When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

Published by Tor Books on March 25, 2025

John Scalzi usually displays his sense of humor in his science fiction novels. He’s churned out a bunch of science fiction comedies, the most successful being Redshirts. The stories tend to be amusing and Scalzi typically uses comedy to make a serious point. Even when he writes more serious novels (like Old Man’s War), he adds generous doses of humor. And he always remembers that the word “science” is in “science fiction” for a reason. Well, nearly always.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye is another sf comedy. It has sufficient merit to earn a recommendation, but it’s also disappointing. I had the impression that Scalzi wrote himself into a corner as he milked laughs from his premise and couldn’t come up with a credible way to ground the story in science.

The premise is ridiculous. One day, the moon turns into cheese — or at least into an organic matter that has the characteristics of cheese. Not only does the moon transform, but so do space rocks displayed in museums and kept in NASA’s vaults.

Scalzi brings a fair amount of science to the project, explaining that the cheese moon needs to be physically larger than the old moon to retain the same amount of mass. Mess around with the moon’s mass and tides get thrown out of whack. But a larger-than-moon-size cheese must compress as it orbits the Earth, so Scalzi imagines the cheese moon erupting as it squirts water from its innards. This is all very sciency, as a reader would expect from Scalzi, but it dances around the question of how the moon changed into a sphere of cheese.

Scalzi explores how the moon’s transformation is greeted by politicians, the media, scientists, wealthy business leaders, members of the clergy, the movie industry, and others. In fact, each chapter tends to focus on new characters who are caught up in the moon crisis. A cheese-related sex scandal involving a congressman and a retired sex worker might be the strangest response.

A chunk of the cheese moon breaks off during an eruption and is projected to smack into the Earth in about two years, causing an extinction event. Some people decide it’s time to start executing their bucket list. Scalzi imagines that bankers will use AI to keep their banks running after all the tellers decide they don’t want to be working during their final days of existence.

The funniest bit involves a company that designed a moon lander for NASA. The company’s CEO is jealous of, and in competition with, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. He makes an unlikely plan to take the lander on an unsanctioned mission to visit the cheese moon.

But back to the science. I wondered how Scalzi was going to pull this off, given the lack of any credible explanation for the moon’s sudden transformation into a cheesy mass. While at least one of his books flirts with Intelligent Design as a rational explanation of life on Earth, Scalzi is a scientist at heart. He nevertheless includes a preacher in the plot and gives the preacher a chance to encourage his parishioners to cling to their faith in times of trouble.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that it disappointed me by failing to provide a definitive resolution of the mystery. Scalzi presents (but does not endorse) a theory, popularized on conspiracy websites, but the theory doesn’t explain how the moon rocks on Earth transformed. The silly premise and the absence of a legitimate (even if farfetched) explanation to support it undermines the novel as a work of science fiction, so maybe the book is best seen as a comedy fantasy sprinkled with bits of science. As a funny look at how people might respond to end times that are still a couple years distant, the story generates enough chuckles to make it a good beach read.

RECOMMENDED

Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on April 8, 2025

Joe Mungo Reed brings a new perspective to post-apocalyptic fiction in Terrestrial History, a chilling story of global warming. There are elements of science fiction and of a technothriller in the plot, but Reed takes a broader look at the ways in which self-interest and egalitarian drives clash, often in very personal ways, as people work to cope with (or escape) an existential crisis.

The story jumps around in time to focus on family members in different generations. The novel begins in Scotland in 2025, when Hannah sees a boy in a spacesuit walking out of the sea. Hannah has been trying to solve the mystery of fusion but can’t quite design a reactor that works.

In the middle of the century, Hannah’s son Andrew runs for Parliament and then for the position of Scotland’s First Minister. By that point, climate change is making life difficult. A corporation called Tevat, founded by the billionaire Axel Faulk, is planning an excursion to Mars, where — assuming the planet can be terraformed — humanity may have a chance of survival after Earth becomes uninhabitable. Naturally, the passengers who sign up for the voyage are wealthy and powerful, although Tevat allows a couple of its employees to join the crew. Andrew’s opposition to Tevat is the key ideological driver of his decision to enter politics.

