Fiction Reviews
When The Moon Hits Your Eye
(2025) John Scalzi, Tor, £14.99, pbk, 323pp, ISBN 978-1-509-83529-4
The Moon is made of cheese, as was demonstrated by Wallace & Gromit in their excellent documentary A Grand Day Out. Well, OK, that was actually a very entertaining claymation short film for children of all ages from Aardman Animations, which played on the well known childhood myth that the Moon is made of cheese. We know that the Moon is really made of rock but what, thought John Scalzi, if it were to be made of cheese? I have heard him talk several times at science fiction conventions and he can be most amusing, so this could be an interesting book!
One day, shortly before 5 pm, at the Armstrong Air and Space Museum at Wapakoneta, Ohio, the staff notice that their sample of Moon rock does not look quite as normal. It appears to no longer be rock and on investigation seems to be more like, well, cheese! They soon discover that the same fate has befallen all the samples of Moon rock in museums all over the world and, though they do not like to admit it, to all the samples held in secure storage by NASA. Simply looking at the moon shows it is different - it is brighter for one thing, and a little larger. Scientists loose no time at all in discovering that the Moon is in the same place, orbiting as normal, and has the same mass - so that is good news for tides! However, chromatograph tests show it is now definitely not made of rock but of something else, something which they call ‘organic-seeming compounds’ - because there is no way that NASA will ever call it ‘cheese’! As cheese is less dense than rock, but the mass has been maintained, the Moon is now six hundred miles wider.
However, scientists postulate, a Moon made of cheese will not have the same internal strength as rock and it will soon start to collapse into itself. The great pressure beneath the surface will compress the cheese, driving its water content out of it, and this will likely shoot up to the surface and form geysers. The collapsing structure will lead to moonquakes and chunks of it could fly off and, due to the low gravity, escape the Moon and make it to Earth. These chunks could be very large and, even though made of cheese rather than rock, when they hit the atmosphere it will be all about energy; it will not be a matter of harmless flying toasted cheese but a series of catastrophes each greater than that which the dinosaurs faced. Life on Earth could be doomed. Or not. Nobody knows. The Moon has never turned to cheese before!
The author tells the story on a day-to-day basis, Day One, Day Two, etc.. Each day we follow a different group of people and how they react to it. Often we look at NASA; their Diana missions are now off the table - there is no way they can send astronauts to the Moon, not if they are not sure if they can actually land on it, or if they will be hit by moonquakes. Jody Bannon, the multi-billionaire behind PanGlobal Aerospace, builders of the Lunar Lander system, is determined that the missions will go ahead anyway, and his money buys a lot of political clout. The President, on the other hand, is completely flummoxed about what to do, what might (or might not) happen, and how he should handle it all. In other walks of life there are friends meeting up in cafés, students going to parties, and businesses wondering about the way forward. How will banks sell thirty-year mortgages if the world might end in a couple of years, or sell investments? How long will people continue going to work if they have nothing to look forward to? How and when will civilisation collapse?
The day-by-day structure of the story produces a whole series of vignettes covering different groups of people, in different walks of life, and dealing with very different day-to-day situations. Some are very amusing, some more serious and thoughtful (and, indeed, get you thinking). The subject might sound funny but the result would not be. There are many small references to science fiction themes, mentions of characters, movies, and TV shows, though if you miss them it will not matter (and how many did I miss?). It all adds up to an interesting look at life. It is well written, runs along nicely, and provides an enjoyable read.
Peter Tyers
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