We’re in a fascinating moment.
In past eras someone like Dante Alighieri would throw real life famous (and infamous) people into Hell, and trust that his readers would know them; John Milton could fill his poems with characters from every page of the Hebrew Bible; Neil Gaiman could fill The Sandman with both historical figures AND the superheroic pantheon of DC (who were, after all, real in the world of The Sandman) and trust that his readers would get at least some of each strand of reference. But this was for the reader, a little bit of spot-the-reference scattered across a narrative so that people could feel that particular fizz of recognition that comes with being part of a club.
I’d estimate about 20 years ago now it became normal for creators to acknowledge the pop culture that was informing the thing you were currently reading or watching. In Jurassic World, park worker Lowery Cruthers has a classic Jurassic Park shirt and a bunch of dinos on his desk—in his world the Tragic Events of Jurassic Park are part of history, but his merch all looks like stuff we can own in our world, because he’s also kind of the audience proxy, and we get a different fizz of recognition from seeing him with our merch. Jimmy Buffet cameos as himself running out of a Margaritaville outpost, frozen drinks in hand, because of course there’d be a Margaritaville outpost at the shiny new Jurassic Park, and of course Jimmy Buffet would actually be vacationing there.
We’ve hit a point in nerd shit where the characters in the book have seen all the movies, read all the comics, slumped in front of various gaming consoles for entire weekends. Fictional characters—they’re just like us! In John Scalzi’s latest novel, The Kaiju Preservation Society, we meet a cast of characters who have seen Godzilla (the good version, not just the Raymond Burr edit) and Jurassic Park, played Doom, read Neal Stephenson, and spent lots of time doomscrolling Twitter. The book begins in New York—our New York, just as COVID-19 is about to swamp the city. Jamie Gray is working for a delivery startup called füdmüd, and the way we’re clued into the fact that her boss is terrible is that he thinks he coined the term “Deliverator”. When Jamie tries to correct him he dismisses her, despite the fact that she wrote her master’s thesis on science fictional dystopias. And I mean he literally dismisses her, and soon she’s facing the pandemic as an unemployed academic dropout who’s down to her last two equally-broke roommates.
Which is where the gig with the Kaiju Preservation Society comes in.
Without spoiling anything: Jamie Gray joins a super secret organization dedicated to the preservation of kaiju. You might ask—what the hell can a kaiju need preserving from? Over the course of the book Scalzi shows us some of the dangers these creatures face, which include their own panda-like lack of mating initiative, and, obviously, humans. Along the way Jamie becomes part of a team of people, mostly scientists, who hail from a bunch of different cultural backgrounds (Aparna [Biology], Kahurangi [O Chem and geology], and Niamh [astronomy and physics]) but all trade in the wit and inside jokes that make Scalzi’s books so much fun. But the larger joy of reading the book is the feeling of being embedded in the team, and following along on both their “normal” workdays—which are still pretty extraordinary because freaking KAIJU—and the far more dangerous plot that kicks into gear halfway through the book.
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The Kaiju Preservation Society
In Scalzi’s world, you can spot an asshole because not only do they not get the sci-fi references, but they’re not willing to shut up and be educated by the nerds around them. On the other hand, sometimes you get lucky and find yourself surrounded not just by nerds, but by GOOD nerds. In Jamie’s case, joining the KPS means that she’s part of a team of people who have advanced scientific degrees, but who respect her work in the humanities (and more important, respect her as a person) who are all working together to protect terrifying beasts. Not because those beasts turn out to be cuddly or useful to humanity, but simply because everyone’s committed to the idea that the kaiju have a right to live their lives in their environment without being hunted or exploited.
I am a person who loves animals, but I love animals because I know I am one. I don’t expect a cat to act like a fish, or either of them to act like a bonobo, or for any of those three to act like a human. And one of the best things about the KPS, both as a book and as a fictional organization, is that neither Scalzi nor any of his characters expect the kaiju to be anything other than what they are. The kaiju are the size of mountains. Some of them fly. They don’t really clock the tiny humans that occasionally fly helicopters near them—those humans are not even as large as the symbiotic parasites that swarm their skin, so why would they? And as for the other creatures that live on the jungle floor? Humans are food that they are, in fact, always in the mood for. One of the best setpieces in a book full of them is the moment Jamie gets to encounter life on the ground, and comes face-to-face with just how small and edible she actually is…but also how important it is for her to remember that in order to help keep her team safe.
