Dawn of Procyon

Pros: fascinating aliens, Landry's resourcefulness

Cons: cliched characters, Landry comprehends the alien with remarkable speed

When Landry agrees to help a friend he has no idea that favour will leave him stranded on the surface of Proc-One, oxygen running out, no way to communicate with the base, and no hope of a rescue. Then he realizes that one of the alien enemy Argoni is nearby, cannibalizing the wreck of his scout ship.

Cait's the optech promoted to supervisor after Landry's disappearance. Her day's not going well either. Her boss is unreasonable, work is piling up, there's an emergency repair that brings its own mystery, and she's found a picture of Landry with a mystery woman. She wants to enjoy her promotion but keeps thinking of Landry and wondering if he really is dead.

Landry's a pretty resourceful character, surviving in harsh conditions for a surprising amount of time. Though lots of new problems arise, he faces each one and finds a solution. I really enjoyed his man vs nature chapters. The book spends a lot of time trying to get away from the initial impression of him as an anti-social workaholic. He's portrayed as mostly friendless, with few redeeming qualities.

For the most part I liked Cait, though she's somewhat cliched as well, a female mechanic trying to prove her worth to her father and male co-workers. She's conflicted in that she's happy to be promoted, but she doesn't feel that abandoning Landry is fair, regardless of the circumstances for his disappearance. I did find it strange that the picture of Landry and his wife made her reconsider him as a person. I wouldn't have thought his personal relationships would matter if she believed him a jerk for being so stand offish at work. There's a chapter towards the end of the book where she makes some baseless assumptions about him that her own investigations don't support.

There were some plot points that didn't make much sense to me, starting with how Landry and Gus managed to steal a scout ship out of a military installation that requires passing through some sort of airlock. Surely there would be notification that the outer door has been opened, if there isn't anything showing that a scout ship has been activated.

While I liked the pacing of most of the book, the ending progresses too quickly to feel realistic. It's hard to believe Landry could come to comprehend anything at all from something so alien, but to do so as quickly as he does defied belief. I did enjoy learning more about the aliens and found these chapters very interesting, regardless of how contrived parts of it felt.

Having said that, the book's ending was rather cool, with sequel potential.

This is a flawed book, but one that reads quickly and has some interesting ideas.