This book is absolutely ridiculous and absurd and has no right to be as good as it is. I thought I might laugh at a story about the moon turning to cheese – and I did, more than I expected to – but I didn’t think I’d CRY.

We all have those off the cuff “what would happen if” ideas, but Scalzi has gone and turned one into a book that is fabulous in its complete wackiness. This isn’t really about people trying to save humanity, or figuring out HOW the moon has turned to cheese and WHY. You get this insane thing that happens and then take a look at the reactions of people, which are very genuine and the whole time you’re nodding your head like “yeah, yep, that’s what I’d say too.”

Each chapter is one day in the lunar cycle, and follows the story of a different person or group as their lives go on. Under a moon of cheese. I thought they were all great, although my personal favorite might have been the one with a group of friends chatting on slack.

Also I really loved the one about the Elon Musk-esque character, and the characterization of how he never actually invented anything, he just pays companies a bunch of money to become the CEO and then takes credit for everything the real engineers do. Gee, that sounds familiar.

I think this book is downright wonderful, it’s fast paced and a very quick and entertaining read. If you’ve enjoyed Scalzi’s other works, particularly Starter Villain and Kaiju Preservation Society, then you’ll really like this. But if you haven’t and you like character vignettes and slice-of-life stories, then please check this out. Whimsy and absurdism aside, it’s full of very funny and touching stories of people confronting a situation they can’t begin to understand, and how they move forward in the face of it.

I know I’ve build this up, so you might be disappointed to hear it isn’t out until March 25. (Nooooo!) But trust me and stick this one on the TBR so you don’t forget about it.


Thank you Netgalley and Tor Books for the chance to read this delightful arc in exchange for my honest review.

I greatly enjoy the writing of John Scalzi, especially with respect to his sense of humor and his facility with words.

The premise of this particular story, however, was a bit over the top for me. In short, the moon turns to cheese. Different chapters focus on reactions of different people around the country to the news, and cleverly, each chapter represents a day in the lunar cycle.

I appreciated some of the riffs of the characters on the limitations of human knowledge and understanding; I just wish he had come up with a more believable trope. On the other hand, as a retired physics professor in the story opines, a thousand years ago humans would have thought an eclipse was just as unbelievable and/or magical. The character muses:

“I don’t what the science is here. I may not live long enough to receive and understand the science. But I believe strongly that the science is there. This history of human civilization is the history of what was considered magical snd mystical slowly but surely being explained.”

Scalzi also gives space to some religious reactions to the phenomenon (predictably not good), the tendency of mobs to get incited into violence out of fear and lack of understanding, and the inevitable onslaught of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

In the final analysis, however, I felt like it was a joke taken too far, and that it would have been more effective with a more credible type of lunar transformation. Kudos to him for all the great cheese puns, however! I felt like he had to restrain himself from taking over the book with them, he was having so much fun at it!

Continuing on from The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain, John Scalzi's latest book is a similarly fun romp through some serious examination of the results of a very silly premise. Where those books felt like continuous narratives, though, this felt like a collection of short stories, and I felt that they were of varying efficacy. I definitely cared more about some protagonists than others.

First, what this book does well. It's funny, with Scalzi's typical no-nonsense prose and ironic humor, and it's a delight to read. It cares enough about the science in gaming out what the results of the absurd premise might actually be, and gives Andy Weir (who gets name checked) a run for his money. It is aware of structural issues in the world without being a total bummer about them.

But for all that it has going for it, I struggled to be properly invested in it, and that was largely because of its structure as a collection of short stories. For the most part, they tended to cover different characters, and because we never saw enough of one character to form a proper attachment, I felt that the structure robbed the book of momentum and emotional connection. Unlike the previous two books, this one doesn't seem to care too much about providing even a hand-waving answer as to how the premise came to be; that's fine in principal, but means that it will never be able to really engage with deeper thematic stuff that would be called up by that. Scalzi is not a writer who tends to make his characters sound wildly different to me, and that's generally always worked for me because I like the way they sound, but I found that less effective when spread across a bunch of short stories as compared to with one singular protagonist.

I didn't dislike this book by any means, and if you're looking for a palette cleanser this might be exactly what you need. I think, though, that I would have enjoyed myself more rereading The Kaiju Preservation Society.

As always expected from Scalzi this was an absolute delight to read. To me stories like this are the epitome of science fiction: One very weird, very whacky, very unexpected thing happens and we have to figure out what to do with it. This is such a great and absurd example of this.

While I didn’t love every single story, I appreciated the variety of serious to cute to, of course, laugh-out-loud funny.

"When the Moon Hits Your Eye" is a humorous sci-fi novel by John Scalzi that posits "what if the moon suddenly turned into cheese?" What would happen around the world? How would people react? How would NASA react? How would the president react? This novel is a series of short interconnected stories about different people dealing with the change in various hilarious ways. It feels like "World War Z" without the zombies and with a lot more humor. A recommended purchase for all fiction collections, especially where Scalzi is popular (which let's face it is pretty much everywhere, and rightly so)!

I really enjoyed the mix of humor and existential dread in this one! As an Ohioan, I enjoyed the various references to our state, especially the 2024 Eclipse. I'm a librarian and the eclipse mania was real! I've only read Miniatures by Scalzi in the past, but will definitely be trying out some of his other novels. Our adult fiction collection development librarian is a big Scalzi fan, but I would make him get this book for our library even if he wasn't.