Book Review: When The Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
About the book
One day, suddenly and without explanation, the moon turns into a ball of cheese. For some, it’s an opportunity. For others, it’s time to question their life choices.
How can the world stay the same in the face of such absurdity and uncertainty?
Astronauts and billionaires, comedians and bank executives, professors and presidents, teenagers and patients at the end of their lives – over the length of a lunar cycle, each gets their moment in the moonlight. To panic, to plan, to wonder and to hope, to laugh and to grieve. All in a story that goes to all the places you’d expect, and to many others you could never anticipate.
For the people of the earth, this could be the end – or the beginning of a whole new world.
From the Hugo and Locus Award-winning author John Scalzi, When the Moon Hits Your Eye is an entirely serious take on an entirely unserious subject.
Why we love it
Sometimes you stumble upon a book so absurd you can't help but wonder what exactly was going on inside the author's mind at the time to prompt it. This is that sort of a novel - a book built around a premise so utterly ridiculous that you can’t help but lean in to it.
On one particular day, humanity looks to the skies and notices something odd - the moon is a little brighter, a little bigger and a little more yellow than normal. Mainly because it's turned into cheese.
What kind of cheese? Well, that's the burning question facing the denizens of earth. Along with the issue of just how stable a giant cheese-ball with the same mass as the moon can really be - it's a whole cheese-apocalypse (much like the contents of my fridge at Christmas but that's another story).
From this single, impossible-sounding idea, John Scalzi spins a sharp, funny and surprisingly thoughtful novel about how humanity reacts when confronted with the utterly impossible.
Scientists scramble for explanations. Governments panic. Tech billionaires try to monetise it and ordinary people just have no idea what to believe. With each passing day told from the perspective of a different character, the novel feels like a panoramic snapshot of humanity in a shared moment of total cosmic disbelief. It should feel disjointed, but John Scalzi is so adept at this sort of fast-paced story-telling that it works perfectly.
And of course, it helps that it’s also genuinely laugh-out-loud funny - a brilliant blend of sharp humour and satire that works precisely because it feels uncomfortably close to the truth of how humanity would react when faced with the impossible.
All in all, When The Moon Hits Your Eye is a playful, clever and brilliantly imaginative novel that shouldn't work and yet somehow really does. Highly recommended, whether you're new to John Scalzi's work or a long-time fan as we are.
