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While accepting an invitation to meet with her people’s enemy, the Galactic Superiority, Alanik heard a cry for help across the vastness of space and used her cytonic powers to hyperjump her ship to the source of the cry. What she found was an entire planet of free humans faced with the choice of continuing to fight against the Superiority or accepting their peace overture.
“Don’t trust the Superiority’s lies. Don’t trust their false peace,” Alanik warned the human pilot Spensa, after Alanik’s ship crash-landed on the planet of Detritus. But after healing from her injuries, she discovered her warning to Spensa had gone unheeded.
Back on her home planet, ReDawn, Alanik is dismayed to learn that her own people are falling into the Superiority’s same trap. The faction in ReDawn’s government that wants to appease the Superiority has gained the upper hand. With Alanik’s mentor captured, and the threat of capture looming over her own head, she has no allies to turn to but the humans. An ancient technology may have the power to save both of their planets from disaster, but can they discover its secrets before it’s too late?
What happened to Alanik after she crashed on Detritus in Starsight? ReDawn gives readers a glimpse of the story from Alanik’s point of view.
It was fun experiencing humans (and characters I’d already fallen in love with) through the filtered perception of another race. It was also enjoyable getting to be in the head of someone who had already mastered their own cytonic skills. However, I found the book to be bogged down with confusing technical details and foreign world-building. This could just be me. I’m not a large reader of sci-fi, as I tend to get lost easily in picturing the scene. I still really enjoyed this addition to the series, though, and think it’s a good preparatory step for readers like me still trying to warm up to the genre.
While reading these novellas is not necessary to understanding the main series, I sense that readers will miss a lot if they bypass them altogether, and I definitely recommend picking up Sunreach and ReDawn before diving into Cytonic.
Rated: Mild. There is one use of mild language. An explosion takes the lives of many hostages. A character is psychologically effected when they take a life for the first time.
