- When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi (Tor Publishing Group, March 2025)
By Lis Carey: One fine day, when NASA is in preparing for early tests of the new moon lander for the Diana missions to return to the Moon, the NASA director gets word of an emergency with the lunar samples brought back from the Apollo missions.
Have they been stolen? No. Have they been destroyed? Not exactly.
They’ve turned to cheese.
The Moon itself, right now at quarter phase, is also looking mighty strange, with a much higher albedo than the gray, rocky world should have. Almost as if…it’s also now made of cheese.
It’s also quickly determined to be larger, at least in diameter. Large enough that even with the lower density of cheese, it’s still the same mass. So, no immediate disruptive effects on Earth, as tides and other effects remain unchanged. Although, the upcoming annular eclipse of the Sun will now be a total eclipse of the Sun.
Over the next month, we follow a variety of small groups, reacting to and coping with the sudden and inexplicable change in their own ways.
NASA has to decide what to do about the test flight of the new Mars lander. Should the unmanned flight go all the way to the Moon and return, as planned, or only to low Earth orbit, instead?
The billionaire whose company designed and built the new Moon lander decides to exploit the confusion to fulfill his own lifetime dream. (Jody Bannon is not Musk; we know he’s not Musk because he hates Musk and Bezos both.)
A science writer whose first book has, well, flopped, is looking for a chance to recover from that, writes a book about the sudden change in the Moon and its possible scientific impact.
A minister at a small Evangelical church in the Midwest has to guide his flock through what this means for their faith–and reaches into unsuspected depths in himself.
Two rival cheese shops in Madison, Wisconsin, find themselves confronting, together, a mob that tips from shouting their confusion, fear, and anger at the Moon, to turning it on a more accessible form of cheese.
A variety of small stories, some funny, some charming, play out over the next month.
It’s a good little book, not up there with Scalzi’s best, but an enjoyable read nevertheless.
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Thanks, Lisa. Read it myself the moment it came out
@Andrew (not Werdna) — Thanks! Lis (not Lisa)
Oops. Sorry about that Lis. Auto-incorrect…
Sounds a bit cheesey to me…. 😉
I don’t have my copy yet, so I appreciate the review even more than usual.
This one seems to fit right into one of Scalzi’s particular patterns: start from an unlikely premise and figure out how people deal with it from there. Whether the premise is ridiculous does not, in many ways, matter. This fits in with one of my favorite literary adages, which is that having a coincidence get you into a story is fine, but having it get you out of one is (usually) much less fine.
“It’s a good little book, not up there with Scalzi’s best…”
And Lord knows, his best efforts are weak enough reeds to lean on already…
Scalzi claimed he’d pitched a novel where the moon blows up but it got scuppered by Seveneves. I remember thinking, what’s wrong with doing another novel where the moon blows up? Now we know.
In fairness, it’s a tough sub-genre. The Wanderer doesn’t hold up. Inconstant Moon sucked. Even Seveneves was a slog. Who ever did it well? Maybe J.G. Ballard? But I like the rival cheese shops coming together in the face of a Wisconsinite mob.
Needs more Wallace and Grommet. And wensleydale, of course.
And plenty of PG Tips?
Rest of sentence, from the Perry Como song: “…like a big pizza pie, that’s amoré…”
Perry Como? Dean Martin, please.