John Scalzi is a master of subverting expectations and skewering genre conventions. The author of Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Starter Villain is adept at turning time-worn tropes on their head with humor and wisdom, riffing on everything from archetypal sci-fi to Bond-esque supervillainy. For his latest book, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, Scalzi takes a crack at disaster fiction, imagining a world faced with an existential crisis in the form of the moon suddenly and unexpectedly having transformed into cheese.
Ahead of the book’s release on March 25, Tor Books offered Polygon an exclusive excerpt from When the Moon Hits Your Eye. In addition, John Scalzi shared a statement prefacing why he chose this particular excerpt to share:
When you’re writing on a topic as outrageous as the Moon turning into something else entirely, one secret to making it work is to have your characters treat it absolutely seriously — to have the reactions a normal person in the real world might have in the same situation. In this chapter, two scientists, a spy, a military man and a politician all sit down to discuss what the actual hell might be happening when suddenly the moon has changed and no one knows why.
As a side note, this is the chapter I read to audiences on my most recent book tour, because I wanted to see how they would react to this whole premise. I can say I was happy with the response.
Washington, DC | The White House Situation Room
White House Chief of Staff Pat Heffernan sat at the head of the conference table and looked at the four experts arrayed on either side of the table. “Let’s get to this,” he said. “It is”—he checked his watch—“six thirty in the a.m., I have a briefing with the president in exactly half an hour, and because we all know he doesn’t bother to read the daily intelligence briefing, it will fall to me to explain what the hell is going on. So explain it to me. Use small words on me so I can use smaller words on him. Somebody start.”
“The news is that good,” Heffernan said, wryly, and pointed to Dr. Debra Dixon, from NASA. “You. Begin.”
“Uh, at approximately five p.m. yesterday Eastern time, NASA became aware that several Apollo-era lunar-based retroreflectors—”
“And you’ve already lost me,” Heffernan said.
Dixon cleared her throat and tried again. “We have a bunch of mirrors on the moon.” She paused to make sure this was understood. “We shoot lasers at them for science. Yesterday afternoon the mirrors stopped working.”
Why did they stop working?”
“It wasn’t clear at the time. We had mirrors at three sites, and there are three other sets of mirrors, two from the Soviet era and one from the Indian moon landing in 2023. Those stopped working as well.”
“We asked the Russians and Indians about this?” Heffernan asked.
“No, we shot lasers at those mirrors, too.” Dixon said. “Or where we knew they were supposed to be. We didn’t need their permission to do that. They’re mirrors. They reflect for anyone.”
“Okay, so mirrors are missing on the moon. So what?”
“After we lost contact one of our stations involved in the International Laser Ranging Service—”
“It’s a service that allows us to track satellites and other objects in near space to millimeter accuracy,” said Alan Glover, who was in the meeting for the National Security Agency. “It also provides data on the location of the moon.”
Heffernan grunted at this. Dixon continued. “Since we couldn’t use the mirrors, one of our stations ranged the moon using an older method called EME, or a ‘moon bounce,’ in which we reflect radio waves directly off the surface of the moon. That’s when we discovered another issue.”
“What was the issue?”
“Uh.” Dixon looked around the table. “The bounce returned earlier than expected, sir.”
Heffernan looked annoyed, and was opening his mouth to remind Dixon about making things simple, when Colonel Glenn Axel of the Space Force spoke up. “It means the surface of the moon is closer to Earth than it used to be.”
This got Heffernan’s attention. “How much closer?”
“About three hundred miles,” Dixon said.
“How did the moon suddenly move three hundred miles closer to Earth?”
“It didn’t,” Dixon said
“But—” Heffernan stopped. “It’s beginning to feel like ‘Who’s on First’ in here,” he said. He looked around the table and saw blank expressions, and realized how much older he was than all the other people at the table. “Forget it. Explain to me how the moon is three hundred miles closer and yet somehow not three
hundred miles closer. Small words.”
Heffernan blinked at this. “The moon is rock. Rocks don’t grow.”
