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New York Times bestseller John Scalzi flies you to the moon with his most fantastic tale to date: When the Moon Hits Your Eye.
The moon has turned into cheese.
Now humanity has to deal with it.
For some it's an opportunity. For others it's a moment to question their faith: In God, in science, in everything. Still others try to keep the world running in the face of absurdity and uncertainty. And then there are the billions looking to the sky and wondering how a thing that was always just there is now... something absolutely impossible.
Astronauts and billionaires, comedians and bank executives, professors and presidents, teenagers and terminal patients at the end of their lives -- over the length of an entire lunar cycle, each get their moment in the moonlight. To panic, to plan, to wonder and to pray, to laugh and to grieve. All in a kaleidoscopic novel that goes all the places you'd expect, and then to so many places you wouldn't.
It's a wild moonage daydream. Ride this rocket.
Wapakoneta, Ohio | The Armstrong Air and Space Museum
Virgil Augustine's cell phone rang just as he was reaching for his coat to go home. It was Bud Roldan, the facilities director for the museum. "You still in the building, Virgil?" Bud asked.
"Just barely," Virgil said. Tonight was the weekly date night for Virgil and Emily Augustine; they would pay their teenage daughter, Libby, to watch her twin brothers, which Virgil knew meant she would be in the living room texting her friends while Andy and Hunter played video games in the basement, and Emily and he would have either Mexican or Chinese food and then watch whatever was showing at the Wapa Cinema. This week it was some animated movie involving waterfowl. This is what passed for romance when you were middle-aged and living in small-town Ohio, and Virgil was not one to miss it. "What is it, Bud?"
"Well, it's…" Bud trailed off, and Virgil 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.
Virgil furrowed his brow and then stepped out of his office, and wound his way through the exhibit floor of the small local museum devoted to the life and career of Neil Armstrong, Wapakoneta native and the first man on the moon, and down the long, darkened and dramatic hallway that led to the "Moon Room," featuring the exhibit room highlighting the Apollo 11 moon landing. He glanced, as he always did, at Armstrong's backup moon suit in its display, helmet and gloves on the floor, which unfailingly gave Virgil a slight start: Here was a decapitated moon man.
Then as always Virgil got over it. He turned the tight right into the small exhibit room, where Bud and Willa King, Armstrong's curator and communications director, were standing by the room's central exhibit: a moon rock Neil Armstrong had brought back with him from his trip.
"What is it?" Virgil asked.
"Virgil, look at the rock," Bud said.
Virgil looked at the rock. It was small, irregularly shaped, looking either triangular or squarish depending which angle you looked at it, a pebbled gray with glossier darker bits that reflected the light. Virgil knew without looking that the informational plaques on the display would tell him this bit of rock was formed by a meteorite impact fusing the moon's powdered basalt surface back into something more solid, an event that happened some four billion years previously. The rock was mostly pyroxene and plagioclase, and if you found it out in the world you would probably think it was a chunk of concrete, if you thought about it at all. 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.
"That's not the rock," Virgil said, to Bud and Willa.
"We know," Bud said.
Virgil leaned in to look at the not-the-rock, his nose coming within millimeters of the Lucite encasement the rock was displayed in. The not-a-rock was precisely the same dimensions as the rock, but slightly larger. The original rock had been securely but lightly held between two plastic stoppers on a vise. This large object was also secured by the stoppers and vise, but now it was solidly wedged. It was uniformly off-white, with faint yellow overtones.
Virgil strained his eyes to look more closely. The surface of the not-a-rock had a slightly oily sheen to it.
"What the hell?" Virgil looked up to Bud and Willa.
"We know," Willa said.
"Is that…"
Bud held up his hand. "We're not guessing, Virgil. You're the executive director. That's your job."
Virgil looked back to the not-a-rock. "I have no idea. Maybe plastic? Modeling clay?"
Bud and Willa both audibly exhaled. Virgil looked back up at them. "Those are what it looked like to us," Bud said. "We didn't want to say it. But now that you've said it, that's what we think, too."
"Anyone want to tell me what's going on?"
"We don't know," Willa...
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.
