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.