Little Green Men is a great, page turner of a story. It's a not a long story, more a novella than a novel, detailing the experiences of the crew of space ship Dei Gracia on a frozen, distant world. The writing is brisk and the tension of the story is perfect. Halfway through the book there was a spot where I stopped and said "Holy Crap, I never saw that coming!" It's a great puzzle of a story that in the end fits together with a very elegant and satisfying logic.
Peter Cawdron says that he wrote Little Green Men as a tribute to the works of Philip K. Dick and the classic science fiction stories of the 1950s. He's certainly succeeded, the story manages to mix the pulse-pounding fear of the Alien movies with some of the big questions of perception and existence that one normally associates with authors like Dick, Asimov or Clarke. The interactions of the crew reminded me of the best of the old Star Trek episodes.
I don't want to give away any of the story, this is a book to be read and enjoyed, not explained. The book was free when I downloaded it to my Kindle, but the story is well worth the regular price of 99 cents. Such deals exist to introduce the reader to a new writer. Little Green Men certainly worked on that level for me, I've already downloaded some of Peter Cawdron's other stories.
