When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

This book totally should not work. (I think Mary Robinette Kowal may have been the first to make this observation in public.) Scalzi takes an absurd premise — the moon suddenly, completely, and for no discernible reason turns into cheese — and then plays it straight for the rest of the novel. The impossible, the inexplicable is implacably real for the characters. The book is hilarious in parts, but it’s funny within the premise, there’s no nod-and-grin to readers that it really isn’t happening for the characters. How can people live in a world where something so crazy can happen without warning?

Well, that’s exactly the question. Crazy things happen without warning to people all the time, and they have to live with the consequences. They don’t usually happen to everyone in the world at the same time, but that’s part of the fun of writing a science fiction novel rather than a mundane work of fiction. And the crazy things that happen without warning are more often negative — a car accident, a life-changing medical diagnosis, sudden unemployment — rather than mind-bogglingly bizarre. But in When the Moon Hits Your Eye people react to drastically changed circumstances just as people do to more mundane upheavals, some with equanimity, some by going off the rails, some by changing themselves too.

Structurally, the book is a mosaic novel. Each chapter recounts one day after the moon’s change and focuses on what happens in one person’s life. Some of the groups recur — the guys in an Oklahoma diner, people in and around a couple of Wisconsin cheese shops, astronauts whose upcoming lunar careers are utterly upended — but very few specific characters repeat until the very end when Scalzi spends a couple of extra days with one character who decides she can’t even. Those are very short chapters. Some chapters have invented news articles at the beginning to set the stage, and to show wider reactions to events that the narrative part of the chapter then portrays up close. Other chapters end with quotations from online settings within the world of the novel; these, too, give extra commentary from outside the one-person, one-day, one-chapter structure that Scalzi has set up in the main narratives.

In these daily episodes, Scalzi plays to his strengths. For starters, the pacing is excellent. The first chapter is a master class in not quite saying what has happened. It’s set in the Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio. The museum is real, by the way, on 500 Apollo Drive in Wapakoneta, Neil Armstrong’s home town, open 10 to 5 seven days a week with a few seasonal exceptions. They really do have a moon rock that Armstrong brought back from his Apollo 11 mission. When the Moon Hits Your Eye opens near the end of the working day, with the museum’s director just about to head out for date night with his beloved spouse when he receives a call from the museum’s facilities director.

“What is it, Bud?”
“Well it’s …” Bud trailed off, and Virgil [the director] waited, eyeing the door of his office, yearning for escape. “You should probably just come see this for yourself,” Bud finally said. “It’s easier than trying to explain it. We’re in the Moon Room. Come on up.” Bud hung up. (p. 5)

When Virgil gets there, Bud asks him to look at the moon rock. “Virgil was so used to looking at the rock that it took several seconds to realize that the rock now looked nothing like it was supposed to look.” (p. 6) It’s slightly larger, though still firmly wedged in the apparatus that holds the rock within its display case. The color is different, changed from bland concrete to “uniformly off-white, with faint yellow overtones” (p. 7) and an oily sheen to its surface. Bud, Virgil and Willa King, the museum’s curator and communications director spend the next several pages resolutely not uttering the word “cheese.” They also investigate it as a theft-and-replacement, and spot someone on security camera footage hanging around the display case late in the day, though they think it unlikely that he could have unsealed the case, replaced the rock and resealed it in the few seconds available. Soon they have Wapakoneta’s chief of police, who is also on the museum’s board of directors, on hand to authorize opening up the display case as not tampering with evidence. The scent that comes out, along with a sudden taste test by Virgil, means that the fateful word can no longer remain un-uttered.

Then he wiped his finger on his pants, pulled out his phone, and called his friend Dr. Julie Doss at the Space Center Houston’s Lunar Vault, where a large amount of NASA’s lunar samples were kept, in clean rooms where the samples lay in an inert nitrogen atmosphere.
Dr. Doss picked up after the seventh ring, just before the phone would have gone into voicemail. “Virgil,” she said, in a clipped voice.
“How are your samples today?” Virgil asked, and waited. (pp. 13–14)

A long silence ensues.

The second chapter switches to the next morning at the White House situation room (which is smaller than movies would have you believe). When the Moon Hits Your Eye is set slightly in the future in an alternative timeline where the American moon mission is named for Diana rather than Artemis and the first crewed launch to the moon is much closer to happening. President Boone has a keen personal interest in space operations. Thus the pre-breakfast briefing about the moon situation, in which the chief of staff, Pat Heffernan, gradually coaxes from the assembled experts that not only does the moon look different, it has a diameter six hundred miles larger than it did the previous day, while retaining the same mass. Then there is the matter of composition.

