Summary: The moon inexplicably turns to cheese one afternoon. There is fallout.
I really like John Scalzi’s writing. He has serious scifi which I enjoy. But I mostly enjoy his humorous stuff that tends to be great on audiobook when I have a long day of mindless database work. I listened to this over the course of two days almost non-stop.
When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a ridiculous concept. One day, the moon turns to cheese. The reason is never discovered. Scalzi takes a silly idea and runs with it. Each chapter is one day. Mostly focused on different characters who mostly do not come back up in the rest of the book. (But some do.)
I don’t think method this would work for a lot of books. There isn’t enough character development or the plot becomes too convoluted to pull so many characters together. But it works here. The potential apocalypse that can come about because of the turning to cheese has lots of threads to work on.
When The Moon Hits Your Eye is mostly scifi humor. But there are serious parts. There are threads about conspiracy theories. Economics and the global trade and banking systems falling apart is taken seriously. Individuals have to grapple with marriage and love and vocation and what it would be like to face the end of the world. There is a chapter mostly about what this would mean to people of faith. And a chapter about how we know things would be called into question when something that doesn’t seem to be possible seems to happen. But also there are lots of chapters about how people just keep living in the midst of everything.
I think it went on a little bit too long. And I hope this format isn’t used again by Scalzi because I really like books about characters that I get to know. But looking back at it, I don’t know what I would cut because even though many of the chapters were not “necessary” for the story, each of them helped to round out a different facet of life in a way that I would not want to cut.
I listened to this on audiobook. Wil Wheaton narrated as he does with many of Scalzi’s humorous books. Wheaton is a good narrator for Scalzi, he has just enough snark and pacing to get the humor without over doing it. If I had to recommend only one Scalzi book, I would suggest Starter Villain for humor or Old Man’s War for traditional scifi. But I still recommend this one as a solid book worth reading.
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook