John Scalzi meets Randall Monroe in a comic SF novel with an insane premise: the Moon has been replaced by a giant orb of cheese. Or, to use NASA’s language, it has “assumed an organic matrix”. How? Who knows?! It’s inexplicable, and that’s deeply unsettling for those who view the Cosmos as inherently rational and ultimately understandable. Whatever it is was pretty thorough: all lunar samples on Earth have ‘assumed aged organic matrices’, too. When the Moon Hits Your Eye opens with a string of separate stories following how the Cheese-Moon impacts people in different professions (astronauts, ministers, fromagers, etc). At first, these stories delight in the absurdism and are seemingly unconnected, but that changes as the physicality of the cheese-moon kicks into place. When the moon begins compressing, it becomes unstable — and scientists realize that it may soon constitute a hazard for life on Earth. While the arrival of the Cheese Moon was already upsetting for astronauts who’d planned a lunar landing in the near-future, the prospect of being barraged by cheese-asteroids puts the people of Earth into an existential crisis. Like Redshirts, Scalzi deftly takes a comic premise and finds a way to make it serious and meaningful: the chapter with a pastor trying to talk to a drunk and hysterical parishioner was one of the most emotional things I’ve read all year. Beyond this, I greatly enjoyed the variety of characters and microstorytelling here. When the Moon Hits Your Eye is an unusual SF book, but succeeds in delivering a very human story in absurd conditions. I kiiiiiinda wish I’d listened to Wil Wheaton read it, but as it happened an ebook version was handier.

Quotes/Highlights:

“Beyond that, there’s no one else in the world who would have the technology to disappear the moon, much less replace it with a globe of, probably, cheese.”
“Do we have that technology?”
“No, sir,” Axel said. “And even if we had it, disappearing the moon and
replacing it with an equally massive orb of probably cheese serves no
discernable military purpose.”