"When the Moon Hits Your Eye" | Reviewed by Nelson Appell

It’s possible John Scalzi wrote his newest book, “When the Moon Hits your Eye,” as a personal challenge. He wanted to see how many cheese puns and jokes he could get away with. He gets away with a lot. Fortunately, there’s something inherently funny about cheese. He has written the first Cheesedystopian book, a science-fiction future filled with Interga-lactic puns. It’s the sort of literary performance that inspires a cheesemongering type of reviewer to try to keep up.

The book has two distinguishing features. The first is the main premise. The moon has turned into cheese. Yes, cheese. One day the moon is made of solid rocks and debris. The next it is composed of a cheese-like substance. How has this happened? What does this mean?

This premise inspires a lot of head scratching and speculative physics about things like the mass of orbiting cheese. Since cheese reflects the sun’s rays more efficiently than rock, the new moon shines much brighter at night. Scientists ponder: Is it safe to go ahead with the manned landing on the moon when it is suddenly made of cheese?

The second feature of this original book is the experimental plot. Scalzi tells the story by dividing the chapters into days, starting with Day 1. Each chapter is a separate short story that advances the overall plot: how would the world respond to such a ludicrous event? How would scientists respond? What about crazed billionaires bent on funding a private moon landing? What about owners of local cheese shops?  Scalzi writes set-piece fiction as well as anyone. He churns out many memorable chapters.

Since we aren’t following a few characters or a main character from chapter to chapter, Scalzi starts his character development over with each chapter. It’s quite a challenge, and he pulls it off with ease.

Scalzi has given us a thoughtful, funny book about the moon turning into cheese. Along the way he offers many lessons on modern media, billionaires with too much time and too much money, cheese jokes, economics, politics and much more. His mind seems to be continually churning away to further understand how the world works.

If you’re a fan of Scalzi, he has written another fun, intelligent book, filled with his own brandy of cheesy wit.

Buy the Book.