Which leads me to the thing I liked most about this book, which is that it’s beyond competence porn, it’s sort of support network porn? Once Jamie gets free of her terrible Large Adult Son of a boss, she is embraced by her KPS team. Most of them are scientists, and she keeps noticing that she might be the only one lacking a doctorate, but it doesn’t matter. They respect her, and listen to her ideas even though she’s “just a grunt”. In fact everyone on the team listens to everyone else, from Base Commander Brynn MacDonald to the helicopter pilots to the geologists. They tease each other relentlessly, but all of the jokes are built on a foundation of assuming the best about each other. Everyone trusts everyone else to work hard, to do their best. The Kaiju Preservation Society is “Good Faith Argument: The Book.” And holy shit is that refreshing and fun to read, especially after the last few years. But more than being a fun conceit, this aspect of the book sets the central conflict up perfectly, because when there are problems they stem from people who act in bad faith.
A point that’s made repeatedly is that the kaiju are part of an ecosystem, and they are themselves an ecosystem. Crawling with parasites that seem gross on first blush, but provide vital, if unconscious, services to their hosts. The kaiju themselves can only thrive in their world’s environment, and their biology and habits are a core component of their ecosystem. In the same way, the KPS are an ecosystem. Each team member fulfills specific roles, but everyone is also allowed to stretch and grow beyond those roles. They work with each other and hear each other out—and they do that while wrangling enormous monsters and evading giant insects and doing science and providing readers with a fantastic time in another world.
The Kaiju Preservation Society is published by Tor Books.
Get a taste of the novel with the Society’s Workplace Guidelines for new recruits.
Is Jamie female? I read the character as male. Did Scalzi do the thing where the main character’s gender is ambiguous throughout (as in Lock In), and I never noticed? I’d re-read to check, but I have too much else on Mt. Tsundoku these days.
I enjoyed the book, but suffered from a fridge logic attack when I was done: it’s vital to the plot that the kaiju become Hiroshima bombs when they get too sick or injured — but getting uranium to do the Hiroshima thing takes a great deal of effort. Your average uranium reactor cannot explode like the Hiroshima bomb. The most that ought to happen to the kaiju is that their guts get hot enough to melt out of their bodies and start melting out a hole in the ground straight down. (As in the movie The China Syndrome, which Scalzi is old enough to remember.)
I could be mistaken, but iirc, Jamie’s gender is never mentioned in the book, and it seemed fairly intentional on the part of the author to allow the reader proxy to be non-binary or either gender so male, female, and non-binary readers alike could imagine themselves in Jamie’s place.
@1 I figure it has something to do with how uranium is stored and regulated inside the Kaiju’s body. That the normal process of feeding uranium into the reaction has a failure more of getting all the uranium in one place when the Kaiju is dying. Though you remind me that even a small nuke needs to have the uranium reach critical mass very very quickly. I guess if the uranium was stored under pressure it could be accelerated quickly enough?
Re: Jamie’s gender. I also read Jamie as male, but I’m a male reader, so I’m sure that’s my bias playing a role. I think it’s great that an ambiguous name let’s the reader decide how they want to envision the story. And it’s typical of Scalzi, who deliberately gives minimal character description to allow the reader to envision characters how they like, at least to some extent. Here’s a lengthy quote from him on the subject from a 2015 WaPo interview:
I also Read Jamie, or in my case listened to, Jamie as male so I would lean to gender ambiguous nature of the protagonist. The one thing I do want to add is that if you are a fan of audio books and use audible the audio book of this novel is preformed and yes preformed is an apt description over read in this case by the beloved Whil Wheaton and he does an amazing job I can’t recommend it enough. Not a paid add or anything just thoroughly enjoyed it one of the best audiobook listening experiences as far as the performance standpoint I’ve had in years.
but getting uranium to do the Hiroshima thing takes a great deal of effort
If you have the right type of Uranium, it doesn’t really take that much effort for it to go boom. The Hiroshima bomb was just two chunks of Uranium with a mechanism to push them together at the right moment. After that, the reaction took over. Now, luckily for us, refining the right kind of Uranium is very difficult, but maybe it’s not in the Kaiju world?
I want to point out to the reviewer that some readers of SF/F are not people who “have seen all the movies, read all the comics, slumped in front of various gaming consoles for entire weekends.” For instance, I’ve been to half a dozen WorldCons, but I’ve never done any of those things (in fact, I see about 2 movies a year that aren’t animated).
I don’t mind if some of a book’s characters are immersed in that culture. But I won’t enjoy a book where (a) all of the characters are that, and/or (b) you have to get the references to enjoy it. (However, Scalzi’s KPS is probably fine, if still not my cup of tea.)
I hope Tor-blog-reading authors and publishers take note!