Andrew’s daughter Kedzie has taken up her grandmother’s hope of building a fusion reactor to provide clean energy. Lacking other options to fund her ideas, Kedzie goes to work for Tevat. There is tension between Andrew and Kedzie, since Andrew’s political career demands that he oppose Tevat and its unpopular plan to save only the rich and powerful. Some of the book’s strongest moments come when Andrew must decide whether to denounce his daughter after she agrees to join the mission to Mars. The pivotal scene could have been played for melodrama, but Reed lets the characters speak or repress their feelings in a way that feels natural and moving.

Later in the century, Kedzie is on Mars. Kedzie and her wife are the mothers of Roban. The Terrestrial Collapse has occurred. The colonists and the first generation of Mars-born children wonder whether anything remains of the Earth. The kids have pictures and videos so they know about oceans and birds and all the things their parents miss, but their knowledge is abstract. More than most post-apocalyptic stories of global warming, Mungo drives home the magnitude of the climate crisis by viewing it through the eyes of kids who — trapped inside buildings on a desolate planet — don’t understand the richness of their parents’ former life on Earth.

Roban has a sense of duty. “We are not just any children, but those living in the middle of the hourglass, some of the few thousands alive after the loss of so much humanity, amongst the few custodians of our species preparing the way for the Great Repopulation when this place is terraformed and when other habitable planets have been located.” Yet his sense of duty makes him wonder whether he might be able to change history and save the Earth.

Roban is assigned to an asteroid mining crew. He encounters a phenomenon that appears to change the nature of time. Later he takes advantage of the phenomenon to send himself back to 2025. The reader meets him in the first chapter when his great-grandmother sees him walking out of the sea. Roban wants to teach her how to build the reactor that her granddaughter will later create, and in so doing avoid the Terrestrial Collapse.

The possibility of undoing the harm to the Earth, of preventing the Terrestrial Collapse, sets up a moral conflict. If it can be done, what would happen to the Mars colony? Would it never be established? Would its inhabitants be willing to sacrifice themselves to save the larger mass of humanity that they left behind? One member of the colony applies corporate logic — the corporation has a duty to benefit its shareholders, so any larger duty to humanity is irrelevant — an attitude that explains why it is so difficult to make fossil fuel companies admit that they contribute to global warming. If nations move to clean energy, after all, shareholders in fossil fuel companies lose. The companies believe they would be derelict in their corporate duty if they put the existence of all planetary life ahead of short-term profits.

Will Roban succeed? The question is almost unimportant. Like most post-apocalyptic fiction that doesn’t involve zombies, the novel is a cautionary tale.  Reed again eschews melodrama by reporting the planet’s destruction from the viewpoint of children on Mars. The reader doesn’t see people die in floods and fires and hurricanes. The fact that people on Mars don’t know if any life remains on Earth makes the story of the planet’s fate even more powerful.

Terrestrial History is also a multi-generational saga of family members who, sometimes in conflict with each other, try to do what they think is right. The depth of the characters and their relationships with each other are the story’s strength. Reed always writes with literary flair. While Terrestrial History didn’t grip me in the same way as Mungo’s debut novel, it is a strong addition to the subgenre of apocalyptic fiction.

RECOMMENDED

The Sublet by Greer Hendricks

Published by Amazon Original Stories on April 1, 2025

“The Sublet” is a short story. Amazon makes it available to Kindle users for a couple of dollars. It’s also available in print on a self-publishing platform.

Anne is a ghostwriter. She agrees to help Melody Wells finish a self-help book. Melody is filled with New Age attitudes about self-improvement. In addition to teaching overpriced wellness classes and writing books, Melody is hawking supplements and crystals. Anne notices that Melody’s lifestyle advice is either simplistic or contradictory, but she needs the money so she starts grinding out the pages.

Anne is married to Paul. The story’s setup depicts the turmoil of a couple living in Manhattan with two kids. Melody tells Anne that she knows of an affordable sublet that would give them more space and a better view. Anne and Paul visit the apartment and, despite their inability to enter a locked closet, make a quick decision to move in. It apparently doesn’t occur to Anne that affordable rent in a Manhattan apartment with a view is going to come with a catch.

A batty neighbor tells Anne that the previous tenant drowned in the apartment’s jacuzzi. Since the apartment doesn’t have a jacuzzi, Anne chalks up the puzzling statement to age-related confusion.