Dixon paused for a moment, and Heffernan imagined her brain filled with examples of how rocks could, in fact, grow. If that was indeed what she was thinking, she said none of it. “We’re looking into it now, sir. The point is that the moon is exactly where it should be in its orbit, and also, its surface is three hundred miles closer to us. Which means that the diameter of the moon is roughly six hundred miles wider than it was before roughly five p.m. Eastern time yesterday.”
It’s impossible but it happened,” Heffernan said.
Heffernan rubbed his forehead. “So now I have to go up and tell a president—this president—that in an instant, the moon somehow accreted six hundred miles of rock.”
Almost inaudibly, Dixon squeaked.
“I heard that,” Heffernan said, and pointed once more to Dixon. “Explain that squeak.”
“Oh, I really don’t want to,” Dixon said, to the room. “Someone else do this one, please.”
“I’ll answer this,” said Dr. Miriam Golden, from the National Science Foundation. Eyes turned to her. “The moon’s diameter is six hundred miles wider than it was yesterday, but its mass is the same as far as we can tell. If it wasn’t we’d already be seeing evidence of it. Higher tides, for a start. If the moon is physically larger and has the same mass, then whatever it is made of is less dense than the basalt and other material that made up the moon as we knew it.”
“All right,” Heffernan said. “What is the new, mysterious substance that the moon is made out of again?”
Another nearly inaudible squeak from Dixon.
“Stop that,” Heffernan snapped at her. He looked back to Golden. “Do you know?”
“It’s being looked into,” Golden said. “There’s nothing we can confirm yet. But yesterday, around the same time as the moon mirrors went missing, Space Center Houston reported a problem with their store of lunar samples. We first thought it was theft, but then other places in the US that have or store moon rocks reported the exact issue at the exact same time. In all cases the moon rocks were gone and replaced with objects made from another substance entirely.”
“What substance?” Heffernan asked.
Golden looked directly at the White House chief of staff and answered calmly and evenly. “Cheese,” she said.
Heffernan burst out laughing, went on for a good long time, and then stopped when he realized no one else at the table had even cracked a smile. “This is a joke,” he said. “It has to be a joke.”
“You have to be fucking kidding me,” Heffernan said, to the room. “I have here representatives from both our science and intelligence community, and all of you are telling me the moon—the whole fucking moon—has been turned to goddamn cheese.”
“That’s right,” Golden said. She at no time had taken her eyes off the chief of staff.
“Bullshit!” Heffernan said. “It’s not possible.”
“It’s not possible,” Axel agreed. “It’s also our best guess at the moment.”
“How the hell is that your ‘best guess’?”
“We checked it,” Dixon said, speaking up. “We tested the cheese that replaced our lunar sample. We determined its mass and density. Then we applied those figures to the moon. They match.”
“What does that mean, ‘they match’?”
“It means they match!” Dixon said. “If you had a moon made of this specific cheese, with the same mass as our previous moon, it would have the diameter it now has. Almost exactly.” She put her head in her hands and stared at the conference table. Heffernan considered this for a minute. Then he said, “What kind of cheese?”
“It’s not just that it’s cheese,” Dixon burst out, raising her head again. “It’s that it’s undifferentiated cheese.”
“Is that . . . a type of cheese?” Heffernan asked.
“She means that it’s the same all the way through,” Axel said. “The moon and the earth have different layers to them. Rocky crust on the surface, molten or partially molten rock farther down, and then a solid core. This new moon doesn’t have layers. We can tell that from the diameter and the lunar samples we have here on the planet. It’s cheese of the same density and consistency all the way through.”
“For now,” Dixon muttered, darkly.
“For now,” Heffernan repeated, question implied.
“She means that a mass of cheese sixteen hundred miles in diameter isn’t likely to be stable,” Golden said. “It’s going to start collapsing on itself soon.”
“We don’t know yet,” Golden said. “We have to model it.” She looked over to Dixon, who was now resolutely staring at the conference table again. “And we still have to confirm that the moon is made of what we think it is. All the evidence we have right now checks out, but it’s still just a hypothesis. We’ll need to get more data.”
