this too, who do you think would be the last line of defense for the children if a predator got past the male defensive ring?).

(The warmonger aliens definitely think it's a bit weird that we have mixed gender armies, not so much in a conventionally sexist way - they're inclined to see the size and strength differences between human men and women as obviously trivial compared to the much bigger sexual dimorphism of their species - but in that the idea of females caring enough about the outcome of a war to fight in it is alien to them. It's not that weird to them though, the big game hunter ancestry carnivore sapients they've encountered have mixed-sex armies and unwarlike sapients that try to resist conquest usually form them when they scramble to put a military together so it's got precedent in their experience.)

Like, yeah, the warmonger aliens are exactly the kind of people where some human commander would draw some of them into a clever trap they wouldn't anticipate cause prioritizing actually winning over looking heroic is alien behavior to them and then the comrades of the ones who died getting punked would bitch about how "dishonorable" it was of us to fight to win instead of obediently lining up to get slaughtered like cattle in some set-piece battle because that'd be the "honorable" thing by their definitions.

But also, something a lot like Londo Mollari's little speech about how brave the humans were in the Earth-Minbari war but it's some warmonger alien dominant bull describing the resistance we're putting up against his people and instead of admiration it's spoken with a tone of queasy puzzlement tinged with fear, irritation with our "irrational" resistance mixed with fear of the possible implications for what might happen if we start winning, it's alien behavior to him and he's admitting that it scares him.

Also, turns out species that have been strongly selected for solidarity (that's us!) are good at building equalizing coalitions and creating memes to coordinate them around, so not only are human ideologies of equality such as liberalism and communism effective at supercharging our resistance against imperialist conquest in a way that's an OCP to the warmonger aliens, they also turn out to be really disruptive to the warmonger aliens' shitty empire when some human chaos agents have fun spreading them around in it.

#writing ideas #warning: long

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simon-roy · 17 days

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The idea of logging on a colonized alien planet brings my mind back to the planet Lalonde from Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn books - a world that had very hard wood as its only meaningful export, and was also stuck developing its economy from agriculturalism (due to investment shortages, though).

All this is to say - Hey! What are some foundational inspirations for your sci fi verse? You gotta have some like recommendations of classic or older sci-fi for us, right? What are some of your suggestions of books and authors to read?

OK SO - My sci-fi tastes have sort of ended up in some very specific niches. Growing up, I was a Larry Niven +Jerry Pournelle man, in part because my dad amassed a huge collection of their books - then gave 90% of them away before i was old enough to read them. So one of my teenage missions was rebuilding that library, trash and all!

Stuff like Footfall, Ringworld, Gil "The Arm" Hamilton, Protector (yes i attempted to name a comic series similarly, and paid for it) "The Mote in God's Eye"... you name it, I read fuckloads of these books. And while they tend to land on a sort of human chauvinist "mankind will win based on his inherent adaptive human-ness, and the aliens will fail because of their rigid alien-ness", this shit was very foundational to me.

Their more collaborative series, The Man-Kzin Wars and War World, also loom large in my teenage mind. The Man-Kzin wars are super fun - humans meet a race of tiger-men, and go from being NWO peaceniks to roughneck cat-skinners in a generation! PEACE AND LOVE WONT DEFEAT TIGER MEN!

Similarly, war world (like lots of that 70s/80s military sci fi) was a sort of catch-all for western military nerds to play with their favorite factions - it was a planet where all the un-ruleable ethnic groups and nationalities had been deported by the authoritarian earth government, and left to rot... until a race of genetically engineered fascist super men land on the world, and start trying to rule the place. Pretty fun shit.

As I got older, I turned hard into William Gibson, and read the absolute shit out of both the Neuromancer trilogy and the Bridge trilogy, as well as his short stories. Bruce Sterling was part of that wave for me, too, and I religiously sought his old paperbacks out too. In terms of novels, "Distraction" is my favorite coherent Sterling Novel - though the short stories in the "Schismatrix" novel/collection of his remain my absolute favorite space opera pieces.

