Novelette
Number of words : 8800
Percent of complex words : 5.2
Average syllables per word : 1.4
Average words per sentence : 11.2
READABILITY INDICES
Fog : 6.6
Flesch : 80.2
Flesch-Kincaid : 4.9
PEOPLE
Kathrin Lynch
The title character, a teenager.
Brendan Lynch
Her father.
Peter Rigby
The wheelwright.
Mary Rigby
Peter’s wife.
Widow Grayling
The local healer.
Garrett Kinnear
An assaulter of young women.
Thomas Kinnear
His father.
William the Questioner
Sheriff when Grayling was young.
PLACES
The Twenty Arch Bridge
Where Kathrin needs to go.
The Shield
The area Kathrin is from.
Blue Star Brewery
Makers of beer.
Bridge Inn
A pub.
The Dancing Panda
A pub.
The Lord’s Confessor
A pub.
The Winged Man
A pub.
Jarrow Ferry
The town Widow Grayling is from.
CONCEPTS
Great Winter
The current cold age of the world.
The Frost Fair
A commercial gathering in the coldest times.
Skydrift
Term for wreckage that has fallen from the sky.
Battle of the Stadium of Light
A small war, twenty years before Grayling found a downed flier.
ANIMALS
Rooks
Birds of the crow family.
Jackdaws
Birds of the crow family.
TECHNOLOGY
Bracelet
A Winged Man’s, it can heal and protect against disease, and enhances longevity greatly.
Flier’s weapon
Looks like a sword handle and needs the bracelet to work.
RACES
Jangling Men
Created people, made to work in hazardous environments.
PLOT
Kathrin is a young woman making a delivery for her father, a carpenter. However the route takes her past a young man who has blackmailed her into sexual services to prevent damage to her father’s income thanks to the local power the boy wields.
She manages to make it with part of her delivery intact. The woman she is taking things to is the local healer, with a witchy reputation. She is indeed stranger than normal, as she has a bracelet from a downed Winged Man fighter that enhances her body’s immune system. She also has one of his weapons.
There is a war going on, and Earth is in a Great Winter as those fighting it are using energy from the Sun to fight space battles via wormholes – it is humans versus their own creations. Grayling came across a downed dying fighter and was kind to him, and he gifted her some of his tech. She also found out that if the Great Winter eases, it means the fighting is over, and she fears that the side o the ‘Angels’, that is, humanity, are the likely loses. The weather is indeed getting warmer. Maybe it is partly this, or she is just tired of life, but she decides to pass on the bracelet an weapon to Kathrin, the latter to help with her travels.
The weapon is seductive, and Kathrin can now kill easily, and has to decide what to do.
4.5 out of 5
http://www.starshipsofa.com/20080325/aural-delights-no-17-alastair-reynolds/
Tags: 4.5, far future, z novelette
