(urth) Short Sun blog review

[Lee Berman]

>The decision to have the Ark narrative be set in the same timespace as the earlier 
>"New Sun" stories, two multi-volume series back, seems like a nostalgic impulse Wolfe 
>shouldn't have succumbed to. Surely a culture that could producean Ark to travel between 
>star systems is an energetic young one, not the miserable Byzantine world of the "New Sun" 
>novels, set on an Earth so far in the future that the Sun has swollen to Red Giant 
>proportions.
 
This is the section which bothered me the most. Seems to ignore the possibility that The
Whorl was created and sent during the heyday of the First Empire and misses the rather
explicitly explained idea that the sun was reduced in intensity rather rapidly, and likely 
on purpose, at the end of this Empire.
 
Makes me wonder about something. I think I've heard estimates the Whorl is at least 300 years 
old. Typhon was presumably alive on its launching and is still alive when Severian meets him
strapped to his couch. Quite a lifespan.
 
I don't think Typhon is human so it isn't a problem for me but I wonder what others make of this.
A body transplant every 20 years or so to maintain life and youth? Or some other explanation.