Subject: (urth) Ringworld

From: Nigel Price <nigel.a.price at virgin.net>
Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 11:13:48 +0000

Re. Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" trilogy, Pippen asked...

>Yes, I've been fascinated all this last year, by the Peter Hamilton
>trilogy.  I'm curious though, I can't think of a Larry Niven
>"Ringworld" structure among the many environments in
>Hamilton's fictional universe.  Could you be more specific???

Yes, I was thinking of the ring of giant disk cities orbiting the Red Giant
star which Joshua and Syrinx discover in the final section of "The Naked
God". I thought that the combination of colossal engineering and the warring
races and nations of Tyrathca and Mosdva within the cities was strongly
reminiscent of Niven's "Ringworld" novels. That and the fact that, like the
Ringworld, the disk cities are breaking down and badly in need of repair and
maintenance.

I know full well that it is almost impossible to "prove" the influence of
one writer on another unless there is some sort of explicit acknowledgement,
as in the case of Hamilton's own comments on his website on his debt to E E
"Doc" Smith. Even so, I thought that there were a number of aspects of
"Night's Dawn" which were strongly reminiscent of Niven, including the
account of the Ruin Ring in "The Reality Dysfunction" and the distant echoes
of the stories in "Neutron Star" in Hamilton's accounts of unusual stellar
phenomena.

On a different, and slightly more Lupine tack: "Night's Dawn" is all about
(demon) possession, its nature and its consequences. I wondered how people
felt Hamilton's treatment of the subject compared with Wolfe's, given how
often Wolfe features possession, particularly in the Long and Short Sun
books. (Whoops, we may be straying into "Whorl" territory here...)

Nigel
Minety, Wilts

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