Pierson's Puppeteers
Pierson's Puppeteers, often known just as Puppeteers, are a fictional alien race from American author Larry Niven's Known Space books. The race first appeared in Niven's novella Neutron Star.
Biology and sociology
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 Seasick 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. Puppeteers dealing with humans usually give themselves the names of centaurs and other figures in Greek mythology, such as Nessus, Nike and Chiron. Puppeteers' names for themselves are reportedly highly complex, and unpronounceable by humans. The group name they use for their own species translates as "Citizens".Pierson's Puppeteers are described by Niven as having two forelegs and a single hindleg ending in hoofed feet, and two snake-like heads instead of a humanoid upper body. The heads are small, containing a forked tongue, 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, suggesting their vocal arrangement may resemble a pair of avian-like syrinxes rather than vocal cords.
Biologically, Puppeteers are highly intelligent herbivores; a herd animal, Puppeteers prefer the company of their own kind. Their cycle of reproduction is similar to that of Earth's digger wasps: the Puppeteers consider themselves to have three genders : the two "male" genders are the equivalent of human female and male and the "female" is a parasitized host into which the ovum and spermatozoon are deposited.
Puppeteers are very long-lived. The exact length of a Puppeteer's lifespan is unknown, but it is at least several centuries—Nessus, the most prominent individual Puppeteer in the works, is over 300 years old during the events of the original Ringworld novel. This, together with a total lack of contraceptives for their species along with an unwillingness to use them, is responsible for extreme crowding: the Puppeteer homeworld has a population of over a trillion, and four farming worlds are dedicated entirely to supplying the population with food. Even then, grown food is a luxury reserved for only the highest-ranking, with synthesizers feeding the vast majority. While contraception is forbidden, access to 'brides' is strictly controlled. Puppeteers also have access to highly advanced medical technology that may be a factor in their longevity.
Technologically, the Puppeteers are very advanced, centuries or millennia ahead of most other species. For example, humans in Niven's universe 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. They transformed their home world, and several other astronomical bodies, into a Klemperer rosette, in order to flee a galactic catastrophe.
Puppeteers appear to lack generalized empathy towards other intelligent species and display almost textbook sociopathic tendencies: they are highly manipulative, appearing to feel no psychological distress when their actions cause harm to others, they perform interstellar-scale manipulation of other species, inducing and directing large scale wars in order to achieve the goal of their own safety and they do not appear to be disturbed when required to make choices that result in the deaths of billions or trillions. From what little interaction is shown between Puppeteers, it seems their lack of empathy extends to their own species. Mate selection seems to be largely status-based, with higher status mates being more desirable. The Puppeteer Nessus finds comfort in having his living space produce simulated proximity to his species: the smells, sounds, and sights of other Puppeteers. However, he appears to have little need or desire for social interaction with others of his kind.
Socially, two 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:
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 triangulate on his target. Nessus had accurately kicked a man's heart out through his splintered spine.
Another behavioral trait is the coma state, broadly a cognate of the human fetal position–in the same way that ostriches 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 that proves the Puppeteers have nothing equivalent to an immortal soul, and therefore death is, for their species, eternal oblivion. As a result, the Puppeteer race is fanatically devoted to its own safety. It is worth noting that this explanation is a form of diplomatic, post hoc rationalizing, as their cowardice is a biologically ingrained trait and not actually a rational choice. It is diplomatic, in that it validates in other species what Puppeteers consider to be irrationally insane bravery, although it is doubtful that the Puppeteers genuinely accept other species' claims to having souls.
A courageous Puppeteer is regarded as insane by his species, and actually shows symptoms associated with human mental illness, such as bipolar disorder, clinical depression and so on. However, aside from the crew of the Explorer, no human has ever met a completely sane Puppeteer, as no sane Puppeteer would ever leave the safety of the Fleet of Worlds.
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 protected by, 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.
General Products
The Puppeteers' renown for honesty in trading allowed the species to accumulate an expansive mercantile empire called General Products; since the human Bronze Age, the Puppeteers have ruled this empire including every race in the 60-LY sphere of Known Space. One of the most important items sold by General Products is the General Products Hull for spaceships. Such a hull is completely impervious to everything except antimatter ; the hull is transparent to visible light which can be alleviated by polarization or complete opacity; tidal forces and extreme gravitational force 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 2007 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 that the manufacturing process is extremely sensitive to gravity and impurities, that the hulls are constructed from a single super-molecule 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 siphon energy from the structure.