Inferno by Larry Niven / Return from Tomorrow by George G Ritchie....coincidence?

I stumbled upon Return from Tomorrow by George G. Ritchie when I went to do my laundry in my block. Someone had left the book on a table where people leave things for giveaways. It is not an overly large book of 120 odd pages, large font and it purports to be a book about Richie's glimpse of the life after death which supposedly happened in 1943 when he was clinically dead for 9 minutes from pneumonia.

I am sort of interested in the afterlife in a non-religious way. You may think I am crazy but I have (or at least think I did) seen 2 ghosts and felt a presence so far in my life...so the topic intrigues me. So I picked up the book and started to read it.

All of the sudden I felt like I read this book before. The scenes of Ritchie traveling around as undead with a Christ character being shown spirits in sort of purgatory (eg. in one case spirits following real people begging forgiveness (turns out they committed suicide)) bore a strong resemblance to Larry Niven's Novel Inferno

Inferno was published in 1976..... Return from Tomorrow was published in 1978....hmmmmmm

In the forward for Return from Tomorrow a Dr. Raymond A Moody writes that he knew about Ritchie in 1965.

I wonder if someone borrowed ideas from the other...one for a supposed near-death experience episode and the other writing a SF novel.

Or both had read Dante?

Or Dante's vision was correct and has now been independently confirmed ;)

this is true....it is just the timing of both books that struck me as odd

Amtep nailed it.

hahahaha....I will wait for confirmation in good time

Niven and Pournelle.
/pedantic