Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned The Power of A Good Pop Song.

I only became aware of John Scalzi’s existence in the last few years — mostly because he was one of the most prominent accounts on Bluesky when I joined it a couple of years ago — but he’s rapidly become one of my favourite science-fiction writers. Hell, one of my favourite writers, full stop.

Basically, Scalzi writes exactly the kind of fiction that I’m trying to write: very serious ideas, told in a very silly way. Take his novel The Kaiju Preservation Society, which is about pretty much exactly what you’d expect from the title: a secret government dedicated to the study and conservation of Godzilla-sized creatures in a parallel universe. In the afterword of the book, Scalzi writes:

KPS is not, and I say this with absolutely no slight intended, a brooding symphony of a novel. It’s a pop song. It’s meant to be light and catchy, with three minutes of hooks and choruses for you to sing along with, and then you’re done and you go on with your day, hopefully with a smile on your face.

That’s a good line, and the book certainly is light and catchy, but I think that Scalzi is selling himself short. It touches on all kinds of interesting themes: the vulnerability of the natural world; the precarity of the working classes during the COVID pandemic; and the way that both of those things can be utterly destroyed by the short-sighted greed of the obscenely wealthy.

Besides, musicians from John Lennon to Beyoncé have known for a long time that you can hide some pretty big themes behind a catchy song. “Chasing Waterfalls” is about the AIDS crisis. “Pumped Up Kicks” is about a school shooting. The novel I’ve been writing for the last four years is about death and forgiveness and trade unions: that was inspired by a Scissor Sisters track.

If KPS is a pop song, then Scalzi’s new book — When The Moon Hits Your Eye — is a concept album, and it’s got one hell of a concept: what if the Moon suddenly turned into cheese? It might be the silliest thing that Scalzi has ever written, which is really saying something. It might also be the most profound.

Over the course of a lunar cycle, Scalzi paints pictures of people from all walks of life, trying to deal with the new reality. There’s the unscrupulous tech billionaire trying to find a way to make even more money; the astronaut who has to deal with the loss of a lifelong dream; the trainees at a pair of warring cheese shops who try to find love. What links them all is a feeling of defiance against the inexplicable, a desire to keep on existing in the face of such insanity. In one of my favourite moments, a group of college students gather on a hilltop late at night to flip off the Moon. None of them have any idea what the hell happened, or how to reverse it: unlike climate change, this disaster is truly out of humanity’s hands. But they can still lift their empty hands to the sky and show the Universe how they’re feeling.

And then they can put on a good pop song and dance the night away.

My one criticism of When The Moon Hits Your Eye is the distinct lack of cheese puns. I know that most of them are pretty ripe these days, but I’m sure there are one or two that are still gouda.