The Kaiju Preservation Society (John Scalzi)

The Kaiju Preservation Society
John Scalzi
Tor
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Jamie knew it was a risk when he left his doctorate unfinished, but he saw a great opportunity with a new company. Six months later, as COVID-19 was shutting down America, his billionaire boss fired him (but not before stealing his ideas)... just when his roommates are about to leave him high and dry. Things couldn't be going much worse for him, until a chance meeting with an old acquaintance leads to a peculiar job offer. Jamie doesn't even know what the job is, only that it involves remote field work helping "large animals", but he's not in a position to argue. It's just as well he didn't know, because he wouldn't have believed it, not until he sees it with his own eyes - the alternate Earth, a lush oxygen-rich jungle full of impossible creatures, and the "large animals" themselves: kaiju, almost straight from an old movie.
The nuclear tests of the 1960's apparently thinned the barrier between Earth and other alternate worlds, including the one where the immense monsters (more accurately considered mobile ecosystems, for their size and the multitude of parasites and symbiotic animals that enable their survival) roamed. Since then, a top-secret global group known as the Kaiju Preservation Society has been traveling to their world to study them and ensure their safety, keeping them from straying through any fissures to our own Earth. As the lone non-scientist at Tanaka Base Camp, Jamie is the designated grunt worker, lifting and carrying and offering a hand wherever it's needed. He doesn't exactly understand just what a creature as immense as a kaiju needs protecting from... until he has to escort his first visitors, investors in the KPS, and remembers the question asked in so many films: who is the more dangerous monster, the kaiju or the humans?

REVIEW: The Kaiju Preservation Society has an inherently humorous premise, a conservation society dedicated to mountain-sized monsters. It was written by Scalzi in direct response to the COVID lockdowns and other unsettling developments of 2020, and even with the froth and silliness it addresses some of those issues on the sly, but much of the story is more about that froth and lightness, with frequent banter and one-liners and callbacks to books, movies, and video games. The whole, of course, is an homage to kaiju movies. He even offers speculation on how a creature as big as a kaiju could even survive when, by our world's physics and biological rules, they should collapse under their own weight before taking a single step toward Tokyo... speculation that does come into play in the plot eventually, but which also eats a lot of page time (as well as providing a lot of dialog into which to inject more humorous banter and references). It was fun, true, with a bit of sense of wonder about it, but after a while I started hoping for a little more actual plot or something like character development. It's past the halfway point before the story, such as it is, begins to kick into an actual gear, though even in the buildup to the climax the characters just can't stop with the page-padding banter. I also could've used a little more description of the kaiju themselves; part of what makes those movies fun is the weird creature designs, and I wanted to "see" the monsters here, too, but they're mostly considered too immense and alien for more than the broadest of descriptors. I almost forgave it those minor frustrations, but ultimately felt the froth-to-substance ratio skewed a little too far to the former, like Scalzi was strutting and mugging and grinning at his own clever lines. Clever as those lines were, I still found myself wanting more actual story by the end, enough to ultimately shave that half-star from the rating.

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