Pierson's Puppeteers
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.
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 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 (Kzinti), suggesting their vocal arrangement may resemble a pair of avian-like syrinxes rather than vocal cords.
For example, humans in Niven's universe invented (actually purchased from the Puppeteers) 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.
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.
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.
This was due to the fact that a GP Hull essentially consisted of a single incredibly large, highly complex molecule.
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.
The general foreign policy of Puppeteers consists of attempts to control the universe around them to ensure their own safety.
As Puppeteers try to expose themselves to as little risk as possible, they use other beings as agents whenever possible, utilizing a combination of bribes and blackmail to obtain cooperation.
The Puppeteer government concluded that humans' most notable quality was luck and decided to strengthen this trait.
Teela Brown, who journeys to the Ringworld with Louis Wu, is a descendant of multiple generations of lottery winners.
Her luck is highly selective, bending probability so that the outcome most beneficial to her or her descendants comes to pass, without regard to its effects on those around her, contrary to the interests of the rest of the Ringworld expedition on more than one occasion.
The Puppeteers first moved their worlds into this formation when their home star turned into a red giant, using an inertialess, reactionless drive purchased at great price from the Outsiders.
After the discovery that the core of the galaxy is exploding, the Puppeteers turned the fleet towards the Magellanic Clouds, gradually reaching a speed of 80% lightspeed.
No entity in Known Space outside the Puppeteer race was aware of the location, despite extensive surveys, with the probable exception of Jinx-born pirate Captain Kidd.
Puppeteers were willing to pay large sums of hush money in order to suppress even trivial details about their homeworld.
In 2641 AD, it was discovered that the Puppeteers' homeworld had no moon, information deduced as a result of the solving of the mystery of the deaths of a crew of a ship investigating a neutron star.
Eventually, their sun converted from a yellow dwarf to a red giant, so the Puppeteers moved the "Fleet of Worlds", the five planets, to their system's Oort cloud.
Beowulf notes, however, that the speed at which the Fleet of Worlds is moving (0.8c) would cause nearly as much damage as the Core explosion itself.
In Crashlander it is speculated that the Puppeteers are planning on moving to the now-uninhabited Core, isolated from potentially dangerous species - which would have either fled the galaxy entirely or been destroyed.
Their initial path is revealed to be out of the plane of the galaxy, but no mention is made of Louis Wu noticing trajectory when flying there on the Long Shot in Ringworld.
