Book Review: Tycho, by William Woodall

            If you were a seventeen year old boy with a moral obligation to humanity to have sex with your girlfriend, why wouldn’t you? This question was not answered to my satisfaction in Tycho, by William Woodall, but I guess he was trying to write something PG and I didn’t want to read two hundred pages of space sex anyhow. Because when the human race has been brought down to fifty people following a devastating bacterial infection, you’d think a whiz kid who’s an expert in both computers and biology would realize that every year his girlfriend spends un-pregnant is one fewer individual to help repopulate the Earth. Also, if I was a Nobel-winning biologist devising a master plan to repopulate earth, I wouldn’t take an equal number of males and females to a refuge on the moon. I’d take as many teenage girls as possible and tubes of preserved sperm.

You know, I'm not sure the sky on the moon looks quite like that. 

            There. Now that I’ve let my inner biologist have a say, Tycho happens to be a pretty interesting book. Reminiscent of Freedom’s Landing, by Ann McCaffrey, Tycho combines the traditional elements of space-exploration sci-fi with modern apocalyptic fiction. The title character Tycho, who at the age of seventeen can already hack into government databases and work complicated biological equipment (which, apparently, still uses techniques like gel electrophoresis despite it being two hundred years in the future), discovers info on a mysterious plague called the Orion Strain. It spreads faster than a speeding bullet, and kills even more effectively than said speeding bullet. Tycho does the math—apparently, humanity is screwed.

            Why the government doesn’t just nuke India, where the plague originates, off the face of the planet, is a discussion for another time. Why the government doesn’t have sterile underground bunkers prepared for this kind of thing, seeing as how this is an age where biologically engineered superplagues are in vogue, is also a question for another time. What matters is that Tycho gathers up his family and friends and, with the help of his well-connected teachers, steals a spaceship and flies off to the moon. The partially terraformed Luna now has an atmosphere and a few handily deserted research lab, but it’s still a pretty terra-fying place to be exiled for the rest of your days. Woodall creates an environment that’s convincingly inhospitable and foreign. It’s clear the moon was never intended for humans to live on.

            Nevertheless, Tycho and his friends make the best of it. With the help of his ex-drug dealer girlfriend, Danielle, and his reckless cousin Jesse, the survivors set up their own society in an abandoned research station. One of the best parts of this book is reading about their adventures—boating on the stormy lunar oceans and jumping off bluffs hundreds of feet tall. For the last humans in the universe, they seem to be having a pretty good time. But can they survive . . . the ultimate disaster?

            Well, I’m not going to spoil the ending for you. That’s not my job. Tycho as a character didn’t really connect with me in the beginning—he seems a little emotionally detached. You’d expect learning that the whole human race was about to be wiped out would be spiritually crushing, but we never get to see Tycho curled up in a little ball on the bathroom floor sobbing his brains out when he learns that everything he knows will be torn away from him forever. Instead, he’s all about action and filling up his 31-person rocket ship. Is it just me, or it 31 an odd number of seats to have on any vessel designed to travel anywhere? But Tycho isn’t really a story about the apocalypse—it’s a story about space and survival. And when that last plane to the moon takes off, so does the story. For any fans of hard-science fiction, it doesn’t get much better than this.

            Highs: World-building. The author creates a lunar world both familiar and alien. Adventure. The plot can be slow in places, but this story is full of imagination.

            Lows: Scientific inaccuracy. I’m not talking about biology here, but the way that computer technology and everyday life doesn’t seem to have changed much all these years in the future. People still use vending machines, eat Snickers, read paper newspapers? People barely read paper newspapers today! Standard characterization. None of the main characters really made much of a permanent impact on my mind.

Did I like this book? Yes. Would I read it again? Yes. Would I recommend it to people who like sci-fi? Yes. My rating? As sci-fi, I’ll give it four stars out of five. As a novel? Three.

—Liz Ellor, O43

You can download Tycho here. You can also go here and purchase my book, Iceclaw.