REVIEW: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

JayneB+ Reviews / Book Reviews / Recommended ReadsContemporary / Fiction / Sci-fi / science / Science Fiction / social commentary / Speculative-Fiction2 Comments

The moon has turned into cheese.

Now humanity has to deal with it.

For some it’s an opportunity. For others it’s a moment to question their faith: In God, in science, in everything. Still others try to keep the world running in the face of absurdity and uncertainty. And then there are the billions looking to the sky and wondering how a thing that was always just there is now… something absolutely impossible.

Astronauts and billionaires, comedians and bank executives, professors and presidents, teenagers and terminal patients at the end of their lives — over the length of an entire lunar cycle, each get their moment in the moonlight. To panic, to plan, to wonder and to pray, to laugh and to grieve. All in a kaleidoscopic novel that goes all the places you’d expect, and then to so many places you wouldn’t.

It’s a wild moonage daydream. Ride this rocket.

Dear Mr. Scalzi, 

I will admit that I had issues with “Kaiju” but then I really enjoyed “Starter Villain.” I still want Hera to handle my investment portfolio. This book looked like it would also be in this somewhat fun vein so, giddy, I grabbed an advanced copy. I like this one, too, and it’s not just that the most famous line from “Apollo 13” gets used. 

“It’s not your press conference, it’s the president’s,” Heffernan said, and then looked at their surprised faces. “People, the moon has turned to fucking cheese. The president can’t not have a press conference about this.

“Do you think that’s wise?” Golden said. “People could lose their minds about this.”

“They absolutely will lose their minds about it,” Heffernan said. “But if we do this right, they will lose their minds in the direction of our choosing.” He stood, and they stood with him. “Now. You have eight hours to get your stories straight. Get to it.”

There’s a gimme for this one, a great big gimme that’s in the blurb. The moon, our moon that is responsible for life as we know it, is suddenly a big orb of cheese. No one knows exactly what kind of cheese but it’s cheese. And unlike the basalt rock that it was, New Moon is acting like a cheese moon would – which is to say it’s larger but also collapsing in on itself and shooting out geysers of whey water stuff. What the hell? The People in Charge know little more than the average schmoe but are trying to stay ahead of the conspiracy theorists on reddit and social media. What does it mean? How did it happen? And what happens next? Watch as people all over the US (and it’s mainly limited to the US and some foreign press) grapple with the unbelievable.  

“There is nothing to be done about it. It just is. And we have to deal with it, or not. In this respect we are no different than the dinosaurs who looked up in the sky sixty-five million years ago and saw the meteor bearing down on them. What we might think or believe or hope is immaterial to the unfathomable reality of what it is that is above us.”

While reading the story, I wondered at the science of it all. Who did you talk to, I asked myself. The afterward answers that. Loosey-goosey science for the win. I totally understand why but I bet there will still be a ton of scientists and nerds (lots who are both), much like the group of high school students, discussing and critiquing and positing about what happens in the story. My guess is that this will be almost as much fun as the book.  

“Did you do public relations before you joined the NSA?” Amos asked Glover.

“No, I just don’t see the benefit of the United States admitting it got taken for a ride by a billionaire who has more entitlement than he has brains.”

“So we make this little weasel a hero,” Olsen grumbled.

“Unless you have a better plan,” Glover said.

“I don’t, and I hate that I don’t.”

Okay why did I like this one? One reason is something that some readers might hate and that is that it’s from such a wide point of view. Each chapter takes us to a different group of people – some of whom we rejoin later a time or two – and we see how this crazy WTH is affecting them: NASA astronauts who realize that their years of training for a return to the moon might have been wasted, an author whose second book just happens to have a section about the moon in it which makes him the go-to public information source, White House staffers, NSA, NASA, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a president who never counted on this being the crisis they would face, —

Boone tapped his desk. “I don’t know how to talk about this in a way that doesn’t fundamentally sound ridiculous.”

“This has been a common problem,” Heffernan assured him.

“So you’re saying we’re doomed,” Boone said to Olsen.

“I didn’t say that,” Olsen protested.

Boone held up his hand. “Yes, you did, you just want to weasel out of it. But cut the shit, Kevin. You don’t think we’re getting out of this alive, do you?”

Olsen looked helpless. “It . . . doesn’t look good, Mr. President.”

“The Cheese Flambé Apocalypse,” Boone said. “That’s going to look great on my Wikipedia page, Pat.”

“It’ll be the end of the world,” Heffernan said. “No one will bother to write it.”

“So I have that going for me, which is nice,” Boone said.

— a group of retired buddies in a local diner hashing out their thoughts on where they want to be at “the end,” a small Ohio church grappling with issues of faith, a billionaire who isn’t going to watch his efforts and dollars wasted, a wannabe author who might have put off until too late actually writing the book that’s been in her head for years and others. 

This is humanity facing something unprecedented, searching for meaning, and as humanity often does, worrying first about how it will affect them. It’s also people reaching out to others, comforting others, letting those in their lives know you mean something to me, you matter. As we all expire (in roughly two years) from the flaming cheese asteroid from hell, I want to be by your side. The bank officials are still in it for the money (though this chapter is darkly hilarious and yes, convincing people of the benefit of long-term savings is compromised by a short-term global Armageddon) but then we know that’s how they’ll be. I do wish there had been a chapter with people thinking about their pets. 

Also, you won’t have to stock up on water bottles,” Clyde said. “Just before the cheese comes down, you can both stay with me. I already have a garden, I have solar panels and I have well water. At the end of everything, we’ll still have showers and electric lights and operating toilets. You can’t ask for much more than that.”

“We could ask not to be smothered in cheese,” Alton said.

So yes humanity with humor (the SNL section is awesome) and some light social commentary that truly moved me at times is why this worked for me. The billionaires and the bank are the main ones who come in for lambasting but everyone else are people I wouldn’t mind sharing a foxhole with for the End of Times. I’m sorry that this is the end of a trilogy of sorts and then it’s back to space, aliens, and spaceships. B+ 

~Jayne

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