I don't think it was the puppeteers that made them non-sentient. The Kzin were a pre-industrial, pre-fuedal hunter gather people enslaved by a space going race. They managed to rebel, and wipe out their owners - and suddenly they were a hunter-gatherer people possessed of space travel, genetic engineering and generally advanced technology.

So as a very male-chauvinist culture, they engineered speech centers out of their women -making them not unintelligent, but pre-verbal. (You can argue over whether intelligence is possible without speech - but this is the Niven premise, and their is some evidence that the two are seperable.)

The Puppeteers have three sexs, one of which is not intelligent, two of which are.

Based on the number of times I've read otherwise reasonable scientists and philosophers ponder on this as a "what if?" I'm thinking that it is. Not fantasy as in sexual fantasy, fantasy as in "plausible other imaginary."

OK - but horrifying - I don't think ever seen as desirable - more a horror thing. If I was Freudian I'd say it was a horror/fear fantasy of the ultimate castration - being castrated from the neck down.

Oh! I remember. He was saying that humans have already encountered the equivalent of an intelligent, alien species in the opposite sex, and that a species with nonsentient females like the Kzin would be much more patriarchal and xenophobic.

No, not a male fantasy. Niven tries to think of anything that would make a species think differently from humans: herbivorous species, parasitic, species that don't mature sexually for eighty years. As long as it's really alien, he'll try it. Though you could recognize some males you know in a kzin's reaction to the idea of mating with something as intelligent as he is.

Typo Boy is right about the Kzin history, and I got my idea from something else in Niven. (Edit: but how do you like the male fantasy of genetically engineering your females to be nonsentient?)

Oh! I remember. He was saying that humans have already encountered the equivalent of an intelligent, alien species in the opposite sex, and that a species with nonsentient females like the Kzin would be much more patriarchal and xenophobic.

Women as aliens (and only nominally men as aliens) - pretty chauvinist in itself.

I think of "brain in a vat" as a philosophical proposition. Are you saying it's a male fantasy because some of us like to imagine ourselves as Supremely Rational Man™?

I think of "brain in a vat" as a philosophical proposition.

Yeah.

Are you saying it's a male fantasy because some of us like to imagine ourselves as Supremely Rational Man™?

I'm saying that because I couldn't get beyond the idea that the whole proposition of pondering the possibility of sentience without a body. It sounds like psychosis to me, not philosophy.

Nah - I don't think its a fantasy in the sense that men want it. It's a fantasy in that it is a nightmare. I don't know that it is more a male nightmare than a female one - but if it is it may (as I said) be because it is the ultimate castration nightmare.

Dude, it's not worth spending two seconds thinking about. And yet people have written 100s of pages on it trying to rationalize it. You can't tell me that's a nightmare.

Burrell - seriously trying to rationalize it? You mean as in "this is a good thing". Or "this is route we should go". Because that is new to me. I've run into as extended premises for stories - but always as pretty horrible (0r in some cases comically horrific) stories.