At this age, too, I found my top-top fave Sterling Stories - "Taklaman" and "Bicycle Repairman", both gritty pseudo-cyberpunk stories of the highest degree, in this collection:

This thousand-plus page collection of short stories and novellas was basically my bible for a few years - i put sticky notes on each story i loved and meant to return to, until the book was so festooned with sticky note bookmarks i abandoned the practice altogether. If you have the chance, just buy this book and chew on it for a few years.

As i got into my 20s, Charles Stross became my lode star - his books like Accelerando and Glasshouse were total game changers for me. They come with their own peculiarities, but I loved his transhuman/posthuman musings (or at least i was obsessed with his stuff for a good few years - the venn diagram of his obvious interests and my own overlapped enough that his books were great fodder for a growing sci-fi loving brain).

But since then, my main literary squeeze has been the great man, JACK VANCE. Working on Prophet, my friend @cmkosemen made a remark about how much the early issues of the series reminded him of a book series called "Planet of Adventure" or "the Tschai Cycle", by Jack Vance. The book has a beautifully simple setup - a man from an entirely undescribed spacefaring human civilization crash-lands onto a weird planet. But on that planet, he finds four separate civilizations, each who possess a population of enslaved humans, culturally and physically molded to the needs of their masters. And each book of this series covers our generic hero's interactions with each bizarre expoitative culture. I was extremely intrigued.

Soon thereafter, I found my current absolute favorite book - "THE DRAGON MASTERS". A book about an isolated medieval world... which gets visited, once every few generations, by a black pyramid starship, flown by a reptilian race known as the Greph. The greph capture humans to (surprise surprise) breed them into hyper specific slaves... who in turn become Greph-like in their thinking and demeanours. But the last time the BLACK PYRAMID landed, a bunch of angry medieval dudes stormed the thing, blew it up, and captured a bunch of greph... who became the breeding stock for a whole new human world of slave labour. By the time we meet this planet, the two rival lords of the human-populated regions have been breeding greph slave warriors, or "dragons", for generations, for combat against one another. But soon, the black pyramid will return...

I love this book I even spent a good few months during covid talking with the Vance Estate and several publishers about developing it into a graphic novel, but nobody could quite agree on how it could get made with old Simon getting a paycheque... so sadly it fell apart. There are concept drawings floating around my patreon and other corners of the internet. But one day I'll use 'em...

My other favorite books of his, to name a couple of the MANY books of his I love:

THE BLUE WORLD: A caste system of humans, descended from a crashed prison ship, live on floating settlements on an ocean planet, paying protection to a giant long-lived intelligent crustacean. But one man is tired of giving up all his crops to this tyrannical megafauna...

THE MIRACLE WORKERS: Rival lords on a planet descended to medieval tech (surprise surprise) fight using armies... and rival SORCERORS who employ the powers of suggestion to voodoo each others' warriors... but when facing non-human intelligences, these sorceror's skills fall short.

But there are heaps more, and I love most (thought not all) of the ones i've read. They're generally short, concise, and full of all sorts of bizarre bullshit.

THere are more books i've read and enjoyed in my life, of course, but these are the core ones that I think of when I think of my career as a sci-fi reader... let me know what your top recs are!

#sciencefiction #science fiction #book recommendations #jack vance #larry niven #jerry pournelle #simon roy #griz grobus #charles stross #dragon masters #william gibson #bruce sterling

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fierceawakening · 3 months

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Post on my dash: sometimes it annoys me that I pick up some sci fi and it’s rad until suddenly a sexism

People replying to it: Don’t say sci fi has a sexism problem. Read this instead!

Me: Thats very cool, but some days I STILL think back to no one bothering to warn teenage girl me about the kzin and get mad all over again. Can I say so please?

#'oh hey warrior cat people'#'cool cool'#'wait what do you MEAN the females are all intellectually disabled'#'the... the isms... they are LENTICULAR'

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forehead-alien · 1 year

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A Kzin from Larry Niven's Known Space universe. The Kzinti are among Niven's most popular creations, having appeared in other settings and franchises as well.

A Kdatlyno from Larry Niven's Known Space universe. Using hearing instead of vision to perceive their surroundings, these aliens create sculptures that are meant to be touched and felt, not seen.

