He was Guest of Honor at a Further Confusion some years back. I went to his Q&A panel and asked him if Kzinti were ever not going to be too stupid to live. He said "Well, in MKW 11 one wears little caps on its fingers so it can use a human keyboard." That's it, that was all he had. It's pretty embarrassing when an author holds his own creation is so low a regard.

Even though the Kzinti are honor-obsessed and tradition-bound, you'd expect four successive wars and assorted galactic chaos to have an effect. After all, most of the really crazy and fanatical ones would have gotten killed, resulting in a majority of the smarter and less insane ones (as well as all the females they kept out completely out of the conflict). From sheer evolutionary and social pressures alone, one would expect smarter kzinti who retained their honor by avoiding conflicts they couldn't win, and more rights for their females simply because they'd end up having to do more of the important work once half the males were killed.

But no. They're not allowed to change, because Niven wants to sell as many short story collections as possible without having to think about it too much. You'd think he'd at least give a damn about the internal logic of the scenario he himself created. So I completely agree with your comment above.

Niven doesn't write the MKW stories, or rather only writes a few. The fundamental problem is the extremely simplistic ethos he gave the kzinti even as late at Ringworld, which was well after the wars. Even real world cats have more sohpisticated tactics than 'Scream and leap'. It's inexcusable to claim that a spacefaring race is so poorly educated and trained.

Oh, I know Niven only contributes one or two stories to each collection. But how many story collections can you think of that ever reach their eleventh or twelth installments? It's clearly all about the money, he doesn't really care if they're any good, only about how long he can keep it going and how many he can sell. Poor Kzin, they deserve better.

It's not that they wrote a fanfiction, it's that they wrote a gay porno fanfiction.

IIRC, the Kzinti problem was the old "Breathing room" routine. They were expanding steadily until they ran up against us. Now their empire can't expand anymore, unless we're out of the way.
We've seen how that goes historically.
There is some change though. By the time of Ringworld, they seem considerable more mollified.

I read part of that story back in the day. Gay porn isn't my thing so I didn't finish it, but if the author's supposition that the females are attended by what amount to priests and the males have to treat them like china dolls, I could understand them looking for more rambunctious lovers. Of course we don't know that said females are fragile, just that they aren't of human level intelligence. They might be 400-pound Death By Snu-Snu monsters. 83

Yeah, it's not my thing either, so when I say loosely, I mean _very_ loosely.

Kilrathi are pretty much kzinti with the serial numbers filed off. There's no Wing Commander porn either, though. Well, no visual art that I can find. I'm sure there are fanfics.