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A Moon of Green Cheese
One fine day the Moon turned into cheese. It happened overnight, perhaps instantaneously. Suddenly its diameter is 300 miles larger, and its albedo higher. It is larger in the sky and bright enough to see during the day.
When the Moon Hits Your Eye, a humorous science fiction novel by John Scalzi, follows the first lunar month after the Moon becomes effectively green (fresh) cheese. All of it turns to cheese, including lunar samples brought back from the Apollo missions and lunar-origin meteorites.
NASA and space researchers around the world confirm that it has changed. Its new size is consistent with the density of cheese and its reflectivity is similar to that of cheese. Lunar features have changed. Everything man-made on the Moon has disappeared.
Moreover, the Moon is evolving. A massive block of cheese left out in the sun all day, it is collapsing on itself because of gravitational forces. Massive geysers are forming. Worse, it ejects a mountain-sized chunk of lunar cheese. It will eventually hit the earth. The event will make the dinosaur extinction look puny.
Scientists cannot explain what happened. It stands settled science on its head. Bureaucrats react with bureaucratic caution. (NASA will not officially state the moon is cheese. They call it a cheese-like substance.) Many question the existence of God. Epicures seek to taste lunar cheese.
Scalzi follows the reactions to the event on Earth. He provides vignettes of different people throughout the United States as they absorb the new situation. A tech billionaire uses the opportunity to attempt a landing on the Moon. A group of retirees at a coffee shop in Oklahoma talks about it, in a heartland church, members try to fit the event into their religious worldview; high school science nerds filter it through bathroom humor.
He also shows the reaction when people realize the world is doomed. Some want to struggle on: Bankers plan to keep the economy going to the very end. A would-be fantasy writer realizes that she should not have put off finishing her book until she could make it perfect. Others go full hedonist.
Scalzi has a lot of fun with the concept, exploring various reactions to an impossible event. When the Moon Hits Your Eye is lighthearted and a thoroughly wacky book. Readers cannot take it seriously, but it was never intended to be. It is a fun read.
“When the Moon Hits Your Eye,” by John Scalzi, Tor Books, March2025, 336 pages, $29.99 (Hardcover), $14.99 (E-book)
This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.
Published in Book Reviews
I enjoyed Ron Goulart, but this seems too silly for me.
Great. Now I’m hungry.
Ty for this delightful romp through sci fi corn.
Will the sequel be “Mars Turns to Pepperoni”?” (Curious minds want to know.)
Scalzi’s an interesting writer. His Old Mans War series is fantastic. Red Shirts was a great deal of fun (the protagonists find out they’re they’re actually characters in a SF TV show [“And not a particularly well-written one”] and go find the writers to try to get them to stop killing them off.
But Scalzi himself is a nasty leftist dink online.
Hence things like this:
If he wasn’t such a brilliant writer I would not read him. He is though. Just like Galileo was a repulsive human being but a brilliant scientist.
See, that’s one of those subjective things. Heinlein was brilliant. Asimov was brilliant. Harlan Ellison was brilliant and a repulsive human being so I continued to read him. For me, Scalzi is an average writer with one good novel, Old Man’s War, and he’s a repulsive human being so I no longer read him.
Asimov himself was something of a luddite, and it showed in his writing although at the age I was reading him, I didn’t yet realize it.
Asimov…a luddite? No. You didn’t realize it because he wasn’t.
Asimov himself stated that he rarely flew during his lifetime, perhaps only the two times he had no choice, involving the military.
And even in the early 1970s I could tell he had some rather… Luddite?… views on computers.
So, Wallace and Gromit were right about the moon all along.
“Wensleydale?”
Or Chairface Chippendale, from The Tick.
That wasn’t because he was a luddite, that was because he had a fear of flying.
That’s a cheese mentioned in “A Grand Day Out” with Wallace and Gromit?
No, but Chairface Chippendale wanted to put his name on the moon, or something.
So the moon has become a block of Velveeta?
Is it labeled as fantasy?
Don’t knock it. I have had is and it is very good.
No more so than any other SF with impossibilium as it basis. L Sprague de Camp categorized any SF with FTL travel as fantasy. Similarly any time travel story could be considered fantasy. While the reason the Moon changed was never explained, it was treated as a scientific phenomena, for which modern science could find no explanation.
Okay, fine, I’ll be the one.
P.S. the cheese doesn’t appear green to me, in the cover photo.
P.P.S. I had a friend whose cat was named Terpsichore.
As explained in the review “green cheese” is fresh cheese, newly made. Just like salad days are when you are young and “green.”
Weird, never heard either of those before.
Get a panel of SF writers who were English majors, and they will confidently tell you it’s impossible to travel faster than light, or back in time. Because Dr. Asimov said so!
Get a panel of SF writers who studied physics, and they will come up with ingenious ways to do both, without violating the theory of relativity. For example, by warping space. (Dr. Asimov was not a physicist.)
I’m currently reading Scalzi’s The Kaizu Preservation Society. About as far-fetched, but only mildly entertaining so far. Scalzi imagines a parallel Earth in which creatures resembling Japanese movie monsters like Godzilla and Rodan really exist.
Sounds a bit like Sheldon Cooper postulating what the Hulk would be like if he were made of other things.
Shouldn’t the moon turn into a “big pizza pie” to stay true to the book’s title? Just sayin’ . . .
I have to disagree with LSDC. FTL and time travel form the basis, or help progress the stories of, many fine works of science fiction. You want fantasy? Throw a dragon, witch, or magic carpet into the story . . .
Yep. My comment to Ann McCaffrey and Ursula LeGuin, when they were members of the Science Fiction Society in Oregon that I also belonged to, was “I don’t care about dragons, no matter how well-motivated they’re supposed to be.”
So is this categorized as weird fiction?