(Tor, March 2025, 323pp)
John Scalzi is one of the most popular of current science fiction writers, even as he’s not regarded, I think, as a *serious* sf writer by the critics or even readers. He’s entertaining, often humorous or even snarky, and he reworks ideas from traditional sf. His most popular works include a series of space opera novels that began with his first, OLD MAN’S WAR, and a pseudo-parody of Star Trek called REDSHIRTS. He writes in a classic sf mode: take a premise, and see where it goes.
John Scalzi’s latest is, like his two previous novels (THE KAIJU PRESERVATION SOCIETY and STARTER VILLAIN), a lot of fun, superficially lightweight but with some deep undercurrents. All three books have wacky premises — an alternate Earth with flying dragons, and talking cats, in the earlier books — that nevertheless play them out cleverly and honestly.
Here the premise is right on the dust jacket: the moon has turned to cheese. What could that mean exactly? Would Scalzi play it for laughs, or do some honest extrapolation. How would this be discovered? Would Scalzi take into account whether or how this would change the moon’s orbit? Would its brightness change? And so on and so on. These are actually the things I thought about as I began the book.
So yes, Scalzi takes all that into account, fairly quickly in order to get it out of the way. And how is this transformation discovered? How does the story begin? When staff at a museum holding one of the chunks of rock returned by the astronauts who landed on the moon looks different. They open the case… and notice the sample’s smell.
That’s just the beginning of a book that shows how a skilled and savvy science fiction writer can take a premise, even a frivolous one like the one here, and wring out it of it every possible implication: its affect on many different kinds of people, its metaphysical significance, its cultural impacts.
The story follows various characters — those museum staff, people in the white house, astronauts in Houston whose mission are abrupt cancelled, a retired philosophy in small town Oklahoma, a megalomanic (Elon-Musk-style) billionaire who tries to evade NASA and fly to the cheese moon himself, a writer of popular science books, Hollywood screenwriters pitching stories, even the staff of two rival cheese shops in Madison, Wisconsin — as events unfold.
(Getting slightly spoilery from here on.)
Scalzi’s especially good at imagining these various situation and characters, as they react to the major development of the book: as the moon, now composed of cheese, which is softer than rock, begins to collapse in on itself; it heats up and shoots cheese-blob geysers into space, one of which is set to hit the Earth in two years. So now society takes stock and begins to tremble to a halt. What’s the use of doing anything if everyone will be dead in two years? A young writer can’t finish her novel with so little time left. A former rock star in Hawaii prepares to kill himself. A preacher in a small church in Iowa speaks honestly, for once. More than in his earlier books, Scalzi manages to vary his tone and play scenes out from the perspectives of these different characters, modulating from humor to pathos.
We have to wonder, as the book goes on, if there will ever be an “explanation” for why the moon turned to cheese in the first place. Alien intervention, perhaps?
Not really. Instead, we get a new surprise, which I won’t spell out, but which may or may not provide an answer. And it anchors the book to concerns of the present 21st-century moment in a way that most of his books are not. How do we know what we know? How do we know we aren’t being tricked? Would people in a future post-apocalyptic world believe there were ever such things as airplanes? Scalzi’s conceit here is very clever, and it satisfies without providing any clean “explanation.” It allows Scalzi to have his premise, and eat it too.
