• Writing comedy is hard. Writing comedy in a science fiction novel is almost impossible. Douglas Adams was able to pull it off in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” but few other authors have been so fortunate. After reading this book, I believe we can add John Scalzi to that exalted list, for I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It made me LOL so many times, I’d lost count.

• Yes, the premise is silly—that the moon suddenly turns to cheese—but the way Scalzi weaves the reader through the many, MANY ramifications of how this event affects a multitude of characters was like breathing fresh air after being cooped up in a cave for a decade. So many fresh and engaging perspectives. So many good, funny, and (at times) heartwarming scenes about everyday people. So many different reactions to this preposterous event, all of which show some aspect of the human experience and what some of us consider “important” in life. This novel is NOT about how the people of Earth are going to solve this problem, but how they react to it. The premise may be a farce, but the normal (and abnormal) reactions to it are definitely not.

• The rapid pace of character introduction doesn’t stop. My advice: just roll with it. Initially, I found this a little off-putting, that Mr. Scalzi expected me to remember so many characters (with FULL names and FULL backgrounds, mind you), but by the third or fourth chapter, I’d grown accustomed to it, trusting the author wouldn’t disappoint me with forced memorization (he didn’t) of characters’ names, traits, and events. When revisiting some characters, Scalzi did a wonderful job in reminding me with just a few well-chosen words, enough to jog my memory without slowing the pace. And the pace was EXCELLENT! The fact that I devoured this book in just 7 days (a record for a slow reader like myself) is testament enough to that.

• I honestly don’t know how Scalzi came up with so many unique chapters, most of which had some humor in them. His depth of knowledge and/or research material blows me away; I learned a lot while being thoroughly entertained. Thank you, John Scalzi!

• Growing in hilarity and ridiculousness, the dialogue is quick and witty, enough to move the scene forward to its logical conclusion. The chapters on the Hollywood VP of Development (Chp. 8), the spoiled trust fund brat (Chp. 9), the cheese shop (Chps. 11 & 18), and the bank chairman & his suck-ups (Chp. 22) are my favorites, hilarious and poignant. The NASA chapters are also very good.

• I think I will return to this book again in a couple of years just to read Scalzi’s brilliant prose again. I’ve not enjoyed a book of humor so much in about a decade. It’s well worth a FIVE-STAR rating.

It gave Neil Gaimans American Gods vibes as we see how different groups across the county react to the moon suddenly turning to cheese and the apocalyptic event that follows. While well written and fun with authentic feeling emotions, as expected from John Scalzi, the lack of a main character or rather the moon as the main character made it read more like an anthology then a novel.

This book started off as an interesting tale of science fiction with the moon turning into cheese and people examining all the rocks that had been collected by Apollo astronauts that housed at NASA and at museums across the country. I couldn't imagine a reasonable ending to this story and I suspect the author also found it difficult. I guess one is left with the question "What would I do if a totally unnatural phenomenon turned up in the world? How would I respond? How would all the countries of the world — friends and enemies — respond? Would they come together to try to solve the problem or not?" To me that was the most interesting part of the book.

So the moon turned to cheese. That’s a thing that happened.

I mean, that’s not a metaphor or anything. John Scalzi wrote a book where the moon literally turned to cheese. Not sure what kind of cheese. Just snap and boom, moon is cheese. 100% serious. And not just the moon, but any pieces of the moon we might have on Earth. Boom, cheese.

This book doesn’t focus on any one singular person, which is a departure for Scalzi. Usually, he focuses on one, maybe two POVs thoroughly for the extent of a novel. Instead, each chapter takes the POV of someone on the Earth–a group of retired intellectuals at a diner, a guy at a space museum, some NASA astronauts who had their mission cancelled, a priest, a comedian, a bank executive, a billionaire with a space shuttle, etc. The novel shifts focus to someone new for each day of the lunar cycle, though some threads reappear, adding cohesion to the storyline.

Scalzi seems to write in threes, like the Resident Evil series. Three books of Old Man’s War, three books of The Collapsing Empire, three codas to Redshirts, three books for Lock-In (I’m counting the novella as one until another book comes out), three for The Dispatcher, and then these last three–The Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain, and When the Moon Hits Your Eye are his (self-proclaimed) weird stuff trilogy. Which makes sense. In fact, the book reminds me of the written version of a concept album. Several songs all concentrating on a theme, but moving forward chronologically to an endpoint.

It’s an amusing book and I liked all the stories and threads within. Primarily it deals with grief. Without spoiling too much, the moon turning to a much less dense substance is not great for Earth’s long-term sustainability. So there are themes about getting older, facing death, approaching the end of your life, how people react when their days are numbered. The biggest flaw is that all the stories have Scalzi’s voice. None of the characters vary up their tone or speaking words no matter what part of the country they’re in.

When I read the description of this book, that the Moon turns to cheese, I was hesitant to read it. But then I realized that I had a similar problem with his previous book "Starter Villain" and I loved that book. So I took the plunge and bought the book - I was glad I did. As one might expect the book is quite humorous as well as touching.