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kosmos2999 · 4 months

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Star Trek: The Animated Series 50th Anniversary Episode Review

Episode: The Slaver Weapon

Season: 1

Episode: 14

Stardate: 4187.3

Original airdate: December 15, 1973

Written by: Larry Niven

Directed by: Hal Sutherland

Music by: Yvette Blais and Jeff Michaels

Executive producers: Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott

Studio: Filmation Associates

Network: NBC

Series created by: Gene Roddenberry

Cast:

Captain James T. Kirk (voice by William Shatner) (credit only)

Mr. Spock (voice by Leonard Nimoy)

Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (voice by DeForest Kelly) (credit only)

Lt. Uhura (voice by Nichelle Nichols)

Lt. Hikaru Sulu (voice by George Takei)

Chuft Captain, Kzinti Telepath, Kzinti Flyer (voices by James Doohan)

Slaver Weapon Computer (voice by Majel Barrett)

Synopsis:

First Officer, Mr. Spock –accompained by Lieutenants Uhura and Sulu-- are aboard the Enterprise shuttle Copernicus in a mission to deliver a stasis box to Starbase 25. It was discovered by archeologists on the planet Kzin.

These boxes have something in particular, time stands still inside them. Everithing was put on the boxes is preserved as the first moment no matter how much time it spends there. Like a time capsule.

They were created by the Slavers. A race which mastered most of the intelligent life-forms of the galaxy a billion years ago until one race revolted. The Slavers and their subjects were exterminated in a war that followed. The stasis boxes are the only remnant of the Slavers.

Their effect on science has been incalculable. The content of one of them was a flying belt which was the key to the artifitial gravity field used by starships. They are rare and also dangerous. For that reason, the Starfleet is in charge of the stasis boxes.

To find a stasis box, you need another one. The first was discovered by accident. As the Copernicus approaches to the Beta Lyrae System, the box began to glow. It indicates there is another of the boxes in the vicinity.

As the shuttle lands in an ice-bound world and the trio of officers are in the surface wearing life-support belts, the were ambushed by a gang of an alien race, the Kzinti. They stole their stasis box and were put as prisoners at their ship, the Traitor's Claw. Right now, the officer's trio is trapped in a police web.

The Kzintis are a race of cat-like aliens. They are armed. It is forbbiden by the Treaty of Sirius. Spock notices one of them --the lean, be-draggles one-- is a telepath. As Uhura notices on this telepath, Kzinti telepaths have a reputation of being unhappy neurotics. Spock knows the Kzintis do not want to deal with him or Uhura because they think both of them are inferior beings. Spock is a Vulcan who only eat roots and leaves and Uhura is a female. They are an alien race of meat-eaters, so they only wants to deal with Sulu.

Spock warns Sulu if he notice the telepath is reading his mind, he has to think about eating a raw vegetable. And also instructs Uhura to not tell anything in the presence of their captors because the women of their race are dumb animals and they can forget it. The lieutenant fell offended by Spock's words but she later understood his intention.

The Chuft Captain starts his interrogation to Lieutenant Sulu. He tells the officers that the ship they are caught in, the privateer Traitor's Claw was a stolen ship. An usual habit of the Kzintis. Sulu reminds the captain that the Kzintis had fought four wars with mankind and lost all of them. The last of them was two hundred years ago, and it seems they have not learned a thing since then. The angry captain threats Sulu if he continue talking that way, he and his crew will be eating him.

They want that stasis box because there were two of those boxes discovered by the Kzinti archeologists and the one that they managed to keep was empty. Next, the commander of the stolen police vessel tells the Enterprise officers that they do not work for their government and if they were captured, the Highest of Kzin will repudiate them. A blatant lie.

The Kzinti opens the stasis box using a ray. Inside the box, there is a picture of an one-eyed alien creature. Probably, it is one of the Slavers. If so, a very important historic discovery. Also, they find a piece of fresh meat. It still fresh no matter how much years had been passed. And, at last, the band of Kzintis found some kind of green object with a handle. It could be a tool, or worse, a gun. The Chuf Captain expresses his desires to kill all mankind if he could.

The band of thugs move their ship to the surface. The captain orders the telepath to read the mind of Officer Sulu, but he has too much difficulty in doing such task.

