Time and the New Sun

Dani Zweig · 07 Oct 1992, 03:08 · from sf-lovers.1992.mbox

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From: dani at netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Subject: Time and the New Sun
Date: 7 Oct 92 03:08:00 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v17-521-12 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V17 #521
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-17b

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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