Have the Kzinti ever been featured in novels?

[Enterprise1701]

The only reference to the Kzinti in the novelverse I can think of is a mirror Romulan in MU: Rise Like Lions referring to "the Patriarchy" as an "old enemy" of the Romulan Star Empire. Have legal issues totally prevented their appearance in all Star Trek novel works?

Note 1: I'm aware of the discrepancies of the "Earth-Kzin Wars" mentioned in TAS: "The Slaver Weapon" with subsequent canon and non-canon
Note 2: I'm aware that Star Trek Online features the Ferasans

 

[Deranged Nasat]

The only reference to the Kzinti in the novelverse I can think of is a mirror Romulan in MU: Rise Like Lions referring to "the Patriarchy" as an "old enemy" of the Romulan Star Empire. Have legal issues totally prevented their appearance in all Star Trek novel works?

Note 1: I'm aware of the discrepancies of the "Earth-Kzin Wars" mentioned in TAS: "The Slaver Weapon" with subsequent canon and non-canon
Note 2: I'm aware that Star Trek Online features the Ferasans

There have been a couple of other Patriarchy references in modern Trek lit. If I recall, Rough Beasts of Empire or Plagues of Night (one of the two) reference it along with the Watraii and new nation the Gottar as minor non-aligned powers who have just enough military and political presence to be dangerous should they ever get their hands on slipstream technology. I don't know if the word "Kzinti" has ever been used, but the Patriarchy of Kzin apparently exists in the novel 'verse, we just never go there .

 

[Christopher]

Yes, the Kzinti have been featured in several novels, notably the Ringworld series, Juggler of Worlds, and Fate of Worlds, as well as in shorter works in Tales of Known Space and Neutron Star and the 13-volume Man-Kzin Wars anthology series (plus several fixup novels collecting stories from MKW volumes). There's a whole lot of Kzinti fiction out there -- it just isn't Star Trek fiction.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The Kzinti get an tiny offhand mention in Ishmael, as Kirk walks past a couple in a Starbase corridor.

They are featured in the TNG novel The Captain's Honor, in that the aliens are blatantly the Kzin, but had their name changed at the last minute to M'dok due to some kind of licencing issue. This novel also retcons Sulu's "4 wars, the last 200 years ago" from "The Slaver Weapon" to 2 wars, if I recall correctly, one before and one after the founding of the Federation.

I read somewhere that there's also a Trek short story featuring a race calls the Kythari, which are loosely based on the Kzinti. (these Kythari were also briefly slated to appear in the aborted New Voyages/Phase II fanfilm version of the unmade ENT episode "Kilkenny Cats")

 

[Therin of Andor]

The Kzinti get an tiny offhand mention in Ishmael, as Kirk walks past a couple in a Starbase corridor.

Yep, and briefly mentioned as the K'zinti in "Battlestations!".

KZIN mentioned ("From Sputnik to Warp Drive", in "Star Trek [The Enterprise Logs] Volume 4" and "Worlds of the Federation").

KZIN homeworld was shown on star charts of the United Federation of Planets and its environs ("Star Trek Maps", rendered as the Kz'nti and Kznti Patriarchy; episode "TNG: Conspiracy"). An area indicates location of The Patriarchy ("Star Trek Star Charts").

KZIN COUNCILOR of "The Time Trap" and "Star Trek Log Four" - Bear-like, prototype Kzin member of the ELYSIAN COUNCIL. Named as a Berikazin ("The Time Trap" novelization in "Star Trek Log Four"). Cleverly not mentioned by name ("S.C.E.: Where Time Stands Still", eBook).

Kznti marker buoy featured ("Star Trek Maps").

Fth-Captain and crew featured (LA Times syndicated comic strip storyline, "The Wristwatch Plantation". Note: That storyline was intended to have been novelized by Sharman DiVono with Larry Niven, but it did not proceed beyond proposal stage.

Race rewritten as the M'dok Hegemony, another antagonistic felinoid race ("TNG: The Captains' Honor"). Race rewritten as the Mirak Star League, yet another antagonistic felinoid race ("Starfleet Command" game series, based on "Star Fleet Battles", which featured the KZIN, without Niven's or Paramount's grace).

The triple-breasted female felinoid dancer (in "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier") was referred to in backstage information as a "Kzinretti".

