[theory] Book of the New Sun takes place not thousands or millions of years in the future, but billions.

I just finished Urth of the New Sun, and had some thoughts on the mechanics of the old sun. I've only read it once, and am workshopping this concept, so I'm curious what you all think about it.

It is mentioned (in Urth I believe) that there is a black hole in the center of the old sun. While I know Wolfe is all about 4d chess and like 50 layers of symbiology and allegory, I started thinking about that statement seriously from a hard scifi standpoint. Gene Wolfe always seems to underpin his settings on actual hard science, even if the depictions are fantastical to the characters that experience them.

What I'm proposing as a theory is that at some point millions of years into the future, the concept that the sun would eventually enter it's red giant phase was considered, and a deep time solution was contrived either by hyper advanced humanity and/or their alien allies. A black hole was placed into the center of the sun to consume the helium ash that would trigger the red giant phase that would eventually expand to consume earth, while also maintaining it's mass and core pressure, allowing more of the suns hydrogen to fuse before it died.

By the time of BotNS, that "stop gap" measure has reached it's limit. Core pressure is no longer being maintained as the sun has physically shrunk, and there is not enough hydrogen and inward pressure to continue fusion at the same rate. Thus causing the sun to gradually dim, and requiring the next measure to keep earth alive be enacted. Bringing a whole new star into the system.

Back of the napkin math with the help of abominable intelligence (claude) estimates that such a system if engineered properly could give the sun another 40-50 billion years of life in the main sequence.

The largest potential problem I can identify with the theory is; that's not exactly how black holes work. Point of fact, the accretion energy would make the sun more luminous over time, not less. My particular counter to that argument is that the story was written in the 70s, when the understanding of black holes was much less advanced, and while very smart, Gene was not a theoretical physicist with internet access. Therefore the idea would have made sense to him both mechanically and poetically, what with the new sun being referred to as a white hole many times.

TLDR: A blackhole was put into the sun to clean up the helium ash allowing it to "burn" for billions of more years than normal without becoming a red giant at all, and now the sun is shrinking and dying.

I'd love to hear your thoughts or consider anything I've obviously missed about my theory on what time the series takes place.