If the moon suddenly turned into cheese, the movie would be unbearable. Astronauts would be annoyed, graduate students would be demoralized, and news articles would be filled with terrible puns. The huge jaws of the Internet will grab the details, churning out doomsday scenarios, memes and conspiracies. And that's before the moon cheese begins to shrink, creating geysers of material and a dangerously unstable atmosphere. lunar landscape.
IN When the moon hits your eyesvoted for one of Scientific American the best works of art of 2025Author John Scalzi outlines the physical side of this scenario along with the social and interpersonal consequences such an unexpected (albeit delicious) transformation. The story follows many perspectives—including scientists, government officials, billionaires with a point to prove, online forum commentators, journalists, and more—as people try to cope with the moon's dramatic transformation and stubborn insistence on remaining stupid. We sat down with Scalzi to discuss the planetary science of cheese, the sticky scourge of misinformation, and how the worldwide struggle to understand the unexplained can reveal the scientific process. (Plus: Would he eat cheese?)
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
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So the moon is made of cheese. How did you come to write this?
I've taken up a really interesting niche of contemporary science fiction that I write, which takes a really absurd idea and then tries to apply real life to it.
Since childhood, we have heard the phrase “The moon is made of cheese” or “green cheese.” And my brain thought, “Okay, what would happen to everyone if the moon was made of cheese?” Because it's kind of a universal thing: the moon is in the sky for everyone. Everybody's going to have to deal with it, and it's going to be this disconnect: “I'm trying to get through my day in the real world with real problems. And also, the moon turned into cheese. Everything I thought I knew about the universe is just thrown out the window. What kind of just God or universe would turn the moon into cheese? And for what purpose? And what does that mean for me?” So each chapter has a different main character, each chapter has a new point of view, and each one deals with the Moon.
I was actually thinking about [this] for a long time. I originally came up with this idea in 2015, and then, just as I was about to sit down to write it, Neal Stephenson suggested Sevenevs—
Also cult book about the sudden, dramatic changes on the Moon and their far-reaching consequences for the Earth and society as we know it.
And I looked like a well-acted Neal Stephenson. I'm not going to release my cheese moon book after Sevenevs. But it actually turned out to be beneficial because I had more time to think about the real-life implications of turning the moon into cheese. Ironically, this has been a multi-year project, from thinking about it to actually writing it. And I really think that, like cheese, it benefits from aging.
How much research have you done?
I did some research. If you replace basalt with a dairy product, what are the consequences? How much is the Moon expanding? What happens when it starts to shrink?
Oddly enough, there are articles about this on the Internet because people have already had this idea; they just haven't written novels about it. So that was extremely helpful. I was talking to some real scientist friends about some things and it was very clear to me: look, I'm not going to be extremely strict about this, but I also want to make sure that physics does what physics is supposed to do. [My friends] just looked at me like, “You’re an idiot, but here’s what you’ll have to think about.”
One of the things that was really important was that I didn't go into too much detail. If you delve into science fiction, you will inevitably find gaps in your knowledge base. For example, I joked that the type of cheese is never specified. [If I were to say] “Oh yeah, that's Gruyere” or something like that, someone will say, “I actually calculated what would happen to Gruyere's moon and you were completely wrong!”
What was the most unexpected consequence of the cheese moon you discovered?
Sooner or later you will have an atmosphere and oceans.
You can't just have a physics-defying cheese moon up there… If it's going to stay in its orbit, it's going to have to do a whole bunch of physical exercises. It will shrink. You will have geysers of steam. There will be eruptions that send off huge chunks of cheese, and eventually, in a few years or decades, oceans will inevitably appear, and these oceans will remain for centuries or even millennia.
Albedo [brightness] The moon will be much higher. When there was a moon in the sky, there would no longer be a deep night sky; it would be like twilight. All of this intrigued me, and I think putting it in the book adds some strange plausibility to the idea that as a writer you are playing fair with your audience. You say: yes, this is an absurd concept, but I'm going to do the math so you can get carried away and see the logical consequences.
Would you eat moon cheese?
In my universe, I would definitely eat moon cheese. If given the opportunity, I would do it 100 percent.
Big. Just to record that you would actually eat moon cheese.
Just to get it on the record, yes. This is a very important thing.
Did you enjoy writing so many different points of view for the book?
Part of the joy of this business for me was that not only were people reacting to it, but [including] things like news articles, Reddit posts, or Slack rooms where people talk about it. I'm a former journalist; I used to work in Fresno Bee newspaper from the 1990s. It will be a great story for everyone. The first few days were like, “Oh my God, the moon has turned to cheese!” But then you get the details about the lifestyle and the sports… Just imagining those things was fascinating to me.
And sometimes this coverage and discussion turns into disinformation or active disinformation.
It doesn’t matter if the moon turns into cheese, an election takes place, or a natural disaster occurs, there will be actors spreading disinformation. And the reason they spread misinformation is sometimes purely for their own purposes, such as if someone is trying to deceive you or trying to influence and manipulate political opinion. When a historical event occurs, there is a general consensus about it at that time because everyone has experienced this world-changing event. General consensus is harder to maintain under any circumstances the further away you get from an event, and especially now because the Internet makes it so easy for misinformation to spread. The old saying that “a lie travels a mile before the truth gets its shoes on” is absolutely true. When the truth comes out, the rumor has already taken root, and any correction is essentially a defensive fight.
Scientists trying to explain a completely mysterious phenomenon are the key characters in the book. What do you hope readers will take away about how science is done?
I really hope that people get the feeling that the scientists in the book are truly excited after that initial shock and disbelief.
People forget that science is not philosophy or religion. Science is not any of these things. Science is a system. It is a systematic way of discovering, documenting, testing, and achieving, through repeated experimentation and testing, as close to the truth as possible. When something like this happens, after the first moment of disbelief the scientists will say, “Yes! That's what we're here for!” And I think it will be interesting for them. The downside to this is that a fantasy situation will also create rumors, misunderstandings, apocalyptic thinking and people moving towards irrationality because in many ways it is irrational.
This is something that scientists have to deal with all the time, both in the real world and in other works of fiction. What scientists do in a book is what scientists do in real life. They roll up their sleeves and say: let's figure out what we're working on and what's really going on.
What was the reaction to this weird, trashy book?
It was a real joy for me as a writer that I was able to pull off so many different points of view, so many different techniques, and so many different ways to show how the big cheese moon would impact the world. I need to do comedy. I need to do some romance. I have to make people laugh. I had to make people cry—there were a few chapters where people emailed me like, “I read this and I really liked it and then you made me cry and then you made me cry again. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. When's the next book coming out?” And that's exactly what I want to do. I want to give people what they expect from a book made of moon cheese, but I also want to give them moments they don't expect.
This book was fun to write and I hope it was fun to read as well.
Have there been any other books lately that bring whimsical science fiction into everyday life that you've enjoyed?
Nowadays there are a lot of books that mix humor and absurdity. It was really hard to find there for a while. So there you have it Dungeon Explorer Carl [by Matt Dinniman]. You have Cat Valente's space opera books, where she's essentially establishing Eurovision, but for the galaxy. There was a book Villain's Assistant [by Hannah Nicole Maehrer].
There are other books that use a concept that changes the world, and everyone has to deal with it on a regular basis. For example, in Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut series, an asteroid hits near Washington, D.C., in the Atlantic Ocean, and as a consequence, the space program evolves incredibly differently and includes women from the very beginning. In modern science fiction and fantasy, not only are alternate histories but different worldviews all over the place, and people are very interested in exploring them.