Although we never see representatives of the Tzenkethi Coalition ("DS9: The Adversary", TV), some fans (wrongly) assumed that this now-alligned race, with whom the Federation fought two wars ("DS9: Paradise Lost"), was intended to be the Kzinti, due to the near-anagram of the name. A Tzenkethi settlement is located on M'kemas III ("DS9: The Adversary"). Garek claims to have been a spy on Tzenketh ("DS9: By Inferno's Light", TV). Tzenkethi male described as a "feliform" biped ("DS9: Infinite Bureaucracy" short story in "Strange New Worlds VII").

In 2006, the screenwriter Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who coined the term "Tzenkethi" for DS9 recalled, "I basically made them up. And yeah, I named them. But I can't remember if I was making a purposeful homage to Niven or not. If I had to guess, I suspect I did my usual and combined a couple things. Probably Kzinti and Tsankth. But when I picture them in my head, they weren't big cat people. I thought of them as more like the Hakazit." (The Tsankth are from "RuneQuest" and "HeroQuest". The Hakazit are from Jack L Chalker's "Well World" novels, and are described inconsistently as either: three-metre tall Tyrannosaurus Rexes with powerfully strong arms; or large mosquitoes.)

There is also no connection between the Xindi ("Star Trek: Enterprise", TV) and the Kzinti, despite both fighting wars with Earth.

 

[Markonian]

The Kzinti featured in a Star Trek production. Doesn't that mean that they became a Star Trek property? Current authors also surrender all of their property rights when penning Star Trek fiction, don't they?

 

[Christopher]

The Kzinti featured in a Star Trek production. Doesn't that mean that they became a Star Trek property? Current authors also surrender all of their property rights when penning Star Trek fiction, don't they?

Clearly not, since Niven and others have written quite a few books and stories about the Kzinti since then. What you're referring to pertains to characters and concepts created for Trek under a work-for-hire contract. Niven created the Kzinti in his story "The Warriors," which was published in February 1966, before Star Trek even premiered on television. "The Soft Weapon," the story from which "The Slaver Weapon" was faithfully adapted, was published in February 1967, and a Kzin played one of the lead roles in Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld. So Niven created the Kzin for his own work and used them in three works of fiction before they were adapted for use in Star Trek. Thus, Niven has the prior claim to the Kzinti, the Slavers, stasis boxes, the Man-Kzin Wars, etc.

 

[Lonemagpie]

And of course the Caitians are now the main Trek felinoid race.

 

[KRAD]

The Kzinti featured in a Star Trek production. Doesn't that mean that they became a Star Trek property? Current authors also surrender all of their property rights when penning Star Trek fiction, don't they?

Yeah, but the animated series wasn't quite as cut-and-dried for reasons that I still don't 100% understand. Just as an example, when we were creating SCE, we wanted to use someone from BEM's race in the episode "BEM," as someone who could detach limbs and have them function independently would make for a dandy engineer -- but we were told that we'd have to get permission from David Gerrold to use such a character because he still controlled the rights to BEM. So we created P8 Blue instead.

Similar situation with the Kzinti, strengthened by the fact that Niven already had used them elsewhere....

 

[Christopher]

Hmm, yeah, worth keeping in mind that at the time TAS was made, it wasn't Paramount's property. The copyright notice on TAS's title screen mentions Filmation Associates and Norway Productions (Roddenberry's company), not Paramount -- which I believe was just the distributor. This was the main reason why Paramount and GR used to treat TAS as non-canonical -- because the rights to it were up in the air after Filmation went bankrupt. Now Paramount has secured ownership and treats it as part of the canon again, to the extent that it's included as such on StarTrek.com and Memory Alpha and the like; but maybe the actual writers' contracts were different than they were on the later shows. Indeed, maybe that's why we haven't seen much TAS followup in canon aside from occasional vague allusions to "Yesteryear" and Edosians and the Klothos.

Although from what you say, Keith, it sounds like Gerrold had a different contract than Stephen Kandel, since you were able to use a member of Em-3-Green's species without trouble. And there were other TAS episodes referenced in SCE, such as "The Time Trap." And I've used animated characters like Gabler and Devna without CBS having a problem.

But regardless, I think Niven would've retained the rights to the Kzinti because he didn't create them for the show, because they'd already been published in independent works and his TAS episode was merely an adaptation of one of those works. So he didn't lose the rights to any of his creations any more than J.K. Rowling lost the Harry Potter rights to Warner Bros. when they made movies out of her books. (I mean, "The Slaver Weapon" is barely even adjusted to fit the Trek universe. Aside from plugging Spock, Sulu, and Uhura into the roles of Nessus and the Papandreous and simplifying the weapon's backstory a bit, it's a nearly verbatim adaptation of "The Soft Weapon" with the Known Space elements mostly intact.)

