Chris is a twenty-seven-year-old down-home boy who is trying to hit it rich on the moon as a prospector. He's just getting by however when he stumbles upon a disabled vehicle that has been hit by a meteorite that is/was being operated by Amelia Thompson, and is baking in the lunar sun. It turns out that Amelia's on her way to the fabled, legendary, and feared Tycho crater on a desperate attempt to make it big.
The Tycho crater is considered cursed by those on the moon as it is a place where people have been known to have gone, but who then never come back. Realizing that his backers wouldn't wait forever for him to strike it big, he decides on a desperate gamble; to go with Amelia to Tycho. His fears are realized when he gets back to base and finds that his contract has been leased out to Chandler Brill by Chris' backers. Brill wants to do research on a particular form of native wildlife, and this will distract Chris from getting to Tycho and to get back and help Amelia. The story then becomes a wirewalk as Chris has to juggle his new charge and his trip to adventure. Then things go really wrong.
Simak's fiction was changing by the time that he first wrote and published this. He was beginning to rack up accolades for some of his more insightful and mature fictions. He had already published the City series of stories, the novels
Ring Around the Sun and
Time and Again and stories like 'The Big Front Yard', 'Crying Jag', and 'All The Traps Of Earth'. The upcoming sixties would be a golden age for Simak with the Hugo award winning novels
Time Is the Simplest Thing (Collier Nucleus Fantasy & Science Fiction) and
Way Station,
The Goblin Reservation and
The Werewolf Principle, the two novels that would grandfather in the modern urban fantasy movement, and the classic
Why Call Them Back From Heaven?.
"The Trouble With Tycho" was originally published in Cele Goldsmith's October 1960 issue of
Amazing Stories, October 1960 with Complete Simak Novel *The Trouble With Tycho* (Volume 34, No. 10) an issue that sported a great cover by the great Alex Schomberg, and which would later turn up as part of an Ace Double with A. Bertram Chandler. This one hundred and fifteen page novella is more of a throwback to the more innocent, and linear plotted action stories that were the mainstay of pulps like "Thrilling Wonder Stories" and "Startling Stories". And with encampments with names like Coonskin and Hunkadory, I'm sure that this story had an influence on Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories.
Simak was a professional newspaper man, like his fellow Wisconsinite writer Jack Olsen, and he had a deceptively intimate, unromantic, and matter-of-fact style that instantly puts you at ease, and that sucks you right into his stories. However, if you're expecting something as good as the previously mentioned stories you'll be disappointed. This is a fast-paced adventure, full of likable characters, action, mystery, romance, and alien close encounters and landscapes. Not Simak's best, but it is a lot of fun, and a good throwback to the fictions of the forties. If you're unfamiliar with his stuff, and you like pulp fiction, this novella would be a good place to start. It would also make a good read for any young reader who's just starting to sample the science fiction genre. I can't help but think that this would make a good movie, but that probably won't happen. This review pertains to the 1976 Ace paperback with the great Michael Whelan cover.