@6:
Based on what I’ve read about A-bombs, you are understating the case a fair bit here. You have to push the chunks together really hard. Like, “propelled by explosives” hard, or at least gunpowder. Otherwise the start of the reaction blasts the chunks apart and you just get a fizzle, not a kiloton-level kaboom. That evolution would produce a mechanism to do that, unsuspends my disbelief — and I’m suspending disbelief in nuclear-powered alternate-dimension kaiju to start with, so I assert that I’m not being all that skeptical.
Based on what I’ve read about A-bombs, you are understating the case a fair bit here. You have to push the chunks together really hard.
Not hard — relatively fast. The uranium pieces of the Hiroshima bomb didn’t hit each other, they were two pieces (one part a tube like piece, the other a cylinder that fit into the tube) that slid together quickly. As you said, they have to come together before the reaction blows them apart. That speed works out to about 1000 feet per second. That’s bullet speed, but pretty slow (subsonic round, like those used with suppressors). I don’t think that something you could really manage in a garage lab, with some black powder and material from Home Depot qualifies as a “great deal of effort.”
I’m suspending disbelief in nuclear-powered alternate-dimension kaiju to start with, so I assert that I’m not being all that skeptical.
Fair enough. I think once you’ve managed the nuclear powered Kaiju the exploding nuclear powered Kaiju is hardly different.
By chance I just finished reading this today. A good, short, fast, and fun read. I would not take the physics of the thing too seriously, there’s just enough there to let you have fun with all the giant monsters without feeling guilty about it.
It would work nicely as a film or an anime, although as a film it might be hard to keep the light hearted tone with all the man eating monsters about.
Fun! Fun! Fun! .. until someone takes your Kaiju away! (Sorry Beach Boys)
I read Jamie as a female and never realized that gender wasn’t specified even though I was impressed with Scalzi for writing a person who lifts things as a female. How odd that feels now. I really liked that the main character wasn’t a brilliant scientist because that person could be me (about 30 years ago). This, in my opinion, is a wonderfully deep story told in a light manner. I am a fan of the author anyway (can we please have another story in the Lock In universe?), but this is something special even for him.
I finished KPS yesterday, and I though Scalzi was doing another non-gendered lead, but I definitely remember reading Jamie Grey referred to as “she”. I’d look up the page number, but the book is at home and I am not.
My husband read the book and I listened to the audio. We were discussing it and halfway through the book we realized he thought Jaime was she and I thought he. I don’t know if I thought he because Jamie was hired to lift things or because the book was being read by Wil. It would be an interesting experiment to have a woman read it and then ask listeners if Jamie is male or female.
WRT Jamie’s gender, I admit I assumed male. I was a bit annoyed that one specific character was referred to as they right from the moment they first appeared w/o establishing their preference while other characters got gendered pronouns but that was a very minor quibble and it could be easily assumed that the various characters established their preference off page. Singular they is fine, but using it for one character felt a bit clunky and I think when they were introduced, it got overused just a bit where pronouns could have been avoided. But after a few more pages, the flow seemed more natural, not sure if it was just me or if Scalzi tried just a tiny bit too hard with the introduction.
Note: even if Jamie is male, the other “grunt” is identified as female, and much better at heavy objects.
loved it
on third reread
Did not sweat the small stuff like exploding Kaiju
Scalzi hand waves ALL the physics, lampshades it then gets it drunk
Kaiju able to throw trees without an elaborate counter balance system or rocket engines in their limbs was my flying snowman moment
Making the Kaiju tentacled HP Lovecraft horrors helps, but Krakens / Cthulhu are supported by water / sixth dimension and are traditionally very slow
But check your brain at the door and it is an awesome Saturday Afternoon TV Movie
FIN
I loved this as well, it was such a fun romp. I assumed that Jamie was male, too, which probably says more about my genre expectations than anything else. If Jamie’s gender reads as female, then the ‘I lift things’ jokes are even funnier.
I was absolutely fine with Niamh being referred to as ‘they’ without a big deal being made of it – that’s how it should be, in an ideal world, after all. I didn’t actually notice until after they had been on-screen for a bit – I was more focused on reading about an actual realistically characterised Irish person, for a change, myself. This tallies with the interview with Scalzi above – I ended up much more invested in Niamh’s story for this reason, despite Jamie being the viewpoint character, as I had assumed Jamie was a default American man. I
Just finished this the other night and loved it! Might reread it right away…
I was absolutley positive Jamie was female, from the very start. I was really surprised to see some of the other commenters certain Jamie was male. It just never occurred to me Jamie was anything other than female. But now that I think about it, I don’t recall any gender references. But I am also cis-gender female. So maybe I just saw myself in the character, as someone above mentioned. This is pure Scalzi, allowing us to see ourselves in the story.
Guess I really should do that reread, to see if I can see any gender clues. Not, of course, that it matters. Which is also vintage Scalzi.