q: "How Old Mount Typhon?" a: "Old Mount Typhon fine!"

Said Vizcacha

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 <crculver at aol.com> http://members.aol.com/crculver/index.html ------------------------------------------------ "Ignorance, that light of fools steers a wayward path" -Brendan Perry

CRCulver opines:

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)

Thus,

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)