When The Moon Hits Your Eye

John Scalzi

★★★★☆

A fast, enjoyable read with a few gut punches hidden throughout. I picked it as a sort of palate cleanser to the darkness of Overgrowth, though it turns out both involve strange transformations and potential planet-wide disasters.

It’s not really about the moon turning into cheese overnight so much as it’s about how people react to the moon turning into cheese overnight. Some people deal with it better than others.

Some of the vignettes are funny, some are touching, and some stand out more than others. Some people only show up once and others come back repeatedly. The feuding cheese shops that have gotten a lot more attention since the change. The pop-science author whose book on fantastic takes on the moon came out at exactly the right time. The astronauts whose mission is scrapped take it better than the billionaire rocket mogul whose company is building their rockets and spacecraft. (He really doesn’t take it well.)

The most impactful stories, though, are a set of vignettes around the 3/4 mark involving a long-divorced couple staring down mortality, and an extended chapter on a writer who has spent her entire adult life trying to get her first novel just right before shopping it around, or continuing with the other stories in her head.

OK, there’s one with a more literal impact, but you know what I mean.

And I appreciate how well Scalzi describes a total solar eclipse. (He mentions in the acknowledgments that the moon was kind enough to pass directly between the sun and his house last year, which helped quite a bit with that scene.)

And then there’s the epilogue. Or epilogues, rather.

SPOILER WARNING!

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Partway through, the story changes from one about people dealing with a massively weird but mostly harmless event to people dealing with imminent doom…but not yet, not until a few years from now, though it’s not hard to calculate the exact date. And it became strikingly clear that the COVID lockdowns of 2020 strongly influenced the psychology and sociology of the story…as well as the epilogues where people try to explain it away as a hoax, eventually succeeding in replacing the real story with a “realistic” version that we, as readers, know didn’t happen, because we got to follow along with the people who experienced it directly.

Anyway, it’s not high art, not even among Scalzi’s best (I think Lock In and Head On are my favorites of his so far, though I still have a lot on my to-read list), but it’s worth reading.

Connections

When The Moon Hits Your Eye forms sort of a thematic trilogy along with Starter Villain (which was a bit more fun) and The Kaiju Preservation society (which is the most interesting of the three).

And somehow I ended up reading a cluster of oddly-related books this summer: This and The Downloaded both cover character studies in an apocalypse that they can’t even mitigate. The Downloaded and Interference both involve long-lost interplanetary expeditions reconnecting with Earth. And Interference and Overgrowth both involve intelligent alien plants, mimicry, and invasions with shifting alliances.