The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi

Photo by Wil C. Fry.
Cover art by Hanna Vedenpaa and Peter Lutjen.

★★★ (of 5)

Full Title: The Kaiju Preservation Society
Author: John Scalzi
Year: 2022 (mine was first edition hardcover)
Pages: 258
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Tor (Macmillan)
ISBN 978-0-7653-8912-1
Wikipedia page
Author’s Wikipedia page

The Kaiju Preservation Society is John Scalzi’s “pandemic novel” (which isn’t yet an official genre, but probably should be by now) — in that he wrote it during the Covid-19 pandemic and the story takes place in real-time (present day) during the Covid-19 pandemic, which plays a part in the story. He says in the author’s note that he spent much of 2020 writing a different novel, one that “was meant to be dark, heavy, complex, and broodingly ambitious” — but that in January 2021 he simply gave up on it (despite it being due “right now”). Then, almost immediately afterward, the idea for this one dropped into his head and he wrote it in a matter of weeks. This one, Scalzi says, is NOT “a brooding symphony of a novel” — rather “it’s a pop song”, meant to be “light and catchy” — “we all need a pop song from time to time, particularly after a stretch of darkness.”

The story follows Jamie Gray, whose sex and gender is never mentioned in the book, not even with pronouns spoken by other characters. (So it’s weird that the Wikipedia article goes out of its way to use he/him for Jamie.) Jamie works for a food delivery company and has ideas about how to grow the company but is instead fired by its billionaire owner Rob Sanders, just as the pandemic is kicking off. With jobs scarce, Jamie is forced to become a “deliverator” for the company, and during the course of a delivery runs into Tom Stevens, who works for the secret organization KPS and invites Jamie to apply. It turns out that KPS operates a gateway to a parallel Earth on which evolution produced kaiju instead of humans, and has bases on that Earth where they study the kaiju and try to protect them from humans. (I learned that kaiju is an actual word, referring to giant monsters like Godzilla as well as to the genre of media that feature the kaiju.) Jamie takes the job without knowing exactly what it entails, undergoes training, and then helps solve a kaiju kidnapping at the end.

My primary complaint is that it takes a while for the plot to get going. More than half of the book is setup, with the plot failing to rear its head until page 145 or so, when Rob Sanders shows up as a tourist on the kaiju world and the reader begins to suspect that Sanders has ulterior motives. Prior to that we are treated to Jamie’s firing by Sanders, Jamie getting hired by KPS, Jamie meeting other KPS employees, the team deploying to the kaiju Earth and getting settled in, descriptions of the kaiju and their ecosystem, the bases on Kaiju earth, day-to-day activities, and so on. A lot of this takes place in Scalzi’s signature style of snarky conversation, in which each character sounds like the others. (One might complain that it’s lazy writing to give all the characters identical personalities, but as a reader, it makes it easy to breeze through the conversation without worrying who’s saying what — it never turns out to matter.) Once the plot gets going, though, the final hundred pages are much more fun. It was a unique choice to have mostly exposition for three-fifths of the book and then let the action build slowly toward very near the end.

(One other complaint, very minor, is that I found a couple of obvious editing errors, like the one on page 65 where the sentence should have read either “as many as” or “more than”, but instead was only edited halfway and now reads “as many than”, which doesn’t make any sense.)

But the whole thing is pleasant and most of the characters are either likeable or neutral in their likability levels. Only Sanders is a jerk, and even then he seems to have fun doing it. The idea of a parallel Earth being kept secret so scientists can study kaiju is intriguing, as well as the idea that nuclear explosions thin the barrier between the worlds. It is also a reasonable prediction that billionaires and other powerful people would attempt to exploit such a world for their own enrichment.

As much as I enjoy books that challenge my brain or worldview, it’s also sometimes nice to not have that, and just read a simple adventure story.

One final note: the book came out on March 15, 2022, but I bought my copy on March 14 — I’m not sure how that happened, or if it’s technically legal for major booksellers to start selling a book before it’s technically “out there”, but that’s what happened.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for some easy-to-read, plain vanilla sci-fi that won’t put your brain through too much trouble, this one’s probably a good choice. (I recommend getting a library copy, however: $27 was a bit too much for this thin and mostly meatless book.)