“When will we have it?” Heffernan asked.
“We’re already working on it.”
“Who is working on it?”
“We’re all working on it,” Axel said. “It obviously has scientific and security issues.”
Heffernan considered this and then looked at Dixon. “What does this mean for the moon landings?” NASA had been promising to go back to the moon for decades, and had finally scheduled crewed landings. Test flights, from NASA and from private parties in other places, were already scheduled; an uncrewed flight from PanGlobal Aerospace, designed to test the soundness of the lunar lander NASA had commissioned them to construct, was going to be launched from Ecuador in a week.
“It’s difficult to land on cheese,” Dixon said.
“If it is cheese,” Golden said to Dixon.
Dixon nodded. “Whatever it is, we’re not likely to risk landing on it until we know it’s safe. It’s not my decision, but I wouldn’t be surprised if landings are delayed indefinitely.”
Heffernan grimaced at this. The president had famously wanted to be an astronaut growing up, and fervently wanted a moon landing during his administration. He would be unhappy with any delay. He put this out of his mind for the moment, and turned to Alan Glover of the NSA. “Who knows about this?”
“About there being something going on with the moon?” Glover asked. “Literally everyone on the planet. The moon is up in the sky, close to the sun. Cheese or not cheese, whatever the moon is made of right now is a lot brighter than moon rock was. The sun is up now. We could go outside and look at it ourselves.”
“Does any of the chatter you’ve picked up suggest anyone else knows the . . . cheese connection?” Heffernan asked.
“Nothing specific,” Glover said. “We have public and secure chatter about the moon, obviously. Scientists are talking openly about it on social media. Even without the benefit of samples”— Glover motioned toward Dixon—“they’ll have already figured 0ut diameter, mass and density. That’s just math.”
“And what about samples?” Heffernan asked. “Who has moon rocks out there?”
“Lots of people,” Dixon said. “We gave moon rocks to every country in the world after we landed. A lot of them were stolen or disappeared over the years, but enough of them are still on public display.
“And turned to cheese.”
“We haven’t heard from anyone about that, but it’s still early morning here,” Dixon said.
Heffernan looked over to Glover. “Pick anything up?”
“Not yet, but again, it’s only a matter of time,” Glover said. “If I remember correctly, the samples are small”—Dixon nodded at this—“and probably for at least a few hours the institutions that have them will assume some sort of theft happened, just like we did. We should probably let them continue to think that for as long as we can.”
“No one is claiming victory for stealing the moon,” Heffernan said.
“Not so far,” Glover said. “Someone will. Someone always claims victory.”
“And just to be clear, and I cannot believe I am actually asking this, there is no way any of our enemies could have done this?”
“No, sir,” Glover said, absolutely seriously. “We know pretty much everything our friends and foes are up to these days. There’s been no chatter of anything even remotely similar to this. Beyond that, there’s no one else in the world who would have the technology to disappear the moon, much less replace it with a globe of, probably, cheese.”
“Do we have that technology?”
“Ask him.” Glover pointed to Colonel Axel of the Space Force.
“No, sir,” Axel said. “And even if we had it, disappearing the moon and replacing it with an equally massive orb of probably cheese serves no discernable military purpose.”
Heffernan looked at his watch. “I have to head up,” he said.
“So let me summarize. Sometime yesterday afternoon the moon was replaced by a globe of cheese with the same weight—”
“Mass,” said Dixon and Golden and Axel, all at the same time.
“—the same fucking mass as the moon, and we don’t know how, or why, and the only thing we can say at this point is that we didn’t do it, no one else we know did it either, and the way we know it’s cheese is that all the moon rocks we have here on Earth turned into cheese at the same time. Is that right?”
“That’s basically the gist of it, yes,” Axel said.
“And every single one of you will actually stand behind this complete line of horseshit.”
“It is our best guess about what’s going on at the moment, yes,” Golden said.
