World of Ptavv s is a well-told adventure story with gripping chase and lastminute rescues, but interspersed with recollections of the vanished Slaver Empire taken from Kzanol's memory, which exists in both Kzanol's own mind and Larry Greenberg's. Thus the story has a double perspective, with the reader seeing events through alien and human eyes. At one point, there is even a hybrid character Kzanol-Greenberg formed when Larry's personality is taken over by the thrint. Thus the story's theme that men must understand the alien outlook is dramatized when the hero has the alien outlook thrust upon him. Such a radical shift in point of view is designed to shock the reader and to give him a sense of the alienism of the novel's universe.

At various places, the novel moves back to the time of the Slaver Empire when much of the galaxy was under the control...