# q: "How Old Mount Typhon?" a: "Old Mount Typhon fine!" *The Urth list — 3 messages, 2 voices, 30 Jan 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### CRCulver *30 Jan 1998, 16:43* Said Vizcacha > My suspicion is that there is either more time between Typhon and > Severian than 1000 years (more like 10,000?)< Woah, Gene Wolfe himself has said that there are only 2 chiliads between our present time here inA.D. 1998, and Severian's time. (I think it is in the People interview). Christopher R. Culver http://members.aol.com/crculver/index.html ------------------------------------------------ "Ignorance, that light of fools steers a wayward path" -Brendan Perry --- ### David_Lebling *30 Jan 1998, 17:09 · follows CRCulver* CRCulver opines: > Said Vizcacha > My suspicion is that there is either more time between Typhon and > Severian than 1000 years (more like 10,000?)< > > Woah, Gene Wolfe himself has said that there are only 2 chiliads > between > our present time here inA.D. 1998, and Severian's time. (I think it is > in the > People interview). Even Jove nods. Unless someone (Dr. Talos? mantis?) is faking the geological and archeological evidence, there's a _lot_ more time than that. The only out I see for the geology is that during the era of starflight (as described in the "Pandora's Box" story -- remarkably like Cordwainer Smith's future, by the way), there was enough power and energy to resculpt the entire face of Urth, and someone did. The only out I see for the archeology is that a Trantor-like world-city grew and then died before someone started twiddling the geography. But I still don't see this happening in two chiliads. -vizcacha (david_lebling at avid.com) --- ### David_Lebling *30 Jan 1998, 16:34 · follows David_Lebling* > Vizcacha said: >> How much time elapsed between Typhon's reign and Severian's? > Mantis has said that about a chiliad (1000 Urth years) passed > between > the reign of Ymar and the Reign of Severian. Typhon was the last of > the > Monarchs, Ymar was one of the first, or the first, of the autarchs. Thus, > about 1000 (Urth) years have passed between Typhon's reign and Sev's > reign. This is a mantic or even lupine opinion have a lot of trouble with. Primarily, I look at the mountains, all or most of which have been carved in the likenesses of rulers. In _Sword_, we are told (as a guess by Severian) that Mount Typhon must have been the first of them, and (I think) this is confirmed in _Urth_, when Severian-as-Conciliator meets Typhon. So we have a space of 1000 years in which the entire future-Andes have been carved. Every ruler post-Typhon is an autarch: did they each carve a mountain? If each reigned 10 years, we only have time for 100 mountains, assuming that they _all_ did one... My suspicion is that there is either more time between Typhon and Severian than 1000 years (more like 10,000?), or there's an inconsistency between _TBONS_ and _Urth_. -vizcacha (david_lebling at avid.com) ---