WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE is not science fiction. There, I said it.

It looks like science fiction. The cover is mostly black, with futuristic sans-serif lettering, an astronaut cavorting on the moon, and craters (they’re actually the holes in Swiss cheese). The book is about the moon suddenly, inexplicably and miraculously turning into cheese…or a cheese-like substance. Nobody at NASA is willing to go out on a limb and say that for sure.

So I guess the book is “pseudo-science fiction,” a category that I just made up. Instead of imagining a future scientific invention like warp drive or the light saber, John Scalzi is imagining something completely non-scientific and ridiculous. Cartoonist Randall Munroe has made a career of answering speculative questions, like: “What if you had a mole (the unit of scientific measurement) of moles (the furry creatures)?” The answer is “nothing good,” which turns out to be the same answer to “What if the moon suddenly turned to cheese?” but with a good deal more specificity and scientific rigor in terms of the giant ball of moles.

"[I]f you remember that it’s not science fiction and are prepared to enjoy the book for what it is, there are pleasures aplenty to be found."

Scalzi isn’t actually invested in the science of it all, but about how people would react to it. What that means in practice is that characters appear throughout the book sporadically, for a chapter here and there. This gives a number of perspectives on the event, from disappointed astronauts in Houston to cracker-barrel philosophers in Oklahoma to disaffected cheese-shop operators in Madison. It also breaks up the story, which is more to the point because the narrative is of secondary importance anyway.

What is of primary importance is the sociology of the whole thing. Scalzi covers the political, economic, scientific, psychological, philosophical and religious aspects of the inexplicable transformation of the lunar substance from granite and basalt to a mysterious organic matrix, focusing on the high, middle and low of society. From that perspective, the book is an unalloyed triumph, especially because Scalzi salts his sociological inquiry with his trademark humor and incisiveness.

It does everything right that it’s trying to do, but whether it does everything that the reader expects it to do is an open question. At a critical juncture of the story, one of Scalzi’s characters expostulates, “Are you [expletive deleted] kidding me right now?” I fully expect that he will get this same reaction from a large subset of readers, due in part to what generously can be termed the structure of the narrative. But of course, that is exactly what Scalzi is doing, having a detailed and well-deserved laugh at society’s expense. And arguably, he handles the denouement of the plot more deftly than the rest of the book.

WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE is going to be divisive --- not for any political or sociological reason, but because it is meandering and disjointed in its storytelling and idiosyncratic in its presentation. That does not stop it from being hilarious, incisive to the point of being scathing, and occasionally warm and touching in unexpected ways. It is also designed to infuriate readers with presuppositions about what science fiction is, what it's supposed to do, and how it goes about that. But if you remember that it’s not science fiction and are prepared to enjoy the book for what it is, there are pleasures aplenty to be found.