From: ansible@cix.compulink.co.uk (David Langford)
Subject: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v010.n033
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 10:11 +0100 (BST)

In-Reply-To: <199910132310.QAA09996@lists1.best.com>

Alastair Reynolds wrote, of Wolfe:

> And I believe in one of
> q&a sessions I have read, either on this list or on the web somewhere,
> he said he envisaged Severian's time as being about a 1000 years from
> now (which always struck me as too short a span of time, but never
> mind).

This has come up before. An on-line chat session included the following:

Q: About how far, really, is the New Sun series set in our future (or the 
future of the previous universe)? How much time elapses between Typhon 
and Severian?

Wolfe: That is never specified in the books. My offhand guess is between 
1000 and 2000 years. I would have to reread the books with care to 
perhaps trim the estimate up a little bit.

Wolfe is surely answering the second question rather than the first, 
since passages in BotNS suggest a serious geological timespan between our 
age and Severian's (e.g. the fault-cliff in =Sword= which exposes three 
miles of vertically stacked human relics).

Dave

David Langford
ansible@cix.co.uk | http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk/


*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request@lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth@lists.best.com