Thrint
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In Larry Niven's fictional Known Space universe, the Thrintun (singular Thrint) were a long-extinct species which ruled the galaxy through telepathic mind control. The Thrintun were nearly destroyed about two billion years before the human era by one of their slave races known as the Tnuctip, and used one of their own devices to amplify a telepathic command ("die") across the galaxy in an event they called "Suicide Night" so as to take their slave races with them. The story is partially told in the novella The World of Ptavvs and the story Peter Robinson from the book Man-Kzin Wars X. Their original name was unknown before the setting of the novella, but traces of their culture had been discovered and they were simply referred to as the slavers.
The Thrintun are carnivorous, eat and excrete through the same orifice which is lined with sharp teeth and fringed with feeding tentacles, and they have a single faceted eye. Their clumsy hands have large fingers arranged in a mutually opposed fashion (like a mechanical grab), and large, round heads. Niven is inconsistent about the actual size of a Thrint: in World of Ptavvs, the character Kzanol is about half the height of a human, whereas later fiction portrays Thrints as about 8 feet high. Thrintun have no internal mechanism for regulating appetite; for their own health and safety they learn at an early age to endure their constant, ravenous hunger rather than suffering from sickness due to overeating. Average Thrint IQ is about 80-90. That they are so lacking in intelligence and dexterity with tools owes to the enormous evolutionary advantage that their telepathic abilities give them; they simply have not had sufficient selective pressure to improve on what they have. A Thrint's slaves may be far more intelligent than their master, but intelligence provides no protection at all against enslavement.
Thrintun refer to their own mental ability as The Power. Most of their religious traditions are centered around their manifest destiny to rule the galaxy, with the Power divinely granted to facilitate this. Powerloss is cause for exile in their society. Thrintun who have lost their Power are referred to as Ptavvs (a class barely above the slave races), are tatooed pink and become the property of another. A Thrint's native Power can manage a few dozen sentient beings simultaneously. With an amplifier helmet, a Thrint can control an entire planet.
Female and juvenile Thrintun are nearly mindless. Males come of age when they can effectively resist the Power of their father.
The Thrintun developed a mediocre philosophic tradition in response to their need for control over their aggressive drives. Aphorisms such as "haste is not speed" represent deep wisdom to a Thrint. The combination of strong and insatiable hunger with low intelligence also leads Thrintun to act rashly. In World of Ptavvs, Kzanol desperately wagers his future on a competive animal race. Gambling is quite common among the Thrintun, and this isn't seen as unusual. Similarly, Suicide Night, in which the Thrintun blasted the entire galaxy with a devastating mental weapon, is an unsurprising reaction by the entire Thrint species to losing their war against the Tnuctipun.
[edit] Thrint In History
The Thrintun evolved on a planet where nearly every animal species possessed telepathic ability. Selective pressures led to an ecology wherein no individual species possessed great advantage over any other, but defenseless offworld species were easy prey. The Slavers were neolithic hunters when their planet was visited by a starcraft piloted by an unnamed race. They quickly enslaved its crew, and then their civilization.
The Thrintun settled vast areas of the galaxy, seeding many planets with basic life forms (created for them by one of their controlled species, the Tnuctipun) to use as food sources. Once a planet was seeded with a sort of yeast, larger animals known to humans as the Bandersnatchi, and to the Thrintun as whitefoods, were introduced in a form of interstellar cattle-farming. Humans (or rather their genetic progenitors, the Pak) evolved from one such planet, which was abandoned when the Thrintun culture was destroyed, after photosynthesis had started, but before the Bandersnatchi had been moved in. The common chemical composition, genetics and environmental conditions found among species in Known Space are a consequence of this process -- most intelligent species in the series are presumably descended from Slaver food yeast. The diversity of life during the Slaver empire is not known.
A number of their technologies, in particular their engineered life forms, continue to exist in the human era. Among these are Stage Trees, trees that mature containing solid rocket fuel in their trunks, originally used as cheap rocket boosters when planted in orchards, but now evolved to be able to seed themselves across star systems. Discovery of a slaver stasis vault, often containing new and tremendously valuable technologies, was a pastime of many gentlemen-adventurers.
In the 'present day' of the Known Space universe, the Grogs, a race of sessile furry cones which can control animals telepathically, turn out to be the mutated descendants of survivors of the Thrintun species.