 

[Deranged Nasat]

The Kzinti featured in a Star Trek production. Doesn't that mean that they became a Star Trek property? Current authors also surrender all of their property rights when penning Star Trek fiction, don't they?

Yeah, but the animated series wasn't quite as cut-and-dried for reasons that I still don't 100% understand. Just as an example, when we were creating SCE, we wanted to use someone from BEM's race in the episode "BEM," as someone who could detach limbs and have them function independently would make for a dandy engineer -- but we were told that we'd have to get permission from David Gerrold to use such a character because he still controlled the rights to BEM. So we created P8 Blue instead.

Interesting. I hadn't known this little bit of trivia.

Somewhere out there, in the stream of unrealized possibilities and whispered half-existence, the Deranged Pandronian floats, cursing its misfortune.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

...but maybe the actual writers' contracts were different than they were on the later shows. Indeed, maybe that's why we haven't seen much TAS followup in canon aside from occasional vague allusions to "Yesteryear" and Edosians and the Klothos.

As an animated series, I suspect TAS would have been covered by the Animation Guild and its rights agreements rather that the Writers Guild (which, by the way, was on strike at the time of TAS' production, which is how Dorothy Fontana got some of the writers that she did, since they could write one animated script at a time when they couldn't write live-action).

 

[sulfur]

Now Paramount has secured ownership and treats it as part of the canon again, to the extent that it's included as such on StarTrek.com and Memory Alpha and the like;

Note, we always considered TAS "canon" (or as it's better termed now, an "acceptable main resource"), despite GR and Paramount's stances prior.

For MA, it was a "official material from Paramount/CBS, aired on television or in a movie theatre, good enough for us!" type of situation.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Just as an example, when we were creating SCE, we wanted to use someone from BEM's race in the episode "BEM," as someone who could detach limbs and have them function independently would make for a dandy engineer -- but we were told that we'd have to get permission from David Gerrold to use such a character because he still controlled the rights to BEM. So we created P8 Blue instead.

M/3/Green, the pillbug creature from the Stephen Kandel episode "The Jihad", was voiced by David Gerrold, but what the novels eventually called the Nasat weren't Gerrold's creation. (Upon rereading, I can see your post wasn't intending to make that connection.) So you guys went for a blue version instead of the green, and the cover art that featured P8 Blue was also different enough to Kandel's character to pass muster.

Bem, the colony creature you couldn't use, was a Pandronian. Gerrold invented those for "Bem".

Similar situation with the Kzinti, strengthened by the fact that Niven already had used them elsewhere....

Yep, he merely lent them to TAS.

 

[CaptPapa]

The Kzinti get an tiny offhand mention in Ishmael, as Kirk walks past a couple in a Starbase corridor.

They are featured in the TNG novel The Captain's Honor, in that the aliens are blatantly the Kzin, but had their name changed at the last minute to M'dok due to some kind of licencing issue. This novel also retcons Sulu's "4 wars, the last 200 years ago" from "The Slaver Weapon" to 2 wars, if I recall correctly, one before and one after the founding of the Federation.

I read somewhere that there's also a Trek short story featuring a race calls the Kythari, which are loosely based on the Kzinti. (these Kythari were also briefly slated to appear in the aborted New Voyages/Phase II fanfilm version of the unmade ENT episode "Kilkenny Cats")

Sorry to jump off-track, but I can't resist. Your avatar is fantastic - I love it!

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming . . .

. . . well, if I were smart enough, I would quote Therin of Andor here, and say, "This is why I love this site - people with terrific knowledge of the subject."
While I'm on the subject, I'm always very envious of CLB's encyclopedic recall of Star Trek info. It's nothing short of amazing . . . to me anyway.

ME

 

[Therin of Andor]

if I were smart enough, I would quote Therin of Andor here, and say, "This is why I love this site - people with terrific knowledge of the subject."

Umm, thanks!

 

[Therin of Andor]

Part 2 of a "Ringworld" graphic novel is due in November! (While adding this to the dedicated graphic novel thread, I realized there was also this thread.)

http://www.amazon.com/Ringworld-Gra...91591&sr=8-2&keywords=ringworld+niven+graphic

Part 1:

Ringworld graphic novel by Ian McLean, on Flickr