Given the last time I tried, I grumped all over Redshirts - a perfectly harmless, funny little thing that for whatever reason struck me badly that day - this is not really a bad thing.
But time passes - it wounds all heels, as they say - and I find myself much more in favor of quick and funny these days. Call it ironic if you want: I might. So I figured I should come back, and The Kaiju Preservation Society looked very much like the "quick and funny" kind of thing I wanted.
And, you know, it was. (I almost want to go back to Redshirts and see if, as I suspect, my initial reaction was one-half "Oh God, no more vaguely Star Trekky light SF, it burns us" and one-half "Scalzi could be an awesome serious writer if he just put his mind to it, and this pains me.")
I don't expect to write a lot here - soufflés are meant to be eaten, not deconstructed - but I can tell you a little bit about KPS.
It was very much a novel of a moment: written at the end of 2020 and beginning of '21, set almost exactly at the same time. Parts of it, especially the beginning, might read like a time capsule in a decade or two - it would be nice if they do, actually.
Hey, here's a funny thing. I wrote this, disparagingly, about Redshirts:
a quick, easy read, full of snappy dialogue delivered by characters without too many attributes to confuse the reader and delivered, for the most part, in little-described interior spaces, so as to keep the narrative from being cluttered up by action or description
KPS is the same way...but I'd put that much more positively: it knows what it wants to do, how it wants to tell this story, and has an Elmore Leonard-level awareness of how to stay out of its own way while getting there. Scalzi is really good at leaving out the stuff that people will skip. (Younger Me didn't skip anything, but that guy was also a bit of a pill.)
So KPS zooms along, telling the story of Jamie Gray, a busted doctoral candidate who went to work for a startup in NYC at what turned out to be the worst possible time and found himself fired by Rob Sanders, head of the appallingly-named and cynically positioned delivery app füdmüd and possibly the most punchable billionaire asshole in fiction since GTA V's Devin Weston. Jamie is out of luck until he runs into an old acquaintance who recruits him for a secretive organization known by its initials, KPS, and which does something vague with "large animals."
You've read the title: you know what it stands for. Scalzi wastes no time in getting Jamie to an alternate Earth with actual mountain-sized monsters and a camp of scientists and others that study them. Jamie is the token normal guy - the humanities major with a masters in a crew of hard-science doctorates who know their esoteric specialties very well. The plot from that point is mostly day-to-day - I'm trying to avoid saying "thin" or something similar; this is a book about being thrown into a strange situation, not about a specific sequence of events - but it does build, and Scalzi pulls a dramatic climax and satisfying ending out of what looks for a while like occasionally dangerous but day-to-day scientific work.
The science is handwavy, of course. It's about Kaiju. Scalzi gets some good handwaves in, though - it's all plausible as "expert dumbing things down for a layman" level details, and that's exactly what he needs.
I was looking for quick and funny; KPS delivered. Can't say any better than that, can I?
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