I admit I don’t read a lot of modern science fiction, and that my knowledge of the kaiju genre is limited to Godzilla and Pacific Rim. When I saw the title The Kaiju Preservation Society (KPS), however, I got so curious I borrowed it immediately. This has also been my introduction to the author John Scalzi, who is a pretty fun guy.

The novel opens in 2020 New York, right at the beginning of the COVID lockdown, with our protagonist Jamie Gray working for füdmüd, a food delivery company with a comically evil boss. He gave up on an academic career for fear of stagnation, and now lives in a tiny apartment with Brent and Brent’s boyfriend, Laertes. Money to pay rent will soon run out, but Jamie refuses to let his friends move back in with a bigoted family.

During this rough period, Jamie unexpectedly reconnects with Tom Stevens, an acquaintance from college. After learning about Jamie’s plight over the course of multiple deliveries, Tom tells him about KPS, the “secret” animal rights organization he works for. They are in need of a last-minute employee replacement and Jamie accepts. KPS pays extravagant amounts of money, enough to solve all his problems for the rest of his life. All in exchange for being isolated from society for six months a year and getting 20+ vaccines in order to engage with “large animals”.

As you can tell from the title, Jamie’s new job involves kaiju, otherworldly creatures of impossible proportions, completely unique from anything on our Earth.

Scalzi’s worldbuilding is absolutely fascinating, mixing real science with the fantastical and Godzilla lore. Nuclear blasts cause the barriers between universes to tear. There is a universe where humanity never happened and the world is instead roamed by gargantuan creatures. They seek our nuclear power for sustenance. They are living nuclear reactors. (Who knows, perhaps some Japanese fishermen, following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saw a kaiju slip into our world and rumour got all the way to Tomoyuki Tanaka, the Japanese film producer who created Godzilla for the screen.)

KPS’s mission is to look after these kaiju, doing everything from tagging them, cleaning them of parasites the size of rottweilers, using pheromones to help them mate because “kaiju are the biggest, stupidest pandas you will ever meet” (page 78), and defending them from secret government “tourists”. They protect our world from kaiju, and the kaiju from us. There is a strong emphasis on biology, ecology and environmentalism, with in-depth explanations and theories as to how the kaiju function.

Jamie’s coworkers are a very international community. To my delight, there is a character from my country as well: the biologist Ion Ardeleanu. All of them have an extremely casual attitude to working with monsters the size of cities. Your aircraft being chased by one of them, or having a handful of trees thrown at you, is a standard occurrence.

The unbelievable being treated as every day and normal is one of my favourite tropes of fiction! I want to praise Scalzi in this regard, as KPS really does come across as a group of people who have experienced so much that nothing surprises them anymore. Theirs is not a blasé pessimistic kind of bluntness, but a warm one. They are always cracking jokes and easing the newbies into their roles. Jamie and the other new recruits are to spend half a year with nobody but themselves, so there is a mutual effort to create a friendly atmosphere, which is comforting to see after everything endured with füdmüd.

Being so used to their unusual workplace also makes them have comically underwhelming reactions to Jamie’s shock. Yeah, a kaiju can explode with the force of a nuclear meltdown, but you will be safe in your quarters! No need to panic!

The story, itself, is very fast-paced and light hearted. The language is a little corny, but that can be attributed to Jamie’s first-person narration, matching the way he speaks to everybody: casual, unrefined, sometimes childish, often vulgar. He is a huge nerd and there are very many references to pop culture, appropriate for the time frame but also kind of mortifying. Oh God, did we really talk like that back in 2020?

I like Jamie, even though he often made me cringe. He is a good person with a strong sense of fairness, who deeply cares for everyone around him, human or not. He got the job at KPS to help his roommates, as well as himself, and once he arrived he was more than willing to risk his life for his colleagues.

That being said, there are a few things I don’t like about The Kaiju Preservation Society.

As I mentioned above, Jamie made me cringe, and so did every other character. A lot of it can be chalked up to my humour not matching Scalzi’s, but it also felt like he was trying too hard to be funny. Long dialogues full of witty one-liners, quips and constant banter (and I do mean constant) get very tiring very fast. Towards the end it becomes grating.

Another issue I have is that everybody is too similar to Jamie. There isn’t a lot of diversity when it comes to personalities, or speech-patterns. If it isn’t specified who is speaking, it is difficult to tell characters apart. Juggling multiple characters in group conversations is a disorientating reading experience, made already unpleasant by the stupid things characters say.

Overall, I enjoyed reading The Kaiju Preservation Society. The worldbuilding was excellent. The dialogues . . . could have been trimmed. Still, it was a fun book to sit down with at the end of each day, and its flaws weren’t so severe that they took away from my entertainment. Perhaps somebody with a different sense of humour will give it a full five stars.