Deja Vu2

now I have the nasty feeling that some lesser god is playing games with me.
went back home and installed halo
after you've killed off all the convenant bugs that boarded your ship, guess where you crashland on.
an artificial ring-shaped habitat. classic arc of the ringworld rising overhead.
if it wasn't so blatantly obvious, it'd be creepy. disturbing.
right now it just feels like fate is beating me on the head with a rubber mallet.

or am i just missing something altogether?

Deja Vu

picked up strata and within the first twenty pages i was flooded with having seen this before.
you've read ringworld? same thing. artificial habitat on a cosmic scale, collapse of civilization, marooning of the motley crew - one/two rational humans, a bloodthirsty kung/kzin, search for the builders, a paranoid pierson's puppeteer and a long-suffering shand.
the two books are identical, and that's not what inspired the deja vu.

kzinti have two arms. kung have four.

i can distinctly remember, even as i read ringworld, that Speaker was supposed to have four arms. everything else fitted. i visualized him like that. so when Marco turns up now with four...

I hadn't read strata. yet somehow this one insconspicuous detail is haunting me. how can two books be so similar, and how could i see the other while reading the one, six years ago?