After they have lived in the apartment a bit, Anne notices that there is no door in the hallway to their neighboring apartment. She also realizes that there are scratch marks on an interior wall that appear to have been made by a cat with six toes. Oh, and the supplements that Melody gave her seem to be upsetting her stomach.

This sounds like the setup to a horror story — what evil six-fingered monster lurks behind the locked door? — but the reader is not so lucky. A monster would have been a more credible answer to the mystery than the one that Greer Hendricks contrives.

Anne’s investigation of strange facts leads to a confrontation with Melody and a solution to the puzzle. The solution is both unbelievable and unbelievably dull. By the time Anne turns the tables on Melody, using a ploy she must have gleaned from movies in the 1940s — a ploy that depends on Melody being remarkably inattentive — I no longer cared what happened to Anne. Her Manhattan problems are unlikely to be of interest to anyone who doesn’t live in Manhattan, while Melody is a parody of a villain. New York City residents might relate to the story, but for me, the thrills and chills fell flat.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes

Published by Scribner on April 1, 2025

The Usual Desire to Kill is a domestic comedy with five characters: Mum and Dad, their daughters Miranda and Charlotte, and Miranda’s daughter Alice. The story is told in a variety of styles. A series of letters from the mid-1960s explain how Mum and Dad came to meet and marry. Emails exchanged by the daughters in 2019 share their exasperation with their parents. Snatches of life are dramatized as scenes from a play. Parts of the story are narrated by Miranda, although Charlotte occasionally finds her voice. The scripted scenes add little to the story, but the storytelling techniques are mixed with a director’s desire to keep the story moving.

In a series of letters from 1963, “Your Loving Sister” tells Kitty about her dating life, including unsatisfactory sex with DK (for Dog Killer) and no sex with a more appealing American named Looey. YLS gets pregnant by DK and marries him, not because he wants her baby or even because he wants her, but because he has a sense of duty. As YLS relates, “I didn’t love him, but we did have a sort of understanding. I thought we would grow into each other.” They adapted to married life because “he changed all on his own — he mellowed; he taught himself how to pretend, how to deal with other people. He has learned to act.”

DK agrees that he has learned to act. During his marriage to YLS, DK internalized the lesson that all married men joke about: the secret to a happy marriage is to tell your wife that she’s right about everything. Later in life, DK will say that he used to hate liver. What he means is that YLS served him liver while assuring him that he likes it and, for the sake of marital harmony, he agreed with her. “Wives dominate while husbands submit” seems to be the theme of their marriage until the reader discovers that DK finds subversive ways to maintain his independence.

The story begins in France, where Mum and Dad have lived for the last thirty of their fifty married years. In France, nobody ever refers to Mum and Dad by their actual names, a choice that reflects the way they have cemented themselves into familial roles. Miranda describes her Dad as “a retired philosophy professor who never loses an argument.” Dad describes philosophy as “a mix of pedantry and common sense.” He challenges his family with amusing pedantry throughout the novel, but he also offers good advice to Miranda about dealing with her mother and with her own future.

Miranda’s description of her childhood captures her parents and their marriage:

“Over the years they had evolved a well-rehearsed technique for living together. It was a two-hander play, but there was also a bit part for me. Like two pieces of a broken plate that didn’t in fact fit together and never had, they used me not as glue but more as a translator; I often found myself communicating the desires or complaints of one to the other.”

Dad often fails to turn on his hearing aids, the better to ignore Mum’s opinions, advice, and instructions. He seems more comfortable communicating with the ducks and llamas on their property. “He didn’t interfere in their lives, in the same way he didn’t interfere in his daughters’ lives. He was just not very good at being interested in other living creatures, particularly if they only had two legs.”

Miranda and Charlotte endure their aging parents for short periods. Miranda is nearly fifty and Charlotte has passed that landmark. Their visits are more than obligatory — the women want to keep in touch with their parents — but they are always stressful. Mum has strong opinions about placing knives in the dishwasher.

Mum needs hip surgery but she doesn’t want to talk about it. “Not that she complains; she doesn’t. It’s more like spectator martyrdom— moving in a certain way to make sure that I notice and feel sorry for her and then, if I ask, denying that there is anything wrong and doing sod all about it.”

If Mum spends a few days in the hospital, perhaps Dad can unwind. And perhaps the daughters can use the time to get to the bottom of an event in their childhood that they never understood. The true identity of “Kitty” is another of the story’s surprising reveals.

