Faced with insufficient power to use hyperspace, Kzanol aimed his ship at the nearest uninhabited Thrint planet used to grow yeast for food (Earth), and turned his spacesuit's emergency stasis field on to survive the long journey and impact.

Both Greenberg and the real Kzanol steal spaceships and race to reclaim the thought-amplifying machine on Neptune, which is powerful enough to enable a single Thrint to control every thinking being in the Solar System.

[6] With regard to the book's ending, Silvia Parks-Brown noted: "Human nature and the way states and their military arms think and act are not said by Niven to have significantly changed in the time separating us from the Known Space series.

That being so, it can be assumed with a high probability that in the decades after the ending of "Ptavvs", Earth and the Belt would be watching each other for any sign of the other developing the ability to enter the atmosphere of a gas giant, locate and recover objects from there, i.e. gain possession of the ditched Amplifier.

In the novel Protector, protagonist Elroy Truesdale observes the Sea Statue whilst visiting the Smithsonian Institution: "It looked the product of some advanced civilization... and it was; it was a pressure suit with emergency stasis field facilities, and the thing inside was very dangerous.

The theme of a human telepath "absorbing" the mind of an alien and thereby gaining various abilities and pieces of information was also at the center of Clifford Simak's Time Is the Simplest Thing.

The theme of a telepathic being able to enslave and control humans, and who comes back to malevolent active life in present-day Earth after an enormous time spent in hibernation or stasis, was used by John Brunner in The Atlantic Abomination.