Protector is a 1973 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe. The work follows up on his classic novel Ringworld and fleshes out a species originally introduced in the story called Pak Protectors.
The story
The novel is comprised of two phases in the same space that are separated by 220 years of time.
The first half of the book follows the path of the Pak named Phssthpok who has travelled from the Pak homeworld in search of a colony of Pak in the distant system of Sol, which is our Earth. Upon his arrival, he takes hostage a man named Jack Brennan who Phssthpok converts to a protector. They crash land on Mars where Brennan kills Phssthpok and is rescued by two humans, Nick Sohl and Lucas Garner, who had set out to meet the alien. The first half of the novel ends with Brennan telling his story to the humans before he heads for the outer reaches of the solar system.
The second half of the book follows the path of a human named Roy Truesdale who has been abducted with no memory of the event. While searching for his abductor, he befriends Alice Jordan who helps him figure out that the man he has sought is none other than Jack Brennan. Truesdale and Jordan find Brennan in the outer solar system on a fabricated world of Brennan's design called Kobold. Brennan has found out that there is a Pak invasion headed towards human space and takes Truesdale to a human outpost colony called Home in an effort to divert attention away from Earth. Brennan and Truesdale arrive at Home only to have Truesdale realize Brennan plans to convert the colony into a defensive Pak–Human army. Truesdale kills Brennan and lands on Home, he himself infected with the virus which quickly spreads to a number of other colonists, thus carrying out Brennan's plan even with Truesdale's own attempts to thwart it.
Concepts
- Origin of Humanity
- Phssthpok had lost all of his Pitchok children in a massive war on the Pak homeworld, and was in need of finding meaning for his life, or he would die. After spending much time in the homeworld's library, he found a story of a Pak expedition mounted long ago to find a habitable planet. The expedition succeeded, but the world's soil had no thallium oxide needed to support the virus needed by breeders (a sub-sentient hominid now known as Homo habilis) to develop into protectors, nor the existence of colonizing protectors. Without this developmental ability, the breeders are allowed to exist on their own and undergo evolution long enough to develop intelligence and, eventually, an advanced technological society.
- Persephone
- According to the novel, Persephone is the tenth planet of our solar system. While actually proposed in the 1970s to account for perturbations for the orbit of Neptune, Niven gives it additional qualities such as retrograde motion, an orbit tilted 61 degrees to the ecliptic, and a mass slightly less than that of Saturn.
- Neutronium
- Brennan created a sphere of neutronium measuring 8 in diameter, and maintained it in a stasis field at his world of Kobold. It is a material consisting of densely-packed neutrons, such that there is no denser substance, and his sphere has a surface gravity measured at 8 million g.
- Kobold
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