1000 years to Typhon

"Still for a thousand years" does not seem like a hard and fast date. However, this is my whole point - a whole lot of time does not have to have passed after the flooding of Urth for things to have changed enough. Hybridization creates mutant monsters in as little as one generation - and often monsters that are sterile. And we really don't have an absolutely firm time between Typhon and Severian. 1200 years could be called a thousand, just as 900 years could be called a thousand. But a lot can change in 200 years. Especially if monsters can change in one generation, as the inhumu obviously, obviously can. The moon could still be reeling from the presence of a new gravitational force into the system and be in an unstable orbit. But it seems as though Maytera Marble's internal clock is off by a factor of ten, at least hinting that 300 years might conceivably be 3000 or some greater span of time. But I never could make much use of her slipping clock because everything else seemed to indicate that it was about 300 years in the whorl. Marc Aramini

Marc, this is really reaching. A generation might, conceivably, be enough time for the appearance of some double-limbed monsters. No argument there. But a generation isn't -- a thousand years aren't -- enough time for the replacement of, apparently, every major life form on the planet with a double-limbed version, plus the rise and fall of a civilization of double-limbed ... whatever the Vanished People are. It just won't wash. Any theory that identifies the Bleen system with the Urth system has to allow a very very VERY long time for it to reach the condition it's in at the time of the Short Sun books.