# Ringworld *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 17 Aug 2001* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Nigel Price *17 Aug 2001, 11:13* 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 ---