(urth) Severian's miraculous eclipse

[thalassocrat at nym.hush.com]

Hi & welcome b sharp:

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 05:13:46 +1000 b sharp 
<bsharporflat at hotmail.com> wrote:
>Greetings all.  Long time Wolfe fan who recently discovered and 
>much
>more recently finished perusing the archives. 
>
>	I'd like to address an issue that was discussed in the past which 
>is
>the eclipse which saves Severian from being killed by the primitive
>tribesmen in the early days of Urth.  It seems most experts have
>concurred that the eclipse was caused by Tzadkiel's ship.  This
>explanation doesn't seem plausible to me.  

I tend to side with the Tzadkiel ship explanation, but it is 
interesting to think about what it was doing there & at that time. 

Maybe it was dropping a black hole into the sun? This would be a 
nice touch, I think: the beginning of the end of the Old Sun and 
the distant birth of the New, at about the same time. 

I've always assumed the black hole thing happened around the time 
of Typhon, but is that necessarily the case? 

The death of the Old Sun is clearly a long, long process: how long 
must have the black hole been eating away at it, for the effects to 
be noticeable by Typhon's time?