Watching from all angles

I enjoy John Scalzi's books for a couple of reasons. The first is that he's a generally entertaining writer with some fun stories and characters, but something that I've begun to appreciate more in recent years is his willingness to experiment with a story's form. In The Human Division and The End of All Things, he broke away from the conventional form of a novel by telling a story in a series of discrete chapters, sort of like a season of television.

His latest novel, When the Moon Hits Your Eye is another exercise in unconventional form. Across thirty-ish chapters, he plays out a ridiculous premise: what happens when the Moon turns to cheese? The result is a fascinating experiment that captures a far-reaching story in an interesting way. While not every chapter lands, it's a fascinating journey that's fun and breezy, while also carrying a heavier message that has quite a bit to say about our current moment in time.

This story kicks off when workers at the Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio notice that their lunar samples have gone missing and have apparently been replaced by ... something. NASA scientists are also quick to discover that their samples have been swapped out, while people who happen to be outside looking up at the night sky notice that the Moon appears to be a bit bigger and brighter.

In a White House briefing, the president's advisors note that mirrors placed on the Moon for experiments are now showing that the surface is closer to Earth, and that everyone's at a loss for what's happening. The Moon's mass is the same, but it's now made up of a substance that everyone is reluctant to say out loud: cheese.

In the chapters that follow, Scalzi does something a little different. Rather than follow a handful of characters, he zooms the lens out, opting to switch perspectives chapter to chapter. There are a handful of characters that we follow every couple of chapters: some folks in the American Midwest and New York City who try and make sense of the world around them, a wealthy private space magnate (Elon Musk-with-the-serial-numbers scratched off) who leverages his company's assets and takes an unauthorized and ill-advised jaunt up to the Moon, and a pair of feuding siblings who own rival cheese shops across the town square from one another.

It's a zany kaleidoscope of perspectives as the revelation turns from quirky to apocalyptic. The Moon might have transformed in an instant, but once it does so, it begins to break down, jettisoning water as it contracts and squishes down under its own mass, blowing massive chunks into space that everyone soon realizes will come down to Earth in a string of impacts that'll be comparable to the asteroid that touched down 66 million years ago to deliver a killing blow to the dinosaurs.

This is where I really appreciated this book's unconventional structure. As a narrative device, a book – and especially with science fiction – often frames an incident through a narrow lens. One – or a handful – of characters are tasked with facing a situation that might have an impact that extend far beyond their lives.

A regular person getting caught up in global events is the stuff of a lot of science fiction storytelling, for good reason. It's an ideal device that an author can use to hook a reader by shoving an average Joe into the action and seeing how they react. Most of us aren't those exceptional superheroes or experts that make for good competency stories.

But even an everybody character is one singular vision of a larger event. I've been listening to a new edition of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers recently, and we see Johnny Rico contend with an alien attack that destroys his home and his time in the Mobile Infantry. That's one tiny story in an event that encompasses millions of people, and thinking about how any of those other stories might play out in very different ways if the spotlight landed on them.

Earlier this year, I read Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont, part of a larger project that we released at my day job at the Vermont Historical Society. I've been thinking a lot about it since reading it, in part due to something that our editor, Garrett M. Graff said in an interview I conducted:

One of the challenges of writing narrative history is that there is a tendency to make things feel too preordained, that we know where the story ends up. One of the strengths of oral history is that it allows you to better capture the chaos and confusion and uncertainty of living through historic events at the time.

He uses 9/11 and D-Day as an example: we know what happened in broad strokes in each instance, because we have the advantage of hindsight and years of removal from that time. What an oral history does is allow the author convey "the chaos and confusion and uncertainty of living through historic events at the time."

With that structure, Scalzi takes a monumental event and sprinkles it out through a wide swatch of the US population. We see a reporter from The New York Times interview characters in the Midwest about their reactions, follow a member of a religious community see the impact on the people in her congregation, some Hollywood executives take pitches for stories, scientists and authors try and figure out and explain to the public what's going on, and so forth.

The result is a month-long window into a nation's reaction – and Scalzi keeps things pretty close to home for this one – to this inexplicable event that forces everyone to come to terms with our limited existence on Earth. Those reactions are from a whole range of people: the typical Midwestern voter to the coastal elites to knowledgeable experts who're all working through their respective fears and uncertainties. In doing so, Scalzi paints a compelling picture for how we collectively deal with uncertainty when faced with an improbable situation like the Moon turning to cheese.

In his novel The Kaiju Preservation Society, Scalzi made an interesting choice: he specifically set it during the COVID-19 pandemic. While that doesn't play the biggest of roles in the story, it was one of those rare works where a creator planted a flag in the ground and acknowledged the existence of this tumultuous time in the world's history. COVID only gets a couple of mentions here, but in many ways, this is a book about the pandemic: how does society deal with this this terrifying, insurmountable event that completely upends society?

Scalzi closes out the book with a couple of entries that jump forward decades and centuries as the cultural memory of this transformation ebbs: people could that the Moon had changed, but as time passes, people begin to doubt those experiences and memories, chalking it up to mass hysteria and conspiracy as time goes on, much like we're seeing now. Like the codas in his novel Redshirts, these chapters helps give this silly story a bit of deceptive narrative heft for the reader to ponder.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye allows Scalzi do to what he does best: take a comical or dramatic situation and have a whole bunch of average characters try and make sense of it – usually by talking and explaining their way through it. His characters are snarky, scared, rational, melodramatic, and egotistical and do everything from scream at the Moon to hijack a rocket to try and land on it. The Moon turning to cheese is a bit of a ridiculous premise, but through this narrative framing and this array of characters, it's a book that proves to be a fascinating mirror of the chaotic world that we're now dealing with – one that I'm not too sure is really all that much more ridiculous than the headlines that flash across my screen every day.