The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization.” Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on.
The Kaiju Preservation Society
What Tom doesn’t tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at at least. In an alternate dimension, massive dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm and human-free world. They’re the universe’s largest and most dangerous panda and they’re in trouble.
It’s not just the Kaiju Preservation Society whose found their way to the alternate world. Others have, too. And their carelessness could cause millions back on our Earth to die.
Different but good!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏
Character development: ☹️☺️😍😄
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Solo Narration
The Hero: Jamie Grey – he was a former doctoral candidate that quit his studies to get a marketing job at a food delivery service called Food Mood in New York. He was planning to knock the CEO dead at his six-month performance review in 2020. He wanted to improve the app and their relationships with their clients because Covid-19 was starting to hit the news, and he figured there would be a lockdown. He had a lot of ideas about lowering costs, paying more to deliverers, kind of like spending more to make more in order to compete with grubHub and Door Dash type apps. Turns out his boss just wanted to demote him to a delivery driver. Jamie quit instead, saying he would rather die.
The Story: Jamie went home to the apartment he shared with a few friends, only to find out that his roommates were leaving him with the lease which he now could not afford. Suffice it to say, he had no choice but to take the delivery job. Six months later in the midst of the lockdown, he was delivering food one night to a nice condo in a new building and it turned out the guy he was delivering to was a former college classmate named Tom. Tom ordered quite a bit, so they often talked in the next few weeks. One day Tom started talking about his job with an NGO. Tom tells Jamie that he would soon be going out of town for work. Jamie is about to lose his delivery job, and Tom tells him about an opportunity at his company. He says it is an animal rights organization for large animals and need a replacement for a team member that has Covid.
Jamie finds out that the company is called KPS and he needed to be able to lift heavy things. He is offered the job and is told the animals are very large wild animals, and he has to follow the instructions he is given to the letter. He is also told that when they are away in the field, they are really away from everything including cell service, internet, and streaming services. Also, he can’t talk to anyone about what he does. Before he knows it, Jamie is off to the far corners of the world as far as he knew to lift heavy things in service of some type of large animals, possibly polar bears or seals.
Of course, by the title of this book, the reader obviously knows that KPS stands for Kaiju Preservation Society so all the mystery and intrigue with respect to where they were going and what they would be doing makes a bit of sense. Though I did think it was fun. The big reveal when they got to where they were going, was pretty awesome as well.
“It made the Amazon rainforest look like a parking lot.”
“This is Greenland, it’s just on a slightly different earth.”
“You have no idea how difficult it was for me to not say, ‘Welcome to Jurassic Park!’ to all of you just now.”
“Jurassic Park didn’t end well for anyone in it, book or movie.”
“The last Gold Team geologist decided to retire after we basically had to reattach a limb. For a second time.” “Oh.” “Well, that’s not completely accurate. It wasn’t the same limb twice. They were different limbs.”
“What we do is more than keep the Kaiju on this side of the fence, we also keep others out.”
“What’s the RLH protocol?” I asked. “It means run like hell,”
“So we’re the monster police, too,” I said to Tom. “Correct,” he replied. “The only real question is, who are the monsters?”
“at least a couple of these are going to make you feel ravenously hungry. Go ahead and eat all you want, but avoid excessively fatty foods, since one of these is going to tell your body to purge fats in a way that absolutely challenges normal sphincter control.” “That’s … not great.” “It’s a mess. Seriously, don’t even think about trying to fart for the next eighteen hours. It’s not a fart. You will regret it.”
“There is a certain type of person who feels like they must be armed at every moment of the day or else the world will come for them in some way. Back home, this is very much not a good way to live. Here, however, outside of the base, it is the only way you are going to survive.”
The world building was pretty good. I would have liked the Kaiju to be explained a bit better, because some of them I just couldn’t picture in my mind. However, their biology and the way the world worked was very detailed. I liked the fact that the team needed a nuclear reaction to get from world to world. The Kaiju had evolved in a way that they were basically nuclear powered, so when something happened to them and they were dying, they basically became a nuclear bomb. Then all the other Kaiju were drawn to the site to feed, but the fact that there was a nuclear explosion thinned the veil between worlds. So, the teams had to do their best to keep the Kaiju away lest they somehow escape into our world. It’s interesting that the Kaiju function like living nuclear reactors, and that their biology plays into the mechanics of world-hopping. The concept of thinning the veil between worlds due to a nuclear explosion is such a creative twist!
This was a bit like Jurassic Park, in that the world is extremely dangerous, and it wasn’t just the Kaiju that were dangerous. Because of their size, they barely noticed people, but the parasites on them are as big as some of our biggest predator animals, not to mention the flora and fauna of the jungle. The insects were a huge problem, there were large crabs that like to jump on people and it wasn’t just one of them. They basically swarmed. That kind of unpredictable, chaotic environment definitely adds to the tension. The team works there, so though everything is so dangerous, they have to deal with it. Their time at the base, reminded me of the kind of camaraderie and fun that military men and women share with each other when they are at their bases between dangerous missions.
This audiobook was told in the main characters point of view via solo narration and was narrated by Will Wheaton. He isn’t one of my favorite narrators, but he has a very expressive voice which I like, and he is a good actor. It’s funny, I think he almost had a deeper voice when he was younger, in Stand by Me, which is one of my favorite movies.
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