(urth) Planet of the Inhumi

[Jeff Wilson]

On 9/21/2010 11:40 AM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> Lee,
>
> The Whorl is at leasdt 300 years old internally -- it is at least a
> thousand years old in sidereal time. And Typhon is not "still alive"
> when Severian meets him; he is either dead or in some sort of
> suspended animation. Severian's presence revives him.

Typhon/Piaton would be the beneficiary of the natural mummifying process 
of the Andes' higher elevations, that have preserved so many Incan 
bodies and lesser remains for us to find. His pause in reference to this 
may be because of the negative associations with the primitive native 
people, or out of vain revulsion at what his ruler face must have looked 
like in that state.

Typhon's age is a puzzle. He must have been fairly old for some organs 
to be beyond repair with the impressive technologies still available on 
Urth, but my suggestion that he looks like a conventional octagenarian 
turned out to have little support. Typhon's sub-venerable cosmetic age 
might be due to just that: cosmetic treatments, though as I recall it 
has often been the style among Hellenic and Roman era dictatorships to 
emphasize the late middle age of the ruler in coinage and statuary as a 
symbol of wisdom and stability.

I wonder if the question of time frames might be addressed by tarting up 
my old PLANET OF THE APES hypothesis with a reverse plot-twist: Instead 
of Green and Blue being Lune and Ushas, maybe the conventionally driven 
Whorl was intended as some kind of round-trip sleeper mission for the 
benefit of Typhon's plans for the Urth, but the Outsider/the Yesodis 
redirected it to Blue and Green instead, so that it serves the 
Increate's purpose as a mission mission to the Inhumi and the Neighbors.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >