John Scalzi Misses His Moon Shot

A bestselling New York Times novelist, John Scalzi specializes in taking weird conceits and putting them at the heart of SF novels: space armies staffed by the geriatric? Old Man’s War series, check; dinosaur preservation in an alt-Earth? The Kaiju Preservation Society, check; underworld business conspiracy run by cats? Starter Villain, check. But Scalzi has taken it a step further with his new novel, When The Moon Hits Your Eye.

This time, though, is extra bizarre—just as NASA is on the verge of a new series of moonshots—the moon turns into cheese. Or, as government spokespeople insist, “an organic matrix.” But it’s cheese.

The moment the moon changes into a uniform ball of cheese (Caseus) that’s exactly the same mass as the old, rock moon (Luna) it starts to fall apart. At least that is what Scalzi reports the scientists telling the residents of the Earth. More specifically “the water is being squeezed out and is erupting on the surface” while the cheese solid begins to “compress under its own mass and, as it does that, it both heats up and breaks down.”

Annoyingly, just as the moon breaks down, so does Scalzi’s narrative. The moon shining in the sky is the only thing that binds a whole collection of disparate stories together. A few of them connect, loosely. Scalzi starts these stories, leaves them, then returns to them as if they are significant. But the astronauts, billionaires, science writers, church-leaders, Wisconsin cheese shop workers, ex-wives of rock stars, and retired men in Oklahoma diners never come together into a single satisfying plot.

Writing multiple stories joined by a major plot point is clearly a reasonable option for an author whether you are David Mitchell in Ghostwritten, Ray Bradbury in The Illustrated Man, Sherwood Andersen in Winesburg, Ohio or many others. And, in some ways, a book about the moon is the perfect excuse to dwell on the multiple and unrelated ways in which Americans respond with lunacy to the change in the sky and possible impending doom. It’s an object we all see, and we are all affected by.

Literally and symbolically, Caseus shines a light on our contemporary lives because conservation of mass means that it is larger and brighter than Luna. As a result of this increase in albedo the nights are more illuminated. And, as you would expect for a bestselling author and multiple Hugo award winner, Scalzi tells a dozen or so engaging shorter stories about how Caseus changes people’s lives.

But, despite often seeming like they are about to come together, the stories never do cohere, nor do they quite add up to more than the sum of their parts. And that’s just frustrating. When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a worthy tragicomic addition to recent fascinating novels about the moon like Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, and Artemis by Andy Weir but, sadly, unlike some of those, it does not make it into the pantheon of all-time great SF moon novels.