(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
At first glance, the premise for When the Moon Hits Your Eye, seems nonsensically silly and hardly the kind of plot to support a hard-hitting and substantially thoughtful exploration of humanity and the many it expresses itself under pressure.
But then, then if anyone can weave weighty narrative gold out of the idea that one day the moon turns to cheese, yes, cheese, it’s John Scalzi, a writer so talented he can take the wildest of ideas and while celebrating all the imaginatively weird possibility inherent in it, still tell a story full of grounded emotional impact.
And that is precisely what this impressively told novel turns out to be.
In the world of When the Moon Hits Your Eye, the moon turning to cheese upends everything we know about the universe, about the way it behaves and how it is expected to behave, and the repercussions for a whole lot of people are immense and extreme in scale.
This weird transformation, which is noticed first by a small air and space museum in Ohio that notices its moon rock sample is no longer, well, quite so rocky, and while NASA and the U.S. government stayed mum on whether it really is choice, many scientists are able to do the maths and work out that what everyone is saying, must be true.
The moon is also far brighter and bigger and while its mass is the same, its make-up is now organic which has the capacity for far-reaching changes on Earth.
‘Hi Mom,’ LeMae said.
‘LeMae, why are the people on the news saying the moon is made of cheese?’ Beverly Anderson said. ‘How are you going to land on cheese, baby?’
As happens in every great seismic shift on our easily-rattled blue planet, some people see the moon’s weird metamorphosis as a threat, others see opportunity while others still see a crisis of faith in religion, their sense of the world or any manner of things that keep them getting out of bed in the morning.
It’s a chaotic and restless time and much of what makes When the Moon Hits Your Eye utterly absorbing reading is how Scalzi brilliantly and incisively takes a richly observant and indirectly critical scalpel to human nature and the society to which it has given birth.
The novel features a rich tapestry of detailed and fulsomely told snapshots of people caught in the aftermath of the big change, from astronauts who can no longer travel to the moon because of its new organic volatility, to billionaires seeking twisted greatness and the people who help them get what they want, and to students wondering what there is left in a world that refuses to play by the rules.
The upheaval, which by its very nature is macro in scale, is treated with micro empathy and insight by a writer who takes an out-there premise and goes deep and hard into the very fabric of what makes us human.
And while some people keep their heads or coat themselves in glory, others manifestly do not, and the question becomes, as it often does, when life throws a massive curveball, why humanity is so bad at handling things it doesn’t see coming?
(courtesy BookPage)
Our propensity as a species to fall apart when the world refuses to march to the beat of our often far-too-small drum – for a people who can dream so big and go so far and do so much, we scare awfully easily when our assumptions are overturned – has long been fertile fodder for imapctful storytelling, and it’s no different with the masterfully written When the Moon Hits Your Eye.
This is the mother of all apple cart upsets, and we do not handle it well, especially when a curiosity and an oddity suddenly starts to acrrue some uncomfortably apocalyptic overtones.
We are a species driven as much by fear as insatiable wanderlust and curiosity and it’s when the fear is in the ascendancy that you see what we are really made of and by and large, it’s not all that pretty.
But the human soul laid bare side of When the Moon Hits Your Eye aside, what also grabs your attention is the way Scalzi takes a look at civilisation as a whole and how what looks rock solid and endlessly assured can suddenly become anything but.
Having said all that, there are profiles of people in the book which do speak of the power of humanity to rise to the occasion when challenges beyond anyone’s wildest conceptions arise, and it’s these snapshots thta give you hope that in amongst all the chaos and self-serving maneuvering that there is the possibility of good and collectively selfless things to emerge.
‘I don’t want to ever think this much about cheese,’ Lisa confessed.
‘Well, the good news is, now you won’t ever have to again,’ Mackie said. ‘Probably. Hopefully.’
As with every Scalzi book, which are never short on startling ideas or expansively rich imagination, When the Moon Hits Your Eye dazzles with its seemingly infinite capacity to go to impressively inventive places, all while staying very much in the trenches with people being people.
The author’s ability to balance the ordinary and the epic is seemingly limitless and this novel treads a pleasingly tight and highly entertaining rope between going wildly out there and anchoring itself in some very basic human concerns.
A tip either way and the novel would lose what makes it work, but that never happens and so, what we end up with in When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a story that goes super big and very cheesy and yet whohc feels emotionally intimate and accessible on all kinds of perfectly wrought levels.
Scalzi happily ad its that much of the science in the book is rubbery but that’s okay because the main game in town here is what happens when the world upends itself, when what we thought we knew isn’t what we thought it was and when life refuses to play by the rules that give us an admiitedly wonky and easily shaken sense of safety and security.
How it all plays out much be left to the reading but trust us when we say the novel goes to all kinds place, expected and not, and does not compellingly and fantastically readably, with When the Moon Hits Your Eye one of those novels you will be intrigued to read and wholly glad you did in so much richly imaginatively and groundedly human ways.