One day, without warning, the Moon turns into a giant ball of cheese. Every piece of Moon rock on Earth turns with it. Nobody knows why, and there is the general understanding that nobody would be able to find a satisfying answer if they went looking for one. What would you do in that situation, faced with such a grand cosmic joke? If you're the president, you might delay the Moon landing you had planned. If you're an author of pop science books, you might find yourself in hot demand on the talk show circuit. If you're a pastor, you might have a crisis of faith — the Bible never mentioned a cheese Moon, after all. But if you're like most people, you might just go about your life. What else can you do?
John Scalzi tackled similar high concepts in his previous two books, The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain. But while those books had a single main character with their own narrative, When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a series of vignettes starring a Magnolia-sized ensemble, including (but by no means limited to) an ex-professor of philosophy, a tech billionaire, several astronauts, a sex worker turned real estate agent, and the employees of two rival cheese shops in Madison, Wisconsin. The novel is at its most compelling in the first half as it hops from person to person, presenting a gestalt of American society as it tries to accommodate such a monumentally bizarre occurrence.
As a series of vignettes, it's hit or miss, and while there are more of the former than the latter, some of Scalzi's satire is shaky. Certain chapters take aim at the rich and powerful — whether they be a deeply stupid billionaire playboy who wants to eat the Moon cheese or a politician with an incredibly specific fetish — and justify themselves with satisfying conclusions. Other chapters, including those featuring a recurring character who might as well be named Schmelon Schmusk, belabor the point somewhat — but then again, maybe some points are worth belaboring.
After a significant development that kicks off the second half, the book becomes grimmer, though still not without humor; a disastrous episode of Saturday Night Live, performed in front of a shell-shocked studio audience, is a highlight. If it's a little disappointing to see a story with such a unique premise take the familiar shape of an end-is-nigh slouch towards oblivion, it redeems itself with a twist that's unexpected yet, in hindsight, inevitable — building up to a bitterly funny final chapter that tickles and stings in equal measure.
The shadow of the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, which just celebrated its fifth anniversary a few weeks ago, looms over When the Moon Hits Your Eye. It was an enormous, destabilizing event, one that everyone had to deal with in their own way, and that briefly brought us all together before we started to tear each other apart. The novel's thesis, which Scalzi illustrates gently but persuasively, is that, when the next cataclysm occurs, we can expect more of the same.
Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner
While the central conceit of John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye is that the Moon has turned to cheese, the book is not overly concerned with how this has happened. Instead, it's more interested in how the world — specifically America — reacts to such a sudden, inexplicable event, as well as what happens when science takes its natural course. If something with the size and mass of the Moon were made of an organic compound like cheese rather than rock, it would immediately start to implode, launching geysers and huge chunks of cheese into space — and, unfortunately for us Earthlings, directly at our planet.
Cold, hard science has never gotten in the way of folklore before, however, and the Moon being made of cheese is a common folkloric trope. (This is referred to in Scalzi's novel, as Dayton Bailey, a beleaguered pop science author, receives a boon when his book containing a chapter about the logistics of Moon cheese becomes suddenly relevant.) Contrary to what some may think, nobody ever actually thought that the Moon was made of cheese. In fact, "They think the Moon is made of green cheese" was a common saying in the 17th century, something you might say about someone you believed to be deeply stupid and gullible. (In this context, "green" refers to its relative newness, not its color.)
The possible origin of the trope may be a medieval Slavic fable where a wolf, seeing the Moon reflected in a lake, mistakes it for a wheel of cheese and tries to eat it. Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, a collection of offbeat just-so stories about various scientific phenomena, opens with "The Distance of the Moon," which uses the fact that the Moon used to be much closer to the Earth as a jumping-off point for a story about people climbing up to the Moon on a ladder to harvest liquid cheese. A Grand Day Out, the 1989 debut film of Wallace & Gromit, also concerns itself with cheese harvesting.
The trope has also appeared in episodes of Tom and Jerry and The Beverly Hillbillies, and features in video games such as Mario Kart and Minecraft. There is also a snack food called Moon Cheese that is essentially small dehydrated pieces of cheese (which resemble the Moon).
Cheese, courtesy of おにぎり on Unsplash
Filed under Cultural Curiosities
By Joe Hoeffner
In a pre-apocalyptic world not unlike our own, a young Instagram poet starts an affair with a California billionaire who's promised a time machine that will make everything normal again—whatever that means.
Winner of the Goncourt Prize and now an international phenomenon, this dizzying, whip-smart novel blends crime, fantasy, sci-fi, and thriller as it plumbs the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight.
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