The hidden family secret is tame by modern American standards. I suppose things were different in England a few decades ago. In any event, the novel doesn’t position the reveal of the family secret as the story’s climax. It’s just one of several moments that merit a soft chuckle. I’m a bit weary of sedate family comedies, but Barnes’ pointed prose made me chuckle so often that I have to recommend The Usual Desire to Kill.

RECOMMENDED

A Spy at War by Charles Beaumont

Published by Canelo on March 27, 2025

My favorite spy stories pit British or American spies against Russians. For an obvious reason (his name is Putin), Russians are making a comeback as the favored spy novel villains. The titular war in A Spy at War is between Russia and Ukraine, making this the first spy novel I’ve read that focuses on that conflict.

My favorite spy stories challenge the reader to guess the identity of a double agent or mole. A Spy at War follows that tradition.

Former British spy Simon Sharman now works in the private sector. He fled the UK after a series of “suspicious events” involving a hedge fund manager. Those events were the subject of A Spy Alone, in which Simon investigated Oxford graduates who went on to be influenced by Russian money. Simon has traveled to Ukraine on a fake Italian passport and is posing as a journalist using a fake Polish press card.

Simon is pursuing Chovka Buchayev, the Chechen assassin who killed his business partner, Evie Howard. Simon intends to kill Chovka but other interested parties want Chovka to defect. They regard Simon as the perfect person to recruit him. The story builds tension as Simon approaches the front line with the belief that Chovka wants to meet him. When the mission goes awry, Simon needs to identify the insider who betrayed him.

The plot leads to a tense if predictable scene that forces Simon to choose between using Chovka for his intelligence value or surrendering to his rage and putting an end to Chovka’s life. In a typical American thriller, the protagonist would pull the trigger and be done with it. I always appreciate a good moral dilemma in a spy novel, particularly when characters actually care about morality.

Chovka receives more characterization than is common for a thriller villain. “Chovka was a survivor, not a hero. Survivors figure out which people have power and make themselves useful to those people.” At several moments in the story, Charles Beaumont demonstrates how that attitude shapes Chovka’s life and decisions.

Unlike Chovka, Simon’s decisions are influenced by values other than greed and convenience. Simon is portrayed as a man suffering from burnout, a weariness with the life he has chosen, who nevertheless uses his experience and intellect to assemble clues as he learns more about his former colleagues from Oxford.

When his story isn’t focused on Simon or Chovka, Beaumont treats the reader to dry British humor in his descriptions of bureaucratic meetings where decisions are made or manipulated. Russian assets are working to undermine British support for Ukraine. It takes a couple of sharp women — including Sarah du Cane, an Oxford professor who serves as an advisor to the British government — to thwart him.

The focus on Russia’s attempts to manipulate public and political opinion about Ukraine gives the novel some currency. The novel takes place in 2022, before the recent change of administration in the US, but its reminder that Russian propaganda is a potent tool of war might be even more relevant in 2025. The argument for selling out Ukraine — “Ukraine can’t win so we should let Russia keep the bits it’s already taken” — sounds depressingly familiar. "You don't have the cards" is how Trump put it.

In the novel, Russian propaganda includes a claim that western contributions of money for the war are being skimmed by Ukrainian oligarchs. The rumor is picked up by bloggers and bots, then amplified until it becomes the basis for policy at the hands of the Russian asset in the British government. Again, the discussions seem spot on. Espionage has always relied on disinformation, but social media provides perfect networks to spread lies until they are mistaken for reality. We all know that, but this is one of the best treatments of the subject I’ve seen in a spy novel.

While A Spy at War isn’t an action novel, characters are often imperiled. The plot moves quickly. The ending is something of a cliffhanger, although it isn’t difficult to guess how the next novel in the trilogy will begin. I could be wrong, but the ambiguous outcome of Simon’s confrontation with Chovka can only go in one direction if Simon still has a story to tell in the last novel of the trilogy.

It might be helpful to read A Spy Alone before reading its sequel. I didn’t. While A Spy at War explains critical events that took place in the earlier novel, I had the sense that I was missing context. Fortunately, any gaps in my understanding of earlier events in Simon’s life did not impair my ability to enjoy this bridge novel in the trilogy.

RECOMMENDED