2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and a network of sensors is needed to detect it. Setting up the communications infrastructure to issue timely warnings is an even bigger problem, particularly in a relatively impoverished part of the world. Tsunamis are more frequent in the Pacific Ocean than in other oceans because of earthquakes in the "Ring of Fire". Although the extreme western edge of the Ring of Fire extends into the Indian Ocean (the point where the earthquake struck), no warning system exists in that ocean. Tsunamis there are relatively rare despite earthquakes being relatively frequent in Indonesia. The last major tsunami was caused by
Ring of Fire II to share in creating the main threads and plot lines of the milieu so that this work and the large second full novel in the series, "1633", were written contemporaneously. Flint is on record that large portions of "1633" were adjusted drastically, even thrown out and rewritten as later submissions in the collected stories in Ring of Fire impacted the various and diverse story threads. For a fuller precis on this interesting and historic literary development see Assiti Shards series. Flint's e-book preface refers to this work as being a prequel to his own short novel (below), but the title