Sweet dreams are made of cheese
Who am I to dis a Brie
I cheddar the world and a Feta cheese
Everybody’s looking for Stilton
(Sweet Dreams are Made of Cheese – parody song from the Internet, to the tune of the Eurythmics song Sweet Dreams Are Made of This)
Award winning John Scalzi has a varied career to date. He’s written about old military soldiers in a Heinlein/Starship Troopers kind of space opera way (Old Man’s War and associated books), parodied Star Trek (Redshirts) and James Bond (Starter Villain), imagined a future with Godzilla/Kaiju monsters (The Kaiju Preservation Society) and now this.
From the publisher: “One day, suddenly and without explanation, the moon turns into a ball of cheese.
For some, it’s an opportunity. For others, it’s time to question their life choices. How can the world stay the same in the face of such absurdity and uncertainty?
Astronauts and billionaires, comedians and bank executives, professors and presidents, teenagers and patients at the end of their lives – over the length of a lunar cycle, each gets their moment in the moonlight. To panic, to plan, to wonder and to hope, to laugh and to grieve. All in a story that goes all the places you’d expect, and to many others you could never anticipate. For the people of the earth, this could be the end – or the beginning of a whole new world.”
Scalzi manages to take a very, very silly idea – namely that the moon is actually made of cheese – and run with it. There’s as much science as the idea can sustain (clue: not that much) but the premise is there really to describe, with some humour, the effects on the citizens of America. There also just happens to be an egotistical billionaire (wonder who Scalzi could be thinking of?) and a President who needs things kept simple. (who’d a thought it?)
In this book what Scalzi does best – and is very good at – is take an impossible, absurd situation and tell us about how people are affected by it. (In his afterword he refers to this as “Everyday people dealing with an extremely high concept situation, in contemporary time.”) And this, I think, is Scalzi’s superpower, for when he writes of his diverse range of characters – from high school students, small businesses, and small town churchgoers to NASA, the Banks and the politicians – he makes each vignette feel real, and that’s a tough line to follow in such a ridiculous situation.
There are moments here that just made me think that whatever the disaster, their responses would be the same. I was left wondering how many of them actually ended their story however, as we are just left to wonder at the end of the novel.
In short, though, When The Moon Hits Your Eye is a science fiction story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and yet has something meaningful to say. In it generally people can be good, empathy can be valuable and villains get what they deserve. To my mind, it’s all rather Frank Capra-esque but with a science-fictional angle, a little bit like the film Don’t Look Up (2021) perhaps, but with more SF.
I know that some will see this book as ‘too silly’ (thoughts of Monty Python here), whilst others like me will admire the way Scalzi has managed to make such an idea readable. I found that it was a much-needed tonic in these present times, to remind us that even when things seem bad, they are not forever, and that even when things are tough there are good things happening. Even when we think we are at the worst, we should still be able to love and laugh. When The Moon Hits Your Eye made me do that.
© 2025 Mark Yon
Hardback | Tor Books
WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE by John Scalzi
March 2025 | 336 pages
ISBN: 978 152 9082 913
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Tor Books
