Phssthpok, a Pak Protector eating Tree-of-Life root in the Library on the Pak homeworld
Pak Breeders and Pak Protectors are two developmental stages 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 (1973). The Pak also appear in several of Niven's later novels, notably those set in the Ringworld.
Niven has written that he invented the Protectors as a thought experiment to explain the common effects of aging on humans and to create a fictional evolutionary explanation for humans' long lives after females have passed reproductive age.[1] Accordingly, most of the positive attributes of Protectors are based on negative human aging effects: swollen joints, decreased muscle-fat ratio, weakening heart, invariant diet, decreasing height, facial atrophy, leathery skin, hair loss, lack of sex drive, and tooth loss are all turned to advantage during the shift from Breeder to Protector.
The Pak species
In Protector, the audience learns that humans are descended from the Pak. Pak Children and Breeders appear in Earth's fossil record as Homo habilis; the few Pak Protectors to make it to Earth apparently are not found in the fossil record.
The Pak species goes through three stages of development: Child, Breeder and Protector.
Pak Child is analogous to a human child: sexually immature and dependent upon adults for survival.
Pak Breeder is analogous to a young-ish human adult: sexually mature, self-sufficient (in later writings) and providing immediate care for the children. To the Pak, the Breeder stage, though capable of space travel, is not deemed fully sentient; Breeders, to a large extent, rely on Protectors for long-term survival. Earlier Niven stories describe the breeder as "just intelligent enough to swing a club or throw a stone".
Pak Protector is not analogous to any human form. It is described as a 'fighting machine', with armor-like skin, super-human strength and super-human intelligence. Niven's stories that focus on the Pak mostly concentrate on the unique Protector stage.
Niven explained the evolution of the Pak as resulting from high radiation levels on their home world near the core of the galaxy. The high radiation near the star-dense core caused severe mutations that can destabilize the evolutionary process. As a result, the Pak evolved a mechanism to eliminate dangerous mutations from the population. That mechanism is the Protector stage.
Protectors are highly sensitive to the smell of their close relatives and "weed out" those that smell wrong, which may indicate a potentially dangerous mutation. This weeding also suppressed positive mutations, essentially halting Pak evolution. Protectors are fully sentient, and are far more intelligent than ordinary humans. This "superior" intelligence, however, serves only a Pak Protector's instincts to protect its bloodline at any costs. The Pak have no drive toward the collection of abstract knowledge, have no concept of art, and do not even possess enough of an artistic impulse to understand the purpose of making sketches and paintings for reasons not directly useful.
The change from Breeder to Protector is the result of a peramorphic transformation brought about by the plant known as Tree-of-Life. As humans (and all primates) are descended from the Pak, Tree-of-Life can create a Protector-stage human.
Tree-of-Life is the mechanism by which a Breeder becomes a Protector. The term originally is used to refer to a specific plant which, when consumed, triggers the transformation. The term "Tree-of-Life virus" is used to describe the symbiotic virus which actually governs the transition.
Niven took the name Tree-of-Life from the Book of Genesis; specifically to the fruit of the "Tree of Life" that could make Adam and Eve immortal (Genesis 3:22–24), which is quoted as the foreword to the novel Protector, and also mentioned by Brennan within the novel.
Tree-of-Life (the plant) is a bush native to the Pak homeworld. When a Breeder reaches the proper age (early 40s for humans), the smell of the root becomes irresistible; the Breeder gorges on the Tree-of-Life root, infecting itself with the Tree-of-Life virus and transforming into a Protector. The age window for the metamorphosis is relatively narrow (between 42 and 50 Earth years). Tree-of-Life is common on the Pak world, so there is almost no risk of a Breeder living past this window without being exposed to the roots.
The transition from Breeder to Protector involves reconfiguration of the anatomy. Skin thickens, becoming similar to leather armor, strong enough to turn a copper knife. Joints swell until the creature becomes "a parody of the human form done in cantaloupes and coconuts". This increases leverage available to muscles by increasing the force of the moment arm, the result being that a protector can lift ten times its own weight. Genitalia and gonads vanish, and a second two-chambered heart forms in the groin at the fusion of the femoral veins. The arms lengthen. Fingernails turn into retractable claws. Teeth fall out and the lips and gums fuse, the mouth forming a horny beak (flat in protectors transformed from humans, non-flat in protectors transformed from Pak). All the breeder's hair falls out and the head acquires a bony ridge to protect the newly expanded cranium. The expanded skull allows the brain to grow to an enormous size; the resulting mind, even starting from something as "unintelligent" as a chimpanzee, becomes far more intelligent than a typical human. Pak Protectors also acquire an extended lifespan, and can live tens of thousands of Earth years (a common element in Niven's stories).
