When Emmalita mentioned that she had a hard time getting into this novel because of the ever changing points of view, I was hoping it might work better for me. After all, I love World War Z, and I don’t think that one has any repeat narrators – unlike Robocalypse, which structurally looked like it would follow a similar approach but then ended up having reoccurring characters. Unfortunately, she was right. Something about this one didn’t work as well for me as it did in other novels that have used this.
I wonder if it’s partially because it is occurring in real time while World War Z is set up as after the fact interviews – so we know the zombie apocalypse happened but also generally that there is some type of conclusion while with this one, you kind of want to get to the end because you want to know, “does the moon stop being cheese? Do they find an explanation?”
Scalzi’s novel spans over one lunar cycle, each chapter representing a different day and perspective, from scientists to retired philosophy professors, from movie producers to newly hired cheese mongers, from average college students to entitled space company owning billionaires. A few characters reappear throughout the book to interact with other main narrators.
I took a short break from the novel at about the third way mark, and will say it was much easier for me to finish when I came back for the final two thirds of the book. I’m not sure what made the difference? Maybe just reframing my expectations? A lot of the earlier chapters focus on the scientific voices as they would be the first to discover and react to something like this, but it was some of the more random perspective I enjoyed the most. Scalzi does skewer billionaires in this as well but I much preferred the chapter from a rich man’s minder and how it mocked his client to the chapters from an entitled billionaire that owned a space exploration company and many government contracts (hit a little too close to home, and at this point, I’m not sure there is any comeuppance that would be enough to read).
It’s still entertaining and I think Scalzi does get a lot right about how people would react, highlighting both the absurd and the human, but I’d recommend just about any of his other novels as a better starting point.