When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

 

While the book seems on its face to be powerfully absurd (and in many ways it is just that) it's also a remarkably serious novel, with more stuff to say than Scalzi's last couple of novels--I mean, it's just as breezy, bordering on flippant, and the wit and humor are just as present; but there are things going on, on the levels of theme and deeper in the subtext, that remind me of *Redshirts* (a novel that has more going on than a lot of people give it credit for). There's a nice little arc that's all about looking death in the face and deciding who you want to be, which is like a little shiv in the ribs; and there's commentary on billionaires and their often inhuman priorities; and there are some nifty takes on politics and media and astronauts and how science might react to the (apparently) impossible, and the book wraps with what might be snark on how what history records isn't often much like the history people live through. While there are a lot of POVs in the book, it's remarkably coherent. Glad my local library of choice had it, happy to get it back so someone else can read it.