Excerpt from When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Then, "What kind of cheese?" Bud asked.

Virgil ignored this, thinking about what had just happened, what he'd just tasted and what he had seen in the sky a few minutes earlier. 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 lunar samples today?" Virgil asked, and waited.

There was a pause so long that Virgil thought he had gotten disconnected. He was about to hang up and call back when Dr. Doss spoke back up.

"All right," she said. "What the actual fuck is going on?"

From r/astrophotography

Anyone get a shot of the moon tonight?

It was super bright. Is that normal?

There was no visible moon tonight, it was a new moon. You probably saw something else.

Something else that looked like the fucking moon? No, and also, today is the first day the moon is visible this lunar cycle, please read a book

I saw it in Aurora (IL) agreed, it was super bright, no, did not catch a photo, by the time I thought about it, it had already set. Anyone else?

I saw it. I thought it was Venus or Jupiter at first and then it started growing horns. Clearly it's the end times, make your preparations.

You're not serious about that, right?

About seeing it? Yes. About it being the end times? I hope not!

The end times moon is red like blood, not white like, uh …

Maybe God forgot to change the color on the LED setting.

Dallas here. I saw it and it was extremely bright. As in, no possible way that it could have actually been that bright. The moon is rock that has the general reflective qualities of asphalt, it only seems bright because of the amount of light the sun bounces off it. Last night sure didn't look like asphalt.

Could it have been closer in its orbit? All orbits are ellipses.

If the moon's orbit was that much of an ellipse we'd be having one hundred foot waves right now.

Do we have any actual scientists here? Is there a scientific explanation?

Actual scientist here. Didn't see the moon tonight, but it's actually pretty easy to misidentify other objects for the moon. Weather balloons and blimps are often accidentally identified as the moon or for UFOs, and they are often highly reflective. Either that or some especially reflective clouds. It happens more often than you think.

Next you're going to tell us that swamp gas reflected off Venus …

Please look right here at the Neurolyzer!

Respectfully, that might explain it if everyone was seeing the same thing from the same location, but people here are checking in from all over the United States. We can't all be seeing weather balloons or blimps. I don't think there are even that many blimps in the world.

Checking in from Santa Monica, CA. There were a whole bunch of us by the pier looking at the moon, and arguing about whether it was the moon at all. What the actual hell?

What was the thinking there on the beach?

No one had a clue. One of the people there was on the phone with a friend of his from JPL to ask about it. His friend told him he couldn't see it because the mountains were in the way.

Doesn't JPL have, like, actual instruments on the moon? Maybe check those?

San Diego here. It's the first time I've ever seen the moon that close to a sunset. I've looked before and could never see it. Tonight you couldn't miss it if you tried. I think that's what's confusing people. A UFO feels more reasonable than that being the moon.

Wasn't there that movie about the moon being a big UFO?

We don't talk about that movie in polite society.

Excerpted from When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi. Copyright © 2025 by John Scalzi. Excerpted by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.