The Slavers

I confess to some uncertainty as to the course of the machinations towards the end of "The Children's Hour" by Jerry Pournelle and SM Stirling. Why do certain events transpire as they do? While my thoughts on that matter settle, I will turn to the sequel:

Jerry Pournelle and SM Stirling, "The Asteroid Queen" IN Larry Niven, Ed., Man-Kzin Wars III (New York, 1990), pp. 35-166.

The unheaded Prologue, on pp. 37-40, is set:

"Three billion years before the birth of Buddha.." (p. 37)

- when:

"...the Thrint ruled the galaxy and ten thousand intelligent species." (ibid.)

The opportunity to write about the kzinti is also an opportunity to write about the Thrintun because stasis boxes left by the latter species survive into the Man-Kzin Wars period. In "The Children's Hour," we were told that:

in an ecological system where most animals were mildly telepathic, the ancestors of the Thrintun developed telepathic hypnosis as a hunting aid;

prey could be subtly prodded to approach a waterhole;

when their prey developed resistance, the Thrintun/Slavers "...evolved intelligence as an additional advantage..." (p. 148);

sophonts arriving from other planets were easily controlled because their nervous systems "...had not evolved in an environment saturated with the Power..." (ibid.);

extra-planetary slave-technicians developed amplifiers that enabled a single Thrint to control a planetary population;

hunters were industrialized in a single generation;

the Thrintun empire covered most of the galaxy;

the Thrintun never needed to be very intelligent but instead subordinated the extremely clever tnuctipun, devious enough to plot revolt.

Surely some non-Thrint species would have nervous systems that were simply not affected by the Power?

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the mentally powerful Chereionites had a prehistoric interstellar civilization that may have been destroyed by the parasitism of the "slinkers" (scroll down) just as the Thrintun civilization was destroyed by the revolt of the tnuctipun.