...all coherence gone.
Nothing very sensible to say until a re-read. I'm delighted, confused and a little disappointed by the Urth sections. Those of us who thought that the price of the Green Man's future was a little high may think again after witnessing the rotting, Boschian charnel house of Urth through the eyes of Hoof and the words of Horn/Silk. Wonderful/Terrible to glimpse Urth through a narrator other than Severian. The true horror of the Matachin Tower. But I expected something more to come of a meeting between Severian and Silk than an inspiration to write tBotNS. (Although I do like the suggestion that Severian though Silk was Malrubius). And the business about Cilinia returning to Urth to die was just a little thin. Surely she could have forced Oreb to kill himself if all she wanted was that kind of release. I'm sure I'll reappraise, but that's how it seems on a first reading.
Of course the speculation is over regarding the Green=Lune hypothesis (of which I was an avid exponent). Silk suggesting to Jugano that he could point out the Red Sun from the roof pretty much nails it. It seems that the Mother and Great Scylla are of the same species. What's the untold story here? I remember the legend of Great Scylla's origin from tBotNS: that woman and her bag of beans; but I get the feeling that there's something about Typhon's choice of Blue as a destination that we don't know. I never did understand the Mother's motivations for sending Seawrack to Horn either.
Kieran C.
*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.