Easy gripping read with lots of action, science and an interesting premise. I wasn't particularly taken with the ending. ( )

Eine SciFi-Kurzgeschichte der Marke "quick'n'dirty" mit starken Anleihen bei "Alien" und "Event Horizon" (ersterer dank vieler direkter Verweise in den Dialogen der Roman-Astronauten auf eben diesen ganz offensichtlich und mit tiefer Verbeugung), dabei eigenständig genug um auf die kurze Distanz voll und ganz zu fesseln und zumindest mich auch schwer zu begeistern. Den Autor werd ich mir genauer ansehen müssen!

Da GR mit halben Noten auf Kriegsfuß steht und/oder seine User zu dämlich für den Umgang mit diesen hält, werden verdiente 4,5 Sterne auf 5 aufgerundet. ( )

Little Green Men by Peter Cawdron is a freaky book that keeps your heart pumping the whole time. I am trying to figure it out and it is so weird and so bizarre, but I absolutely loved it. I mind boggling book and scary at the same time. I love his books! ( )

ABR's full Little Green Men audiobook review can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

Chief Science Officer Michaels along with the crew of the Dei Gratia travel to distant plants to mine the resources available. However, he finds himself in the unique position of encountering the first ever extraterrestrial contact. Violent little green men attack him and the crew leaving bodies and mysteries of their encounter. Using history and man's unique ability to destroy everything they come into contact with, Michaels manages to solve the mystery of the little green men and save the crew.

Cawdron takes the reader on a roller coaster ride of visuals and emotions as the little green men make their mark upon the crew. Not your ordinary sci-fi book, Cawdron leaves much to the imagination and gives the reader just enough to keep them hooked until the end. At the end, the reader finds him/herself pondering the inner workings of humans and their interactions with others. Who are the true monsters? Little green men or the humans who invaded American and slaughtered without prejuidice or the humans who invaded other countries during the crusades? Why do humans destroy everything?

These questions and more make the story stick with you well past the ending. Excellent plot, well developed and executed perfectly.

The narrator, Jeffrey Hayes, did an excellent job of narrating and injecting the appropriate emotions.

Audiobook provided for review by the Author.

Please find this complete review and many others at audiobookreviewer dot com

[If this review helped, please press YES. Thanks!] ( )

Don't get me wrong ... I love a book that poses what looks like an unsolvable "mystery" about the situations and occurrences in the plot, as in "How can this possibly be happening?" and for the first 80% of this book, I was really loving the ride. As a reader, I'm forced to conjure up my own "theory" to account for what is going on in the story.

So what do you do when the author begins to reveal the "secret" and you find out that your theory actually made better sense than the author's? Such things have hardly ever happened in my reading experience, but it did happen with Peter Cawdron's Little Green Men. I found myself saying, "Come on, you're kidding, you can't expect to get off that easily!" (Possible spoilers ahead, depending on one's attitude.) You know how when you're telling children a story and they have reached the level of sophistication where you can no longer "buy them off" with an attempt to resolve the story with "fast moves" like "and it turned out, it was all a dream"? You are kind of insulting the intelligence of a such a child when you tell them a story like this.

Cawdron thinks he can take a leaf out of the "book" of Philip K Dick and try and pull off a more grown-up version of the cheap trick we are no longer allowed to use (ok, once only!) when telling stories to kids. One big problem with his use of "Dickian" devices like this is that they don't really work in stories that are so straight-line adventure-yarn realistic as LGM. Dick can do these things successfully because reality in general in a PKD book is a constantly shape-shifting thing.

It's one thing to say that what a character does in a story is in fact "mass-hallucinated" by the other characters in the story, but you can't do this once you as an author have "presumed" to tell part of the story from the "hallucinated" character's point of view... because you have just relied on the fact that there is no such thing as that "point of view" with respect to that (non-)occurrence. All of a sudden, the "omniscient author" seems not to have had the story as much under his control as he was letting on. Dick can get away with things like this, as in for example the paradoxical exploits of Jason Taverner in the early-middle chapters of Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. But Cawdron wants it both ways: he wants to use the "fluidity" of a Dickian reality and at the same time try to say at the end of the book, "but in fact, it was XYZ that happened", where "XYZ" is the Definitive Reality. And I start getting a case of the stylistic bends if I try to invoke some kind of "magic realism" all of a sudden in a narrative that, as all other readers seem to agree, presents itself both from the start and by the end as a description of a Reality where "IN FACT" these things happened and these other things DID NOT. Does Cawdron want his story, as told, to "fall apart" the way I claim it does? No he does not. Whereas with PKD, reality itself is always one step away from falling apart, and there is never, not even in "realistic" PKD novels like The Man in the High Castle, a "Master Narrative" that one is able to tell that "accounts for" everything that went on in the story. And if there is to be such a Master Narrative here, I would say, at the very least, that the story needs to be "told" in a different manner from the way Cawdron tells it.

Three stars, because it really was an exciting "adventure yarn", one that had one or critical two square pegs in round holes too many, and on beams holding up "supporting walls" of the story-house. Ka-blam...! ( )