When the Moon Hits your Eye by John Scalzi

Book Review

Pauline Morgan

Imagine the challenge – a group of students in the pub or a gang of fans in the bar – who can come up with the craziest idea for a novel. Then the next challenge is how to change that idea into a novel. The premise behind When the Moon Hits Your Eye is ridiculous and implausible, except in fantasy nightmares. Without any warning, reason, or explanation, the moon suddenly becomes cheese.

            A good deal of thought has been put into working out what would happen to a ball of cheese the mass of the real moon but the heart of this novel is the reaction of various characters to this phenomenon.

            The first hint that something odd has happened is when it is noticed that something has happened to the exhibit of moon rock in the Armstrong Air and Space Museum. At first they think it has been stolen and replaced by a piece of cheese. People begin to notice that the moon is brighter – it is 300 miles closer to the Earth because cheese is less dense than rock, so it has grown. While the scientists struggle to understand what has happened, the reaction of others is very different.

            LeMae Anderson is an astronaut, one of a team who was supposed to be making a flight to the moon in the next few weeks. Now the whole program has to be postponed, as landing on cheese doesn’t seem feasible, as the structure is compressing under the weight and melting the interior. The result being geysers of molten material. It looks as if LeMae’s lifelong ambition and all her training is about to become redundant.

            Jody Bannon has not had a good week. He is the designer of the lunar lander and, amongst his other problems, NASA has scrapped all launches, including the unmanned test flight. He persuades the authorities to permit an Earth orbit launch. In his arrogance, he decides that he will be on board and he will take it to the moon.

            For Dayton Bailey, the moon turning to cheese is a lucky break. He is a writer whose books have always just missed out on the big time. His latest book , That’s No Moon, which looks at the science of fictional structures, has a chapter on the old adage that the moon was made of green cheese. Suddenly, he is in demand.

            There are many fundamentalist religious communities in America. Chrissy Evans is the Sunday School teacher at an Evangelical Church, not so much because she holds strong views but because her husband’s family want her to fit in with the community. She runs up against the fallacy that is circulating, that the moon turning to cheese is the devil’s work. Through her eyes, the situation is explored when a strongly held doctrine is suddenly challenged by the unknown.

            Hollywood is taking a battering as well. Any production that involves the moon is put on hold, possibly permanently. Hannah Leventhal is trying to find a substitute to schedule that will not cause controversy, and all she seems to be getting offered are puns on the cheese theme.

            Luke Rose is a multi-billionaire. He doesn’t believe that there is anything money cannot buy. He has decided that he is going to be the first person to eat moon cheese. He directs Eric Lopez to get some before anyone else.

            The novel is almost written as a diary, with entries for each day of the lunar cycle. The narrative dips in and out of the lives of the various characters, looking at the way the unexpected events affect them and those around them. What starts as a ridiculous premise becomes a study of the ways different people react and cope with a major event. Many representations of the human psyche are included here, some comic, others verging on the tragic; there is hubris and resignation. The novel shows what an imaginative writer can do with an unprepossessing initial scenario.