note Re Short Sun Blog

It would be interesting to see Merryn's contribution to this discussion.

Yes, if Dorcas and the Cumaean are included in the convesation.

Quite so. My point, made less cryptically, is that these matters are debated withing the story, and they seem there to be treated largely as philosophical ones. Personally I have a lot of sympathy with Merryn. Whatever is, is part of nature. Vampires, for instance, do not exist (we think) in the world as we have it, but in a world where they did exist they would be natural beings - the laws of nature would be different. It is hard to work out a coherent definition of the supernatural which, on the one hand, does not reduce to 'inexplicable by current science' (which would block new scientific discoveries) but which, on the other hand, draws a meaningful distinction between the natural and the supernatural. That said, there does seem to be something distinctive about Severian's powers. Hierodules, hierogrammates and sea-monsters have powers which we cannot explain, but can be seen as part of the nature of the universe they live in. But Severian has powers which no one else has, so could be called 'supernatural'' in that a general account of the universe wouldn't include them. This is so, I think, whether or not he works by turning back time, and whether or not he works through biological processes - it's still true that what starts those processes is not part of the ordinary order of nature.