When the Moon Hits Your Eye is not the first of Scalzi’s novels I have read (it’s the fourth), and it confirms his status as an “automatic buy” for me. He is largely, but not exclusively, a science fiction writer. But he does not typically write the kind of science fiction that is fantasy-adjacent, where there is complex world-building and a whole new social structure you need to learn. (Which, to be clear, I also love. But this is not that.) Rather, Scalzi’s talent is to take one completely ridiculous premise and then have everything else flow logically from the absurdity that is human nature.
The result is both a tendency to laugh out loud while reading and a habit of going ‘huh!’ and pausing for a moment to appreciate something profound. In When the Moon Hits Your Eye, the premise is that one day the moon turns to cheese. Well, NASA scientists won’t be definitive so they continually call it ‘organic matrix,’ but everyone knows it’s cheese.
This transformation is first discovered by the staff of the Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio, whose lunar samples have inexplicably turned to cheese on the evening of a new moon. This transformation is quickly noted by the rest of the world as the moon waxes and is both larger and brighter than normal. Larger because while the cheese moon is the same mass as usual, it necessarily takes up more volume. Brighter because it’s, well, cheese reflecting the sunlight.
Events proceed throughout one lunar cycle and include a deeply unlikeable billionaire stowing away on a lunar rocket one of his companies has built (a company he bought specifically so that he could have them build such a vehicle he could sneak onto), a group of retired guys that meet for coffee at their local diner every morning to discuss The World Today, several astronauts who were supposed to be on the next launch to the moon and now have to do PR for NASA, and an unpopular writer of popular science who happened to release a book about the moon days before the cheese incident.
As it turns out, a moon of “organic matrix” instead of rock will start collapsing in on itself and erupt in massive steam geysers. Once the inevitable cheese asteroid begins its extinction-level journey towards Earth, apocalypse by cheese not being on anyone’s end-of-the-world bingo card, knowing the predicted date for the end of everything causes some re-evaluation of life’s priorities.
Scalzi also does not disappoint with his penchant for including references to ridiculous-seeming, but completely real, historical events that make his premise seem marginally more reasonable. (But don’t look up the Erfurt Latrine Disaster of 1184 while you’re on your lunch break.)
If you liked Starter Villain (also by Scalzi) or Good Omens by Neil Gaiman, you should absolutely get your hands on a copy of When the Moon Hits Your Eye. And maybe some crusty bread and a nice brie to settle in with while you read.