Yes, the Moon turns to cheese but this book is not a fantasy, instead Scalzi plays it straight. He smartly does not offer an explanation for how or why this happened but simply deals with the fact that it did. The book then proceeds to how various individuals react to it. There are no main characters in the book as each chapter deals with a new group of people (although some character appear in multiple chapters).

So what is this book actually about? It is, like most books, about human nature. And in the capable hands of Scalzi it is a well-told collection of fascinating tales. The book deals with people's reaction to the cheese Moon. He features astronauts, the President, scientists, a multi-billionaire owner of a space company, a man of the cloth, and of course a myriad of common folk.

And the ending - simply marvelous and very satisfying..

Huge thank you to Tor Publishing Group for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

If you want your sci fi books to start with elementary school moon fact, boy have I got the book for you! All jokes aside, what can you expect when you crack open a John Scalzi book? In his latest novel he posits what would happen if the moon was actually turned into cheese. If you guessed you’d be laughing within the first few pages, you’d be right.

The novel opens with Virgil Augustine who runs in a space and astronaut museum in Ohio. All seems normal until it’s discovered a slice of coveted moon rock has been stolen and a dupe left in its place. Or so he thinks. Not stolen exactly, but changed. Into cheese. In fact, every single lunar sample on Earth is now cheese, including the moon itself. What, you may ask yourself, does that mean for Earth? As it turns out, a lot.

We follow a timeline rather than a set group of protagonists, each chapter marking the days since the moon was made cheese, or rather an organic matrix, I mean. As each day ticks by, we see the impacts unfold on society. We get to see a few characters more than once, which sounds like it would be exhausting. I can assure you it’s not. Each chapter lays bare exactly what Americans would be doing when the moon turns to cheese in the most authentic way.

I zipped through this book. Even at the halfway point I couldn’t believe at how wrapped into this I was. I enjoyed the humor, the real people from all walks of life, and the cheese puns. You can’t be mad at the sheer scope of cheese puns, it’s truly a work of art.

Scalzi excels in writing laugh-out-loud dialogue with his characters. They are believable, human, and made for TV. I lost count of the times I would cackle out loud reading this. There were also more than a few times I found myself tearing up. Scalzi paints the full picture of being human in the face of an existential crisis, along with all the beautiful and ugly emotions that come with it.

Long story short, pick this book up and devour it. I promise you, it’s Gouda.

...ultimately, a bit dissatisfying. The large number of characters never really coalesce into a cohesive thread. Which maybe was the point, but... I feel this is not one of Scalzi's top works. Maybe I am still salty about Jeff Vandermeer's weird lighthouse alien trilogy never really answering the mystery. Time to re-read Scalzi's series about the elderly clone soldiers instead, I really enjoyed those.

I'm not 100% sure why this book did not work for me. I love Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain, Android's Dream, and the Interdependenancy Books, the Dispatcher Books, and the Lock In books. But this one did not keep me interested. Most of the chapters are kind of one-off vignettes, and there is not much in the way of character development. Most of the things that happen in this book (not just the moon turning to cheese) all seem so implausible that it I can't buy into any of it. One implausible thing, fine, the moon turns to cheese. But then the other things that happen are all things that happen when people react to that one think and so many of them seem so ridiculous that it kept making me want to give up on this book.

Indeed a light hearted romp through the eyes of different protagonists ultimately facing up to the rest of their lives only being a couple of years long. Very convincingly written and very amusing in the right places. Not your usual science fiction but refreshingly so.

This book has so many layers that were so well built that the average reader wouldn’t recognise it at first. 10/10 read for all readers

A wonderful novel that explores bits of what it means to be human in the face of a ridiculous premise. I loved this fresh take on a fable. 5 stars for me.

This is not a novel. It is a series of novellas (novellae?) set in a universe very much like this one. Some tragic, some comic, some satirical, some philosophical. All entertaining.

The moon spontaneously transforms into cheese. This causes assorted difficulties, not least when physics causes cheese moonquakes and volcanoes.

This quirky and, let's face it, humorous novel takes the whimsical notion of "What would happen if the moon actually was cheese?" and then examines many of the logical consequences by way of largely plotless vignettes set, one a day, over the next lunar month. Some of these are lightly connected, most aren't, and some are more serious than others. They range from the political response, to the frustration of the next lunar mission, to an annoying billionaire with an inflated ego, to the birth of love in two competing Wisconsin cheese shops.

This is the first Scalzi novel which scores less than 5 stars with me. It doesn't quite land, perhaps because there's no real plot, perhaps because some of the vignettes don't really engage, perhaps because the underlying concept relies too much on whimsy rather than credibility. But some of the vignettes, particularly the later ones, are touching and heartwarming. So I enjoyed this one, just not as much as his others.

And if my comments should reach Mr Scalzi, I would like him to know that I would really like to read Lessa Sarah's takes of Skalaria.