Once the transformation is complete, a Pak Protector must periodically consume more Tree-of-Life root to maintain the virus in its body. Without the virus, a Protector will weaken and die as its DNA is degraded; the virus supplies replacement DNA.
The Tree-of-Life crop on Earth failed due to there being insufficient thallium oxide (which particular oxide is never explained) in the Earth's soil; the plants grew but did not support the virus. As a result, the Protectors that led the colony to Earth died of starvation when their store of roots ran out.
Protector behavior
Pak Protectors have an innate need to protect close relatives. When a Pak Protector has no bloodline to protect, it usually stops eating and starves, though some childless Protectors can adopt the entire Pak race as their family.
Niven states that Protectors on the crowded Pak homeworld would constantly war against each other to gain advantage for their family and that alliances would last only until one ally sees advantage in betrayal. Human Protectors, and those on the Ringworld, seem to be less warlike and better able to work for the betterment of the entire species (or all of the Ringworld hominids) rather than just their bloodline, though this may simply be a function of how few Protectors with families encounter each other.
Protectors typically die from starvation (from lack of will to live, e.g. if the Protector's bloodline has died out, in which case they simply stop eating until death takes them) or violence. Although Protectors have a vastly extended lifetime, it is not infinite; during the original half-million year journey to Earth some Protector colonists did die from old age.
Because of their enormous intelligence and instinctive need to protect their family (or their species, etc.), Protectors are efficient, ruthless and quite amoral. Xenophobia is a commonly displayed trait: other races are considered either unneccesary or potentially dangerous. It is observed several times that this intelligence combined with instinct also compels action so completely that Protectors often have little "free will". Niven uses this trait as a plot device several times as characters set up circumstances where Protector characters will react in a specific manner. In Protector, Jack Brennan (a human turned into a Protector) commits genocide by exterminating the Martian race ("Aliens were dangerous, or might be, and Pak were not interested in anything but Pak") and also releases a genetically modified Tree-of-Life virus on the colony world Home, turning everyone middle aged into a Protector (and killing all other humans on the planet) in order to create an army of childless Protectors with which to fight the invading Pak fleet. It is indicated throughout Niven's works that humans (Homo sapiens) that have turned into protectors are far more intelligent than their Pak (Homo habilis) counterparts (in much the way that humans are more intelligent than the primates they evolved from) and that the Pak may, in fact, be the final evolutionary stage for the human race as a whole.
Niven explains much of Protector behavior in his Future History, by revealing in Ringworld's Children that the ARM may be run by at least one Protector and that Boosterspice (which dramatically prolongs human lifespan) is derived from Tree-of-Life.
The Pak and humanity
In Protector, Niven explains that humans (and all of Earth's primates) are descended from a colony of Pak breeders that were stranded on Earth 2.5 million years ago. The protectors that built the colony ship died when their Tree-of-Life crops failed. The original Pak Breeder population (known to us as Homo habilis) bred and mutated wildly, evolving into modern humans as well as all other Earth primates. All Terran primates would transform into the Protector stage if exposed to Tree-of-Life root (or, more accurately, the symbiotic virus it contains).
In The Ringworld Engineers, the characters find evidence that the Ringworld was built by Pak Protectors (confirmed by the statements of a character in Ringworld's Children who claims to be one of the original builders) and populated by Pak breeders. The Pak Protectors dwindled in numbers until they were no longer able to maintain the genetic purity of the breeder forms and the breeders eventually evolved into all the other hominids of the Ringworld that one sees in Larry Niven's novels.
Homo habilis is an extinct species of archaic human from the Early Pleistocene of East and South Africa about 2.3 million years ago to 1.65 million years ago (mya). Upon species description in 1964, H. habilis was highly contested, with many researchers recommending it be synonymised with Australopithecus africanus, the only other early hominin known at the time, but H. habilis received more recognition as time went on and more relevant discoveries were made. By the 1980s, H. habilis was proposed to have been a human ancestor, directly evolving into Homo erectus, which directly led to modern humans. This viewpoint is now debated. Several specimens with insecure species identification were assigned to H. habilis, leading to arguments for splitting, namely into "H. rudolfensis" and "H. gautengensis" of which only the former has received wide support.
