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Book notes - The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi
Another enjoyable book, which I read in what were probably ideal circumstances, stuck on a bus going very slowly through Ambleside in the aftermath of an accident. It's definitely a journey book - light and undemanding, fun and pacy, but with not a lot of reread value. Coincidently I had just started listening to his Redshirts, a spoof on the Star Trek motif of red-shirted ensigns always dying on away missions. Redshirts, I think, does have reread value and is a more intricately plotted book.
I think a lot of the reason for this is discussed by John Scalzi himself in his concluding author's notes - he had planned an entirely different and much darker novel, but was overtaken by the covid pandemic. He himself was unwell for many months and found himself unable to write to the original plan. The Kaiju Preservation Society emerged from all this, and was written as a kind of let's-get-back-in-the-saddle book.
The basic plot is a parallel Earth in which enormous and ravenous creatures - kind of ultra-dinosaurs if you like - roam the planet. The protagonists are there to study and investigate them and their world, and there's a bunch of military and big-business bad guys who are out to exploit them in various ways. There's a bit of technobabble which establishes in reasonably consistent way how the connection between the worlds came about, its limitations, and why out of all possible parallel Earths, only this one is known. But if he wanted to write more novels in this universe it would be easy to imagine another connection to another alternate.
Who would like it? Well, as mentioned it's a journey or holiday book, and pretty much perfect for that. It's hard to imagine anyone reading it a second time as (IMHO) there isn't enough depth to draw you back in for another round. But in the right circumstances lots of people might find it fun.
You don't need to have much familiarity with SF, though there are lots of allusions to films and streamed series to establish other parallels between the world of the book and our world. But if you don't know these, it's OK as they are not plot-critical in any way, and most of them are explained just in case. Some aspects are easier for an American rather than international audience to get, for example there are increasing references to the 2020 presidential election. It's fairly clear where John Scalzi's political sympathies lie, and where he thinks unscrupulous big business might place their own bets, but for me these kind of intruded into the book too much.
