Just before the lockdowns of 2020, protagonist Jamie Ward unceremoniously loses his job at a tech start up, and is forced to scratch a living as a ‘food deliverator’ for the very company that just fired him. A chance doorstep meeting with an old acquaintance gives him a new opportunity to work for the society of the title, where his can-do attitude and knowledge of sci-fi trivia are the main qualifications.
The title of the book explains the premise - the KPS that Jamie is recruited into are tasked with studying, understanding and preserving giant Kaiju creatures. Quite how this comes about is a neat twist on the Godzilla movie mythos and the book moves at a rapid clip as Scalzi gives a good sci-fi based explanation of what these creatures are, the eco-systems that surround them and the way that they interact with the world that we know. Setup out of the way, the plot kicks in with a few twists and turns, and some satisfying action scenes that give you all the giant stompy monster action that you want in a short novel.
According to afterward to this book, the author John Scalzi started work on a ‘dark, complex, ambitious’ book around the end of 2020, still struggling with the after effects of that dreadful year. After writing a few thousand words a computer crash and lost manuscript caused him to have something of an epiphany and he sat down and wrote this book instead, which is a good job because it’s a lot of fun and a nice distraction from the state of the world right now.
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