Laurence van Cott Niven is an American science fiction writer. His 1970 novel Ringworld won the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. With Jerry Pournelle he wrote The Mote in God's Eye (1974) and Lucifer's Hammer (1977). The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him the 2015 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.
Known Space is the fictional setting of about a dozen science fiction novels and several collections of short stories by American writer Larry Niven. It has also become a shared universe in the spin-off Man-Kzin Wars anthologies. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) catalogs all works set in the fictional universe that includes Known Space under the series name Tales of Known Space, which was the title of a 1975 collection of Niven's short stories. The first-published work in the series, which was Niven's first published piece, was "The Coldest Place", in the December 1964 issue of If magazine, edited by Frederik Pohl. This was the first-published work in the 1975 collection.
Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. Ringworld tells the story of Louis Wu and his companions on a mission to the Ringworld, an enormous rotating ring, an alien construct in space 186 million miles in diameter. Niven later wrote three sequel novels and then cowrote, with Edward M. Lerner, four prequels and a final sequel; the five latter novels constitute the Fleet of Worlds series. All the novels in the Ringworld series tie into numerous other books set in Known Space. Ringworld won the Nebula Award in 1970, as well as both the Hugo Award and Locus Award in 1971.
The Ringworld science fiction role-playing game was published by Chaosium in 1984, using the Basic Role-Playing system for its rules and Larry Niven's Ringworld novels as a setting.
The Kzinti are an alien cat-like species developed by Larry Niven in his Known Space series.
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.
An Alderson disk is a hypothetical artificial astronomical megastructure, like Larry Niven's Ringworld and the Dyson sphere. The disk is a giant platter with a thickness of several thousand miles. The Sun rests in the hole at the center of the disk. The outer perimeter of an Alderson disk would be roughly equivalent to the orbit of Mars or Jupiter. According to the proposal, a sufficiently large disk would have a larger mass than its Sun.
Louis Gridley Wu, a fictional character, is the protagonist in the Ringworld series of books, written by Larry Niven.
The Smoke Ring is a 1987 science fiction novel by Larry Niven. Like much of Niven's work, the story is heavily influenced by the setting: a gas torus, a ring of air around a neutron star. It is a sequel to The Integral Trees.
Protector is a 1973 science fiction novel by American writer Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe. It was nominated for the Hugo in 1974, and placed fourth in the annual Locus poll for that year.
The Ringworld Engineers is a 1979 science fiction novel by American writer Larry Niven. It is the first sequel to Niven's Ringworld and was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1981.
The Ringworld Throne is a science fiction novel by American writer Larry Niven, first published in 1996. It is the direct sequel to his previous work The Ringworld Engineers (1980). He wrote it as a replacement after being unable to finish his contracted novel The Ghost Ships, the sequel to The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring.
The Man-Kzin Wars is a both the name of series of military science fiction anthologies as well as the name of the first book in the series. The short stories detail the eponymous conflicts between mankind and the Kzinti, set in Larry Niven's Known Space universe. However, Niven himself has written only a small number of the stories; most were written by other science fiction writers, as Niven opened this part of the Known Space to collaboration in the form of a shared universe. The cover art for the books in the series is created by Stephen Hickman.
N-Space is a collection of short stories by American science fiction author Larry Niven released in 1990. Some of the stories are set in Niven's Known Space universe. Also included are various essays, articles and anecdotes by Niven and others, excerpts from some of his novels, and an introduction by Tom Clancy. Its sequel is Playgrounds of the Mind.
Fleet of Worlds is a science fiction novel by American writers Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner, part of Niven's Known Space series. Fleet of Worlds can also refer to the series consisting of this book and its four sequels.
The State is a fictional totalitarian world government in a future history that forms the back-story of three of Larry Niven's novels: A World Out of Time (1976), The Integral Trees (1984), and The Smoke Ring (1987). It is also the setting of two short stories, "Rammer" and "The Kiteman", as well as a stalled fourth novel, The Ghost Ships. After several years in development, Niven announced that The Ghost Ships would never be made and wrote The Ringworld Throne instead. The novel would have focused on a race of self-aware natural Bussard ramjets birthed in the supernova that created Levoy's Star and were returning to their place of birth to mate. According to Playgrounds of the Mind, Kendy and the kite-fliers from "The Kiteman" would have returned also.
Destroyer of Worlds is a science fiction novel by American writer Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner, set in the Known Space series. It is a sequel to their previous novels, Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of Worlds. It is set ten years after Juggler of Worlds, drawing heavily from Protector, but, like the rest of the series, can stand alone.
A list of works by, or about, the American science fiction author Larry Niven.
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