When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: humorous science fiction, science fiction
Pages: 336
Published by Tor Books on March 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
From the New York Times bestselling author of Starter Villain comes an entirely serious take on a distinctly unserious subject: what would really happen if suddenly the moon were replaced by a giant wheel of cheese.
It's a whole new moooooon.
One day soon, suddenly and without explanation, the moon as we know it is replaced with an orb of cheese with the exact same mass. Through the length of an entire lunar cycle, from new moon to a spectacular and possibly final solar eclipse, we follow multiple characters -- schoolkids and scientists, billionaires and workers, preachers and politicians -- as they confront the strange new world they live in, and the absurd, impossible moon that now hangs above all their lives.
My Review:
You might be thinking that the title seems familiar. Or that it’s doing to you what it did to me and is giving you an earworm. It IS familiar. The whole line is, “If the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore”. I’m even hearing it in Dean Martin’s voice as it was one of his biggest hits and my parents certainly played the music of the Rat Pack around the house when I was growing up.
It’s also more than a bit of a pun for this whole entire book – especially the ending – as the moon hits pretty much everyone on Earth in the eye all the way through.
There are a lot of funny and or fanciful stories where the Moon is made of cheese. Usually green cheese – which works if the word green means “new” instead of the color. Wallace & Gromit travel to the moon to sample some of that cheese in A Grand Day Out. Wallace clearly hopes it’s his beloved Wensleydale – but sadly it’s not.
It may seem like I’ve digressed, but I’m not sure that’s true, considering the book. From a certain point of view, When the Moon Hits Your Eye could be said to be a series of digressions – or one whole entire digression. It’s certainly a series of vignettes, a month-long collection of slice of life stories all wrapped around a single, cheesy premise.
“What if the moon suddenly turned into cheese?” Not just the actual moon, but all the moon rocks carefully protected in museums and laboratories all over the Earth, right along with their point of origin.
Because that’s what happens in this book. It’s not about the science of how it happened – because no one can figure that out. At all. It’s about the reaction. All the reactions – including the reaction of the cheese itself.
Which is going to be absolutely moon-shattering – and potentially earth-shattering as well. But that’s not the point. The point is the human reaction to the cheese reaction to a fundamental change in the composition of the whole entire universe.
And it’s not good. But it is, frequently and often and wryly and ruefully, utterly hilarious.
![[cover of Redshirts by John Scalzi]](https://www.readingreality.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/redshirts-201x300.jpg)
Escape Rating B: I ended up with a GINORMOUS cheese-wheel of mixed feelings on this one. I’ve read a fair bit of this author’s work, and let’s just say that Moon reads like a stellar reason why I’ve always said that Scalzi is a bit of an acquired taste. If you enjoy his authorial voice – it’s on full display in Moon. If you don’t, this isn’t going to change your mind.
The Scalzi story that Moon reminds me of most is Redshirts, which is as much meta as it is story and drove me a bit bananas in the reading of it. According to the author’s afterword, thematically Moon is part of a conceptual but not actual series that includes The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain, in that all three stories “share a similar conceit of ‘Everyday people dealing with an extremely high-concept situation, in contemporary settings’.”
Which circles back to the idea that this isn’t REALLY about the moon suddenly turning into cheese. It’s about the human reaction to the moon becoming cheese. And, because humans are gonna human no matter the circumstances, that reaction is frequently hilarious.
To the point where I frequently laughed so hard I shook the bed and had to go read someplace else so my husband could sleep.
That hilarity is possible because the story is carefully set so that it’s not a tragedy as a whole – although it could have been. And the one documented death that does occur – well let’s just say that a Darwin Award nomination would have been a fitting outcome and leave it at that.
Where all of this reader’s mixed feelings come into this review is that the one thing I wish Moon had that it absolutely doesn’t is any hint of causality – not even of the casual handwavium variety. It’s not just that the people in the story don’t know why it happened – because that’s true in the whole entire 1632 series by Eric Flint and THAT still works. (1632 has some EXTREMELY flimsy causality, but it’s enough to get the reader over the hump and into the story.) It’s that the reader doesn’t know either. Not why it happened and not why it stopped. It could have all been a mass hallucination – which gets argued decades after the fact – AS IT ABSOLUTELY WOULD.
Which gets back to my mixed feelings. The story in the middle, the days in the life of the people in the world who were dealing – or not – with the moon having turned into cheese, were fantastic and funny and real in all of their human reactions to this insane thing that was happening. But that marvelous middle ends up feeling like a tent without even the flimsiest tentpoles of causality to keep it upright. I enjoyed it as I was reading, but it fell flat to the ground at the end.
So even though I’m a teensy bit disappointed even though my sides still ache from laughing, I would still recommend reading When the Moon Hits Your Eye to anyone who loves the author, a good, needs a good, sustained belly-laugh (and don’t we all these days), or especially a combination of the two.
