Teela can also be viewed as a lampshade trope, by bending narrativium to function as a plot device ("a hero will always win when outnumbered, since million-to-one chances are dramatic enough to crop up nine times out of ten").
Shortly afterward, Gil finds out that his new arm had not come from a condemned criminal as he had hoped, but from the captured stock of "organleggers", black market dealers in illicit organ transplants.
The stories are noir style, told in first person, and frequently involve exotic technology and locked room mysteries: The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton (1976) contains the first three novellas.
His ability to ask the right questions when programming complex problems also helps him deduce the probable identities of the kidnappers when the Kdatlyno touch sculptor Lloobee is kidnapped from the Argos as it was about to enter Gummidgy system.
Pelton lives in a house on the side of a cliff in the Rocky Mountains on Earth, and having spent a lot of time in space resents being called a flatlander.
Indeed, the hull eventually disintegrated due to annihilations by exposure to antimatter particles from the Fast Protosun's solar wind, but Pelton and Shaeffer were able to escape and managed to return to Jinx.
He finally died in the year 2443 after being selected to chair the Interworld Commission, an early form of pan-Human government established after the peace treaty with the Kzin was signed.
Prior to his death, he had used his position to give the secret of hyperdrive to the Kzin disguised as a diplomatic packet, in the hopes of creating a lasting peace of equality between the two races.
He is the central figure of several stories which revolve around his dealings with Pierson's Puppeteers and human characters in unusual and potentially dangerous activities, which often test his wits and courage to see them through to completion.
Shaeffer's long, thin body is extremely flexible; he has startled both Sigmund Ausfaller and Sharrol Janss at different times with his habit of smoking tabac sticks using his toes.
Shaeffer tends to be pragmatic and discretionary in his outlook, activities and affairs, although he has been prodded to acts of unseemly courage by circumstances and, in a few rare cases, personal choice.
He flew for Nakamura Lines until a stock market crash in 2639 forced the company to fold, leaving Shaeffer unemployed on We Made It but with the expectation of back pay, against which he continued to live comfortably for the next two years.
Finally, in 2648, they decide to ask one of Sharrol's friends, Carlos Wu, a registered genius with an unlimited parenthood license because of his intelligence and resistance to disease and injury, to help them have children.
Sharrol kills Feather, feeds her body into Carlos' autodoc as biomass material, and removes Shaeffer's head and places it in the intensive care cavity of the 'doc.
The 'doc rebuilds Shaeffer over a four-month period, but his height is adjusted to match the intensive care cavity and his rebuilt muscles are adapted to Fafnir's gravity.
Shaeffer recounts his adventures over the last fifteen years to Smittarasheed and attempts to sell him the location of Carlos Wu's autodoc, a valuable prize to the ARM since its technology is based on nanotechnology.
Shaeffer and Sharrol manage to escape to Home with their daughter Jeena and their unborn child, leaving Ander to take the blame (rightly) for Ausfaller's death.
Kzinti ears are hairless, pink, and shaped liked a segment of a Chinese parasol (or cocktail umbrella); they can fold back flat against the head for protection during a fight.
A year and a half later, when Ander Smittarasheed catches up to Bey and Sharrol on Fafnir, she is frozen for shipment to Home along with their daughter Jeena and their unborn child.
Niven's works describe Bandersnatchi as one giant cell with long chromosomes as thick as a human finger, rendering them impervious to the mutagenitive effects of radiation and therefore unable to mutate.
In appearance they are a physically large and powerful bipedal species with muscular build, rough scaly skin, retractile claws and thick hides, growing up to eight feet tall.
In the novel Protector, the Martians are wiped out when Jack Brennan causes an ice asteroid to crash into the surface of Mars, raising the average humidity of the atmosphere.
They are reluctant to reveal this information because they are ashamed, since one of their starseeds created the Thrintun, a species which destroyed nearly all intelligent life in the galaxy several billion years ago.
The novel A Darker Geometry by Gregory Benford and Mark O. Martin stated that the Outsiders were created by a race of extra-dimensional aliens seeking to escape the heat death of their own universe.
[18] The Thrintun (singular Thrint; also, Slavers) are an ancient species that ruled a large empire, including the region of Known Space, through telepathic mind control about 1.5 billion years ago.
A technology created by one of their slave races was the stasis field, which makes its contents impervious to harm and provides indefinite suspended animation, and which has figured in several Known Space stories.
Thrintun were small (approximately 1.25 meters tall), highly telepathic but not particularly intelligent (with their mind control, they did not need to be), reptilian, with green scaly skin, pointed teeth, and a single eye.
In the novel World of Ptavvs, the protagonist Larry Greenberg, a telepath who reads the mind of a Thrint, theorizes that some of their inventions were traps: Bandersnatchi, thought to be non-sentient livestock, were in fact intelligent, created as spies immune to telepathy.
The war escalated until the Thrintun, rather than accept defeat, employed a device that amplified the sphere of influence of a Thrint's mind control to encompass the entire galaxy.
This course of events is alluded to in the novel World of Ptavvs and a still functioning suicide amplifier itself is discovered by Hal Colebach in the short story "Peter Robinson", at which point it is destroyed.