“You have to be fucking kidding me,” Heffernan said, to the room. “I have here representatives from both our science and intelligence community, and all of you are telling me the moon—the whole fucking moon—has been turned to goddamn cheese.” (p. 21)

And from there, people keep doing their jobs. NASA works the problem, the chief of staff works the politics. “[People] absolutely will lose their minds about it,” Heffernan said. “But if we do this right, they will lose their minds in the direction of our choosing. … You have eight hours [before the press conference] to get your stories straight. Get to it. I’ll have breakfast sent down.” (p. 26) One thing that the NASA representative said even at this first meeting was that 1600 miles of undifferentiated cheese was likely to be unstable. That will have implications well beyond rescheduling missions of the Diana program.

The chapters that follow show people’s lives intersecting with the sudden and surprising news about the moon. The astronauts who were scheduled to go to the moon are upset about how their careers have been suddenly derailed, but they are also consummate professionals and experts. When they, too, have a press conference, they do not say “cheese” but rather NASA’s approved verbiage: “organic matrix.” There is a chapter set in an Oklahoma diner that’s a very good satire of national newspapers reporting opinions found in small-town diners far from any US coast. The chapter that follows a movie producer inundated with moon-related pitches and puns, and the one about a struggling author of popular science books who finds his sales rocketing up the charts because his latest has a chapter about the moon-as-cheese myth are both very funny, but they also feel insider-y, Scalzi writing about industries that he’s involved in as a writer of some moderate renown. In keeping with the book’s mosaic structure, though, they’re over before they could get too annoying. There are also a couple of chapters of billionaires behaving badly; the nature of their comeuppance varies, but it points out that vast amounts of money may not shape character so much as reveal it.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye is at its best when showing how regular folks deal with extraordinary events. Scalzi has lived in small-town, midwestern America for a good quarter of a century, and the book shows his knowledge of these areas. He starts the book in Wapakoneta; other chapters are set in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in Maquoketa, Iowa, and the university cities of Madison, Wisconsin and Eugene, Oregon. He doesn’t ascribe special virtue to these places, but showing places beyond the expected big cities, and showing the diversity that’s also present in smaller places is a bit of a departure from science fiction’s present norms and a reminder of another dimension of inclusiveness.

Scalzi does not engage in discovering a mechanism for the moon’s change, or in a reason for it. Plenty of people are working on those questions off-stage, but as an author he wants to show how people react with they are confronted with the inexplicable and unchangeable. In the course of the Diana astronauts’ public relations duties, one of them gets asked why they don’t just call it a miracle.

“I’m perfectly fine with people calling it a miracle,” Davis [Baruch] said, absolutely truthfully. “You know what else was a miracle? The polio vaccine. Landing on the moon the first time was a miracle. Having a baby is a miracle. Just because something is miraculous doesn’t mean we can’t attempt to understand it. All of these things are inspiring, and make us appreciate the universe we live in. And we can appreciate the universe more by figuring out how it works. This new moon is many things, but one thing we know about it is that it’s following the laws of physics as we understand them. That means, to me, this is a miracle that we can learn about. That’s one reason we’re going back to it.” (p. 168)

The people under the new moon need to learn about it sooner rather than later. The instability that NASA noted in the beginning turns out to have potentially catastrophic implications for life on earth. Throughout the second half of the book, people wrestle with questions of what they would do if they were facing imminent mortality. There are love stories, there are family feuds. There is a plea from a pastor that everyone in the congregation knows knocked up his girlfriend when they were teenager, before she got him into and through seminary. There are profit-takers, and a memorable broadcast of Saturday Night Live. The guys at the diner talk again. A former rock star faces his mortality still sooner. The mosaic structure shows its strength in addressing a global event that’s undeniably personal, and Scalzi gives enough variety in reactions for them to be engaging and touching, without tipping over into maudlin.

One small bit that struck me as I was reading along was the number of characters who said to another, “You’re not wrong.” I haven’t gone back to check whether there’s an instance in every full chapter, but it’s definitely a large majority. It’s an uncommon thing to say or hear, at least in my experience, and I remember Scalzi being fond of the usage in other books. At first I thought it was a rhetorical tic that got away from him and somehow got past his copyeditors, but now I lean toward the idea that he did it deliberately because he likes to put odd little things in his books to see who will notice; he wrote Lock In with no semicolons, for example. As meta-jokes go, it’s mostly harmless, even if it didn’t exactly land for me.

I laughed a lot reading When the Moon Hits Your Eye, a book that totally should not work, but does.