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A Gaming Life
Book Review – When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
I’ve been a big fan of John Scalzi’s books for quite a while now, ever since I gloried through Old Man’s War and its many sequels (I’m not even sure I’ve read them all).
There was also Redshirts, a book that highlighted those crewmembers in some Star Trek-like universe and actually made them people. I adored that one.
And Starter Villain, which I thought I had reviewed but I haven’t, but is probably my favourite Scalzi book.
(I should rectify the lack of review, but I’m not sure I can do a good review since it’s been so long since I’ve read it).
When I got the chance to read When the Moon Hits Your Eye, though, where the conceit is that the moon has suddenly turned into cheese, I had to jump on it.
The book was published in March 2025.
The interesting thing is that, while there is plenty of humour and hilarious situations, this is actually kind of a semi-serious take on how the world (and the people in it) would react if suddenly the moon turned to cheese and everything people thought they knew was turned on its head.
What a weird concept!
And a brilliant one.
It’s also an examination of how people would react if the end of the world was imminent, but not immediate.
How would people handle that?
Would people keep their jobs if there was a bunch of time before the known end of the world?
Would they continue to celebrate things like weddings or birthdays?
The book starts at a museum that contains moon rocks, where suddenly a rock on display has become…not a moon rock.
Consternation unfolds, but then the US government scientists realize that it’s not just moon rocks.
The entire moon has spontaneously turned into an “organic substance” (cheese, but they’ll never admit to it) and expanded so that it keeps the same mass as the regular moon.
The book is told in a series of vignettes, with a kind of threaded story mingling with all of that.
There are the astronauts who were supposed to be going on a moon landing mission but now that the moon is very unstable, the mission is scrapped.
There’s the billionaire who was helping finance that mission who then hijacks a lesser mission to put his name in the science books as the next person who landed on the moon.
Even though it’s not only cheesy, but it’s completely unstable with cheese geysers and everything.
But ultimately, the story is told through vignettes like a very ill former rock star meeting his first ex-wife to inform her of his decision to end his life, given the imminent end of the world (I’ll leave the “why the world is going to end” to those of you who will read the book).
There is the high school nerd club discussing the billionaire’s moon mission in hilarious form.
How about a woman who grew up with an immense fantasy world in her head and dreams of putting that world onto the page. What happens when you haven’t fulfilled that dream and now the world is going to end?
This vignette is wonderful, not just in general but especially for aspiring writers as it contains some very good advice that may (or may not) have been given by a real writer.
Especially hilarious is a couple of friends who attend a taping of Saturday Night Live which doesn’t go over well considering how the world is going to be ending and the crowd is not in the mood for bad comedy.
That’s the main thrust of the book even as there are chapters that sort of advance the main storyline as well.
These character studies and vignettes are the heart of the book and almost all of them are either poignant or extremely funny.
Sometimes both!
Those readers who want everything wrapped up in a nice bow with logical (or even fantastical) explanations for events will be left wanting, though.
There is none of that here.
The book does come to a conclusion, though whether or not you find it satisfying depends on your ability to deal with uncertainty.
When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a tale told in segments, not many of which have anything to do with each other though there is an underlying story underneath it all.
It could almost be one of those multi-author anthologies where an author tells a story about their characters that sometimes incorporates characters from another author.
Since this is all written by Scalzi, it’s much more coherent than some of those are.
Some people may feel the story is a bit too fragmented, but I found the character studies to be just as interesting as the main storyline.
Scalzi is a master of character, and a book like this just shines under his writing.
Books with this format live and die by the strength of these vignettes, and occasionally there is a clunker that I just wasn’t that interested in.
Though they are few and far between, and they’re often short enough that it doesn’t take long to get through them.
Overall, When the Moon Hits Your Eye is another solid book by Scalzi that I highly recommend checking out.
Even if “sci-fi” is not your normal genre, the characters are this book’s strengths.
Give it a try if you can.
Dude! Take Your Turn! 
I liked the book, but I’d put it behind many of his others, like the Interdependency series, Lock In, etc. It’s fine, but the style just didn’t quite jive with me.
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