I just finished reading Protector for about the tenth time.
My question: what happened to all those Protectors that Roy converted on Home? There must have been a couple hundred thousand of them. I assume they annihilated the Pak fleet, because no mention is made of a Pak attack on Earth or elsewhere in Known Space stories taking place later on the timeline.
But if they successfully concluded that war, then there is an army of Home-ian Protectors on the loose with nothing to keep them occupied. What happened to them? I know there were novels written by other authors than Niven set in the Known Space universe; did any of these books expand on this subject?
I just read something about that-I believe they were all killed, or are still fighting the Pak in relativistic flight, and will not return during the time of known space.
There was a battle between humans and a Pak fleet in Destroyer of Worlds, but it was a different set of Pak than the fleet in Protector. How many of them ARE there, anyhow?
I think the universe of known space was beginning to lose its way by then. Just too much going on. Everything had to be “tied together”. Even if it never made sense.
I still don’t believe the Pak built the Ringworld. It’s not in their nature. To make it fit in the novels, the authors basically had to say “you know everything we learned about Pak before? The people that said that were lying.” That’s kinda cheating.
Personally, I don’t believe the Pak built the Ringworld because I prefer to refuse to accept the existence of the Pak and Protectors. They read like a poor attempt by Niven to deny his own aging. “What? No, I’m not getting old and decrepit-- This is just my body attempting to turn into an awesome killing machine”. Plus they really don’t fit into Earth’s evolutionary history: Humans are clearly related to gorillas and chimps, so they must be degenerate Paks… But humans, gorillas, and chimps are clearly related to monkeys, so what are they? And apes and monkeys are clearly related to lorises and lemurs, and primates are clearly related to rodents, and so on.
And it definitely doesn’t make sense to have them in the same universe as the original Ringworld book, because if they exist and are known, then how was the Ringworld ever a mystery to begin with? The Puppeteers should have immediately said “Hm, inhabited by hominids; this place must have been built by Paks, that explains that”.
The protectors from Home are still a long way off, I think - they’re using slower than light travel, fighting the portion of the Pak fleet headed toward Earth hundreds or thousands of light years away from Earth. It’d be great to see some of them come back but not likely to happen.
Yes, but I couldn’t remember the name, so I couldn’t find it again. Thanks!
(BTW, I “hate” that story idea. I mean, it’s interesting, but we don’t need it. Plus, it makes whole stories and character development ‘not happen’. Like a bad reset button TNG episode.)
But the whole reason the Pak fleet was headed this way was because the Core explosion forced them off their planet. It’s got to be lifeless by now.
Down in Flames was interesting, but a ton of stuff written since then, like the Man-Kzin Wars series, has rendered it impossible. Real tnuctipun have shown up, it turns out that there are actually ship-eating hypership creatures that live around stars, which is why you can’t go into hyperspace too close to one, etc.
That had to be the singular(ity!) most dumbest thing in known space. It started as a throw-away CT by Bey Schaeffer and became fact. Of course, it became fact in what I like to think of as the Highlander II of Known Space - Ringworld’s Children.
