Kaiju Preservation Society – John Scalzi
Expected publication date: 15 March 2022
The newest John Scalzi book came my way courtesy of NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge. Thanks.
If you go to Goodreads the blurb (I will not give you the very spoilery part of it, no worries) will tell you this:
When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization.” Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on.
The blurb then goes on to spoil the nice reveal from the start of the book, which is just horrible in my opinion. Why put so much into a blurb? What’s the point? Don’t they realize what they are doing? I guess not… sad, though.
Jamie starts off as a cool dude working for a food delivery company as one of the idea men, but soon receives a couple of bad news – he loses his job, his roommates are also not doing well, he has to accept a dead end job…. Things are not looking up, and then Covid hits. Fun yeah…. Well there’s more of us who can relate to these things.
At one of his delivery jobs, he comes across his old school buddy who offers him a job and he accepts. His money issues are solved, but other things are ahead of him, some of which will put him and the entire world in danger.
*SPOILERS*
What Jamie finds out is that the job involves researching and taking care of Kaiju, Godzillas in a parallel world. This job ends up involving him in stopping the attempt of an idiot to steal the Kaiju in order to get an energy source. The danger is that the Kaiju can literally explode like a nuclear bomb. Fun, right?
The Good
This was my first Scalzi book and it was fun. It’s your typical popcorn book – not a lot of nutrition there, but a nice snack when all you want is a fun and easy read. I read this book over a weekend.
Scalzi is good at writing light and fluffy humour. You get to see Jamie complain about vegan cheese not being cheese at all but “orange and white sadness than mocks cheese and everything it stands for.”
There is also a funny scene when he is receiving all the necessary shots (trigger warning to all you antivaxers out there) for his travels. The description of the possible side effects and ways of countering them was fun: “Angrily consume bacon on the toile.” At times it is a bit too much, but fun all the same.
The humour here is not really cerebral, but it works. In a book like this, it works. There are moments when the constant back and forth quipping and puns get too expected. Perhaps it would have been better if he had removed some of those because sometimes less is more.
In addition to the humour there is the world he has created here. The idea of parallel worlds that become accessible through the influence of nuclear reactions is cool. Seeing this parallel Earth that has a completely different ecosystem on it is interesting. It also makes you wonder what other worlds might be out there. And I’m sure this leaves open the possibility of a sequel, even though this is a standalone book.
There was a small moment when I thought this book hit its peak relatable moment – at one point someone comments that “your average kaiju will go off like a ten- or fifteen-kiloton bomb” and Jamie replies that he “doesn’t have any sense of that.” And don’t you agree? Author throw around these numbers and values, and every often the other characters in the novel just accept that. But, honestly, how many of you know what this means? Honestly? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Scalzi then does the smart thing, gives the effect of that sized bomb in the in-book real world terms: how far the light blast would expand. Thank you, Scalzi.
The Ok
There isn’t much that’s really bad in this book, there are however, moments when the plotline is so obvious that you just wait for the characters to catch up. It was so obvious that the idiot from the start, the idiot who fired Jamie would come back, and come back as an even bigger idiot.
And if you add to that that we learn that his family has been in the energy business, more specifically in the nuclear energy business, the fact that he would be the one to try and steal the Kaiju was so obvious to be stupid.
The last ok thing was the typical question that is asked in books like this – and in this case literally asked in the text – “who are the monsters?” The book acknowledges that this is an overused trope, but acknowledging something while still continuing to use it… not the best way to avoid accusations of being too-tropey.
The Cherry
The last bit I want to reflect on is Martin Satie. Satie is one of the helicopter pilots in the book, and he is cool. He doesn’t give a damn about other people’s wishes, ideas or emotions. He does his job in a way that doesn’t put him, his passengers or the creatures around him in danger. He also dislikes entitled spoiled rich morons, and the confrontation between him and the main moron of the book is just fun. He is a character I’d like to read a whole book about. I feel like he could be my spirit anima in this universe. Cool. I want more.
To sum up, this is a fun little standalone book that is great for killing time without breaking a sweat. I mean, it’s got jokes, Covid, parallel worlds, godzillas and a cool Canadian! What’s not to like here?
Anatomy of Reading 