“I hate it with every single bone in my body and I can’t think of any other explanation,” Dixon added.
Heffernan nodded. “Last question,” he said. “When does this go away?”
“Go away?” Dixon asked.
“Yes, go away,” Heffernan said, irritably. “How long do we have to wait until this cheese moon goes away and the old one comes back?”
The people at the table looked at one another. “We have no idea how it happened, sir,” Golden said. “And we have no idea if this is a temporary or permanent change. We have to assume for now that, for all intents and purposes, this is the moon now.”
“You all agree with this?” Heffernan said. They all nodded.
“Great. You can tell everyone that at the press conference later today.”
“You want us to do a press conference about this?” Dixon asked, shocked.
“It’s not your press conference, it’s the president’s,” Heffernan said, and then looked at their surprised faces. “People, the moon has turned to fucking cheese. The president can’t not have a press conference about this. He will go up, Jaime will whip some comforting words to vomit out at the nation, and then you all will go up and answer the questions the president has no business answering.” Heffernan pointed to Glover. “Not you, you’re a spy.”
“I didn’t think you were talking about me,” Glover assured Heffernan.
“But the rest of you, we’ll do this thing at three.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” Golden said. “People could lose their minds about this.”
“They absolutely will lose their minds about it,” Heffernan said. “But if we do this right, they will lose their minds in the direction of our choosing.” He stood, and they stood with him.
“Now. You have eight hours to get your stories straight. Get to it. I’ll have breakfast sent down.”
MOON ALTERED BY MYSTERIOUS FORCES, PRESIDENT SAYS
NASA and other scientific organizations to look for causes but say “no danger” for now
Early reports suggest alterations may include organic-seeming material
By Robert Evansen, NYTimes Staff Writer
In one of the most extraordinary presidential press conferences ever given, President Brett Boone confirmed that the moon, Earth’s sole natural satellite, has undergone a significant and unexplained transformation, growing some six hundred miles in diameter seemingly instantly.
“We do not yet have answers for how or why this has happened,” President Boone said, reading from a brief, prepared statement before handing over the bulk of the conference to representatives from NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Space Force. “We have the nation’s best minds working on this, and we will find answers, and when those answers are found, we will share them with the United States and the world.”
President Boone stressed that while this lunar transformation was without precedent in recorded history, “I have been assured by experts at NASA that the nation is under no threat from it. I want to stress this: There is no danger at this time, nor do we anticipate any danger from it in the near future.”
The president added that he had been in contact with other world leaders— including heads of state from China, Russia, India and the United Kingdom— and had met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and representatives of the United States intelligence community. “At this moment, this does not appear to be the act of any government, group or individual. As this is an issue that affects us all, governments worldwide have pledged their cooperation to determine how this could have happened, and why.”
According to Dr. Debra Dixon, chief scientist for NASA, the agency became aware of the moon’s alterations yesterday at around 5:00 p.m. Eastern, shortly before the moon, entering its waxing crescent phase, became visible in the early evening sky. Dr. Dixon noted that while the change occurred when the moon was not directly visible to observers on Earth, no special significance was accorded to that. “At this point, we assume it was random.”
Dr. Dixon said that NASA was not yet prepared to offer any definitive statements as to the nature of the transformation, cautioning that “science takes time.” That said, Dr. Dixon did say that early observations of the moon suggested that its surface, previously made from rock, might now be partially or fully comprised of “organic- seeming material.” Dr. Dixon stressed that organic compounds were not in themselves evidence of life.
When asked how the moon’s sudden transformation would affect NASA’s schedule for crewed moon missions, Dr. Dixon said that no determination had yet been made and that those decisions would be made by NASA administrator Kevin Olsen in conjunction with John Able, administrator for the Diana missions. “Make no mistake that our aim has not wavered. We will return Americans to the moon,” Dr. Dixon said. “We also have
to understand how these changes will affect our brave astronauts and their missions. We need to take them safely to the moon. We also need to bring them safely back.”
