Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm on page 32 and having a fabulous time, wish you were here.

This is the Scalzi-est sounding Scalzi book so far with lines such as "It's like the Foreign Legion for nerds." I love the representation that neither defaults to straight white dude, nor has to point out that there are non-white characters by describing their skin tones (and only their skin tones) in terms of comestibles. The utter lack of physical description is so refreshing: I am anosmic and aphantastic and tone deaf, so all that sensory stuff is just filler to me anyway. Hmm, maybe that's why I enjoy reading plays, and why everyone enjoys reading Austen.

Also, it's time to reread Snow Crash apparently, since I can't recall anything except one character name, and yes, it is an excellent name, but not enough to conjure with.

***

It will no doubt be the work of future graduate students to review the books that were written during 2020 and 2021 and fashion some kind of taxonomy for them: the ones that completely ignored the pandemic, those that acknowledged it; those that focused on any of the myriad shocks people suffered, from the intensely personal to the global, as well as other recurring themes or motifs or subtext that I can't imagine. It'll be interesting work, if you enjoy a dissertation. There will also no doubt be a lot of popular work on the art and culture of the plague years. Whatevs. This novel including the acknowledgements will be chief among my personal memories of the books read and written in those years. Scalzi is just so damn entertaining to me that he is a natural choice for diverting text. He is also a person with an amazingly lengthy and public diary, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is the Whatever that lives longest in people's interest. I would be surprised if I get to see this prediction come true because, fifty years on from now would be an impressive age to achieve as a person of no wealth or importance or even decent insurance in these United States of which mine is only among the best of those still considered Southern, generally ranked worst in everything, and boy does it not seem likely that anything is going to improve in the near future, because Citizen's United, and gerrymandering, and a Supreme Court majority so partisan and extreme as to be laughable if one could stop crying. Perhaps something good will come of all this and a way will be found to actually pass the laws that the vast majority of the citizenry are begging for, like another assault weapons ban, and an end to the death penalty, and states actually having to equitably pay for the public education they are legally required to provide, and the right of people to make their own decisions about their bodies, who they are, and who they want to marry. Sorry for that digression.

Anyway, Scalzi writes a damn good story, lots of damn good stories in fact, and if you haven't read any of them then you should. Fun for the whole family. And this is one that is going to make a fun summer movie one day.

Library copy

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