Child Of the Sun - Leigh Brackett

Novelette

Number of words : 9000
Percent of complex words : 6.6
Average syllables per word : 1.4
Average words per sentence : 9.2


READABILITY INDICES

Fog : 6.3
Flesch : 77.2
Flesch-Kincaid : 4.8




SETTING

Losangles

Earth city. Note the name has evolved this far into the future.

Vulcan

Hidden planet between the Sun and Mercury.


CHARACTERS

Eric Falken

Unregenerate hero and spaceship pilot.

Sheila Moore

Unregenerate woman who asks Falken for help. Also had a lover taken by the Hiltonists.

Paul Avery-Miner Hilton

Man who flees with Falken and Moore. Not who he says he is, but a spy.

Sun-child

Last of his race.

Gantry Hilton

President of the Federation of Worlds.

Kitty

Falken's girlfriend, taken by Hiltonists in the past.


VEHICLES

Falcon

Falken's spaceship.


ORGANISATIONS

Hiltonists

Followers of Gantry Hilton

Hiltonist Black Guards

Military organisation for Gantry Hilton.

Unregenerates

Opponents of Hiltonism.

Spaceguard

Military defense unit of the Hiltonists.


RACES

Sun-children

Energy beings that live in space for eons, now almost extinct.


WEAPONS

Tractor-beams

Capture devices.

Psycho Adjuster

"They'll blank your brain with electric impulses and then transmit a whole new memory-pattern, even shifting the thought-circuits so that you won't think the same way. They'll change your metabolism, your glandular balance, your pigmentation, your face, and your fingerprints."

Spaceshells

Projectiles for spaceship weapons.


CONCEPTS

Psycho-Change

Being Psycho-Adjusted.

Interplanetary War

A Solar System conflict.

Peace and Happiness

Hiltonist doctrine.


PLOT

Sheila Moore goes to Eric Falken for help. Falken is a shining light to the failing Unregenerate resistance. Unknown to either of them, Moore's companion Avery is a double agent and the actual son of the Hiltonist leader, using mental technology to avoid detection.

This is apparently post-Interplanetary War and the intimation is that Mercury is pretty much completely unimhabitable know, as compared to some other Brackett stories.

A surprise awaits them all as they find a hidden world, the plaything of the last Sun-child. It is a powerful energy being who lives to great age, but who had been hiding amusing itself to distract from the knowledge of its own mortality, and end of its race.

Falken sees a possibility to do a deal to get their own world from the Sun-child, and then doublecross, but it has too many abilities. All that is left is to reason with the entity that skulking around on a tiny planet its way beneath its talents and intellect.


3.5 out of 5