Finally caught up with you guys. I've finished reading Silhouette and listening to the podcasts you've put out about it. Since you haven't finished the discussion, I'll keep most of my observations short.
1) The early descriptive detail about the "...flabby rats that sometimes spring across the compartment at night, caroming off the ceiling like tennis balls and squeaking like bats...," is great. It reminds us that rats have stowed away on human ships forever and we probably should expect them to hitch a ride to the stars with us, too. Also, it's a great little Chekhov's Gun, since it comes back near the end.
2) Why is everyone walking around getting all cut up on Neuerddraht? Tons of radiation (supposedly) and they are wearing breathing apparatuses, but walking around in shorts and t-shirts. Weird.
3) Another nice detail is that the smoke doesn't rise in zero g. It only follows the airflow once Johann opens his room vent.
4) Is the composer being sent to an "arctic labor camp" a reference to the USSR? This story was written at the height of the Cold War. This would have been shortly after Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for Literature (1970) and Gulag Archipelago got published in the West (1973?). I'm not a Solzhenitsyn scholar by any means, just did a quick search. I remember some of my aunts reading it back in the late 70's.
5) I searched for Heintz' quote about "Lying spirits...." but found nothing.
6) If they've been on the ship for only 17 years, I don't know how they've gotten to Algol, which is 90 light-years from Earth. I'll have to do the math on the relativity stuff to see if that makes sense. I assume Wolfe did some himself. It seems like a weird detail for him to not check. Assuming they are traveling at sub-c velocities, it's very believable that a couple hundred years would elapse (from Earth's POV, and yes, I subscribe to the Einsteinian interpretation, not the one that Heintz or whomever is trying to convince Johann about).
Here are some quick write-ups on Algol, with neat little animations showing why it changes intensity from Earth's point of view: https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/algol-the-demon-star and https://www.constellation-guide.com/algol/
I really liked the idea that the Captain was faking leaving the ship to draw out the mutineers. Johann then more or less tricks/forces her into leaving, which gives him a chance to seize control in a sort of coup d'etat, under the cover of the confusion of the mutiny.
Oh wow, I love the idea that these stories are in a shared universe! I hadn't noticed that detail about the smoke -- I just let it paint a mental picture for me and didn't think about how Wolfe was using it to tells us about the gravity on the ship.
And the ship is definitely moving at something near light speed, right? The question is just whether Einstein's model is correct because Wolfe by nature is a contrarian.
Here's an additional thought: what if Wolfe was thinking about this long trip under time dilation about the time he was writing Tracking Song as well? Maybe the trip to Algol and back is the time span for the damaged Earth to start recovering. The ship in Silhouette is huge: the hydroponic pod is described as being several kilometers long at one point. Just like the Great Sleigh in Tracking Song is huge: leaving a track 100 meters wide. Maybe the Great Sleigh is one of the landing craft from the unnamed (?) ship in Silhouette.
The tie probably isn't that tight, but these seem to be recurring themes for Wolfe.
I sat down and did some math with some help from http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/tdil.html
Algol is about 90 LY away, so would take 90 years at c to get there, but relativity would make the time shorter to the people traveling. Ignoring the need to accelerate and decelerate (in order to leave Earth and to orbit Neuerddraht), the ship would have to be traveling about 0.982c for the 90 LY trip to Algol to take 17 years. From the Earth's POV, that would take 93.7 years. The return trip would be similar, so roughly 200 years would elapse on Earth in the time it takes them to go to Algol and back.
This is just a rough estimate. It would take something like an Earth year at 1g to accelerate to 0.982c, so really the time at fixed velocity is only about 15 years, not 17.