Subject: Time and the New Sun

From: Dani Zweig <dani at netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 07 Oct 1992 03:08:00 +0000

It's harder than it seems at first glance to decide on the time scale of
Gene Wolfe's "New Sun" books.  Most of the changes that suggest millions of
years - resource depletion, evolution of new species, even the
extinguishing of Earth's fires, could have been achieved in far less time
through technological intervention.

Trying a simpler question, as a means of getting a handle on the harder
one, how much time passed between Ymar's day and Severian's?  The clues
conflict.  Ymar lived in the first days of the dying of the sun, in the
last days of Earth's diastrophism, and in the last days of Earth's
interstellar empire.  (It may have even been in his day that the Autarchy
lost most of Earth outside South America.)  On the other hand, he lived in
a world little different from Severian's, where even the small villages
were the same.  We also note that it was reasonable to expect a coin from
Ymar's time to survive, badly corroded, in Severian's: there is reason to
suspect that common words such as 'copper', 'stone', 'wood', often refer to
far more durable materials than we associate with them.

Dani Zweig

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From: Matt Austern <matt at physics2.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed, 07 Oct 1992 17:53:52 +0000

dani at netcom.com (Dani Zweig) writes:
> lost most of Earth outside South America.)  On the other hand, he lived
> in a world little different from Severian's, where even the small
> villages were the same.

There's another clue worth paying attention to: the way that Ymar is
remembered in Severian's day.  Severian read one story about Ymar, and felt
that he was reading about a person infinitely removed from the world he
lived in, about whom it was possible to know almost nothing.  The
impression I got is that almost no records about Ymar, or writings of his,
had survived, only a few fragments like the one Severian read.

The way that Ymar was remembered seemed more similar to the way that we
remember Alexander the Great than to the way that we remember Napolean.

Matthew Austern
(510) 644-2618 
austern at lbl.bitnet