Of the all contents on the stasis box, the piece of meat was the first to be tested. They have found that it was protoplasmic and poisonous. The telepath told the captain that Sulu thinks the one who appears in the picture is a Slaver.

In the first try on the gun-like device, nothing happened. The Chuft Captain asks the mind reader because he wants to know if Officer Sulu had a reaction. He feels no ill effects. The telepath had a bad taste experience this time. The leader of the band thinks it may be a commnications device or a sonic stunner designed to affect members of a race dead now.

In the next setting, the artifact turned into a small telescope. In another turn of the object, it become a laser. Not so effective as the ones available on present time. One more switching and the device turned into what it seems to be portable rocket that blasts away the Chuft Captain. He made an impact on Uhura and freed her from the web. But she was stunned by the band of thugs' phasers.

The captain also hits the thelepath, making damage to his spacesuit. The next setting seems to do nothing, but the ball with two loops at its sides deactivates all the energy consuming devices on its surroundings. The trio officers feel free from the police web and escaped. Spock jumps to and kicked the Chuft Captain taking the Slavers' device with him. They stunned and captured Uhura again. The captain was bruised and asks for help to get back into his ship.

When Sulu gathered with Spock, he tells he is afraid the Kzintis will ask for help to their people. Spock tells him that they maybe will not do. For their race, to be hit by a race of pacifist vegetarians –like the Vulcans-- is the ultimate offense. He must be seek personal revenge before calling for help.

All it is happening according to Spock's plan. The band of thugs will do nothing to Uhura as Spock is free. Sulu gets to the conclusion that the object is probably made for missions of espionage. He thinks so because it has too many settings a soldier can use and the laser is the only effective as a weapon.

Spock theorizes if it is true, there is a self-destructing setting. He toggles a null setting and the device turned into a globe with a handle. Sulu thinks is is a key to another setting.

The Traitor's Claw takes off again to search both Sulu and Spock. The ship's captain makes a bargain to them: the life of Lieutenant Uhura in exchange for the weapon. He also wants a fight with the Vulcan officer. They refused to both.

Sulu turns the globe and it changes into something like a gun with a sight. He points and shoots at the horizon and there was a huge explosion. Like a nuclear bomb one. A total conversion of matter to energy at distant. Something very dangerous to fall on the hands of the Kzintis.

Both Federation officers were knocked as they fell to the foor and were captured again by the alien thugs. Inside the ship, the Chuft Captain plays with the device and it turns into an oval shape with a few buttons and a small light that turns on and off while the device beeps. He was frightened because the Kzintis had legends of weapons haunted by their owners.

The actual setting is a reasoning computer. The Chuft Captain tried to know how much time it was turned off, but the computer told him that it does not have sense of the passing time. Then he asks the machine about the last thing it remembers. The device told him that it was on a mission, but it is not going to tell him about without certain code words. He received the same answer when he wanted to know the position of the stars in the sector it used to be.

Finally, the captain asked it to tell him about how to put the total conversion setting again and it gives him some instructions. Spock was aware that the computer tells them it because it was programmed to self-destruct if it falls in hands of the enemies. The Kzintis went to the outside to test the weapon, but all of them were killed by the explotion of the device.

The Federation officers are now free to get back to the Copernicus. Sulu tells Spock that he was sorry that weapon was lost. That it could be fine in a museum. Spock tells him that if that weapon was not taken by the Kzintis, it could be the Klingons or another species. It would never reach the museum.

Fascinating Facts:

This episode is written by Larry Niven. It is an adaptation of one of his short stories, “The Soft Weapon”. The story has any relation to Star Trek. It is part of Niven's Known Space universe. It was notably republished in 1968 as part of an anthology titled “Neutron Star”.

Only five voice actors (Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, James Doohan and Majel Barrett) appeared in this episode. James Doohan did not participated as Scotty by he had done the voices of all the Kzinti.

This is the first time the USS Enterprise did not appear as a part of a story nor in the Animated Series nor The Original Series. It only appear in the credit scenes.

#space opera #space western #filmation #star trek #70s sci fi #star trek: tas 50th anniversary #star trek: the animated series 50th anniversary

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