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.

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