: Pfhor slave history runs about thus: The Pfhor
: species begins, in ways that I won't mention so as not to spoil the
: epilogue. After a few million years of development on their own homeworld,
: they begin to travel the stars, and to build a galactic empire. They are
: only maybe 10-12,000 years ahead of mankind, developmentally.
Are the Pfhor really more advanced than humanity? That's like arguing whether dogs or cats are smarter. The Pfhor possess all that wonderful technology, yet they seem to be disinterested in scientific discovery. On the individual level, there is plenty of evidence of scientific interest, as evidenced in many of the terminals of M2 and MI, but the society as a whole discourages such interest, preferring to acquire new technology from those they conquer. But were the Pfhor always this way? According to Yossarian's wonderful fan fic piece, no - a little genetic engineering was used to replace the native Pfhor culture with something else - the Pfhor were farmed rather than bread and in a sense became their own slaves.
My own take on this is very different, as per my other post in this t hread. Perhaps I'll write some fan fic at some point, but I think the Pfhor are an intelligent, but intillectually unadvanced species that came upon advanced technology by pure luck. They learned what they needed to know to utilize the technology, but true science was more of a cultural phenomenon - something enjoyed by few individuals and heavily discouraged by the society as a whole. And they don't seem to adapt to change very well, making them far less advanced than humans.
I think I brought this up once before, but it's very curious to me that the Pfhor didn't utilize cybernetic implants when it came to themselves in spite of obvious advantages. Even humans were using implants to some degree by they time they reached Tau Ceti. Why were the Pfhor so willing to implant devices in other spcies and not in themselves?
