The verdict
A short, funny, generous novel that plays a ridiculous premise absolutely straight. Read it when you want science fiction that is kind rather than bleak.
Quick facts
- Author
- John Scalzi
- First published
- 2022
- Series
- Standalone
- Awards
- Shortlisted for the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel
- Best for
- Readers who want a fast, funny science fiction novel in an evening
- Skip it if
- You want bleak, rigorous or hard science fiction
Author John Scalzi
The Kaiju Preservation Society is John Scalzi’s lightest novel. A laid-off food delivery driver in pandemic New York takes a job looking after enormous animals on another version of Earth, and the animals turn out to be the straightforward part of the job.
The idea behind it
The premise is a joke that the book commits to completely: what if the enormous monsters were not a threat but a conservation problem? The Kaiju Preservation Society is exactly what its name says. It is an organisation looking after a population of vast creatures in a place where the ecology produced them naturally, and its work is closer to wildlife management than to monster hunting.
What makes that work is the tone. Jamie Gray, the narrator, is a normal person in a bad year. The pandemic has flattened his career, he has been driving for a food delivery app, and the job offer arrives at the exact moment he has nothing else. His reaction to the whole situation is the reader’s reaction: this is absurd, and then it is just work with unusual hazards.
Scalzi wrote it during the early pandemic and it reads like a deliberate act of kindness. It is short, it is funny, and it is genuinely nice about its characters. Nobody in it is a monster in the human sense, and the book has no interest in punishing the reader.
The story, spoiler-light
Jamie goes into a six-month performance review expecting to be told he is doing well, and comes out with nothing. That is the setup, and the book handles it with more bite than you might expect for a comic novel, because the specific humiliation of that scene is real and recognisable. The escape route arrives through an old acquaintance, and it leads to a job that cannot be explained in a normal conversation.
Once Jamie is on site, the novel becomes a workplace comedy with teeth. There is bureaucracy, there is equipment that does not work, there are colleagues with strong and incompatible opinions, and there are animals large enough that a mistake is fatal. The plot escalates into something with genuine jeopardy, and it manages that without losing the lightness, which is harder than it looks.
The cast is small and well drawn, and the book’s affection for them is the reason it works. If you have read Scalzi before, you will recognise the voice: quick dialogue, dry narration, and a lead who copes by being sardonic. If you have not, this is a good place to meet it.
What makes it science fiction
The mechanism is an alternate Earth connected to ours, and the book is not especially interested in the physics of that. What it does care about is the biology, and it has fun with it: a world where the animals got very large, and where evolution produced a working ecology around them rather than a series of boss fights.
That reframing is the genuinely clever part. Kaiju in fiction are almost always a threat. Treating them as a species to be protected, with all the politics and compromises that conservation involves, gives an old genre image a new job. It is a good example of a comic premise being used to make a real point about how humans relate to enormous things they cannot control.
Who should read it, and who should give it a miss
- Read it if you want a fast, funny science fiction novel you can finish in an evening or two.
- Read it if you liked the idea of a monster story that is not really about monsters.
- Read it if you want a pandemic-era novel that is generous rather than grim.
- Give it a miss if you want bleak, rigorous or hard science fiction. This is none of those things.
- Give it a miss if you dislike quippy dialogue. The voice is the book.
Where to start, and what to read next
It is a standalone, so there is nothing to read first. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel, which is a useful signal that the light tone is not the same thing as low quality.
If you enjoy it, Scalzi’s other work is the obvious next step, particularly his longer series for readers who want more room. For the same comic register with a different setting, the classic comic science fiction of the last few decades is worth exploring.
The verdict
The Kaiju Preservation Society does exactly one thing and does it very well: it is a warm, funny, fast novel with a ridiculous premise played straight. There is nothing cynical in it. It is the book equivalent of a good evening, and it was written to be one.
Read it when you want science fiction that is kind rather than bleak. Not every book needs to be difficult, and this one is not.
Frequently asked questions
Is it part of a series?
No. It is a standalone novel, and no prior reading is needed.
Is it suitable for readers new to science fiction?
Yes. It is short, funny and light on jargon, which makes it one of the easiest entry points into the genre.
Is it about the pandemic?
It opens during the pandemic and uses the disruption as its starting point, but it is not a novel about the pandemic. It is a novel about escaping one kind of life for another.