Scalzi is a fascinating author. He came into the trade relatively later in life than the typical writer, but he positively exploded on the scene when he did.
By his own account, the theme for his first novel, Old Man’s War, was the product of him standing in his local bookstore and watching where the people who looked like him went. Maybe no great surprise but the balding, middle-aged, white men had a tendency toward military sci-fi. So Scalzi followed the age-old wisdom and sat down to “write what he knows” - which, by his own admission, was absolutely not anything “military” but he’d cut his teeth on enough Heinlein, Herbert, and Star Trek (as his excellent, hilarious, Hugo-winning Redshirts demonstrates) that he managed to do the impossible and break out as an author on his first novel.
Kaiju Preservation Society was written during the COVID lockdowns, following the J6 insurrection, and in the wake of a tremendous personal, professional loss for Scalzi: more than 3,400 words of his novel-in-progress were simply gone. As he tells it in the don’t-skip acknowledgements for KPS, he ended up writing this novel the day after his heart-wrenching existential crisis of an email informing his editor he had no novel to deliver.
It’s a really good author acknowledgment section. Read it after you finish the book.
The incredible thing about John Scalzi is his humor. The author of the foreword to one of his novels (shame on me for not remembering if it’s Starter Villain or Redshirts or something else entirely) reliably informs us of Scalzi’s personal awareness that “the failure state of comedy is ‘asshole’”. And one of the most remarkable qualities of Scalzi’s novels is the literal laugh-out-loud humor throughout, which has yet to decay into “asshole.”
Close followers of his blog (https://whatever.scalzi.com) probably know that he’s not shy about sharing his opinions. In this, too, he manages to avoid “asshole” while sharing important insights. Probably that’s not a universal quality, but he seems like he intends to be a decent and respectable person who genuinely likes - as well as loves - his family. Even if his culinary sense is beyond the pale.
Kaiju Preservation Society is hilarious, tense, action-packed, and fun. It’s packed with rich exposition, rigorous world-building, realistic-and-realized affable characters, and great storytelling.
It’s a fast read, because Scalzi simply does not waste time belaboring the enumeration of stupid, pointless details about royal banquets, naval maneuvers, or how his worlds work. Character interactions are the vehicle for world building, not interminable paragraphs of impeccable canon. People get things wrong, they over-simplify, talk over people’s heads, crack jokes, break rules, over-react, and generally *act like real people" - while literal godzillas traipse through the foreground.