The Kaiju Preservation Society

The Kaiju Preservation Society
by John Scalzi
Recommended Ages: 14+

Jamie Gray goes into his six-month performance review at a tech startup with big ideas about how to improve the food delivery app, and comes out with a pink slip and an opportunity to become a delivery driver just as COVID-19 hits. It's a tough break, but luckily he runs into an acquaintance while making a delivery and gets offered a job. Lifting things. For an organization called KPS that protects large, endangered animals. The pay is good, so Jamie takes it. And then he's let in on the secret. The off-the-grid, foreign-country situation he'll be working in? It's a parallel earth. An earth with a warmer climate, a thicker atmosphere, and kaiju. Like, you know, Godzilla.

The Kaiju Preservation Society is what KPS stands for. And Jamie adjusts quickly from gosh-wow-sense-of-wonder to more than competent lifter of things who, with his group of newbies, soon becomes passionately committed to protecting Kaiju Earth's mountainous, nuclear-powered denizens. Despite the fact that said denizens, and their parasites and other critters down to insect-sized, would gladly eat a human being if they can. Jamie and friends have a few tricks to defend themselves, though. Like stun batons and monster pheromones.

They're there mainly to study the creatures, but now and then they also have to babysit tourists – mainly richie-rich investors, government and military officials – and one of the first group Jamie gets saddled with turns out to be the evil CEO who fired him. On a bet. This guy, Rob Sanders, tries to throw his weight (and money) around on Kaiju Earth and very nearly gets thrown to the parasites for his pains. But while he pretends to learn his lesson, he still has something up his sleeve that's going to turn the final act of this funny, fast-paced, intense novel into a life-or-death fight to save a momma kaiju and her brood.

This is my first time reading a book by Scalzi and I'll give him credit for making it a fun ride. His characters patter with wit and well-delineated personalities. They're smart, tough and recklessly brave, yet understandably scared at the same time. There are whole scenes that are so good, you'll want to find someone who'll let you read them aloud. (I read to my dad an early scene in which a doctor tells Jamie about the side effects of a series of vaccines.) I could complain about the left-wing politics that everything filters through – sometimes distracting to the point where I, for one, had to double back to understand the antecedent of a character's pronouns – but in the big picture, the only bone I really want to pick at is Scalzi's disinclination to describe.

When the kaiju appear, I yearned for a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, a metaphor or simile, whatever, to suggest a mental image over and above the implied "you do know what a kaiju is, don't you?" Establish it for those of us who aren't plugged into your mental movie, Scalzi. Paint with words, just for a little bit! I psychically begged him on this, multiple times, but did he listen? No. He told what happened and reported what the characters said, which was (I admit) sufficiently entertaining to keep me turning the pages. But at the expense of slowing the pace just a sukoshi, he could have seeded the reader's imagination with, like, imagery. Just sayin'.

John Scalzi is the Hugo- and Locus-award-winning science fiction author of the seven-book "Old Man's War" series, the "Interdependency" trilogy (The Collapsing Empire, etc.), some "Dispatcher" mysteries, and the novels Agent to the Stars, The Android's Dream, Redshirts, Starter Villain, When the Moon Hits Your Eye (in which the moon turns into cheese), Constituent Service, Monsters of Ohio and End of All Things.