We’ve got a few more days before the end of the year to fit in some 2022 books, and John Scalzi’s COVID-era adventure has been showing up on quite a few Best-Of lists
The start of the pandemic in early 2020 was a difficult time to navigate: lockdowns pending, fear of contagion all around, businesses closing temporarily or shutting down completely. It’s hard to imagine anything that could make the situation worse.
Walking into a performance review expecting a promotion and then having your asshole boss fire you out of nowhere? That would do it.
Even a crappy fourth-floor apartment is expensive in New York, and Jamie Grey isn’t one to let roommates Brent and Laertes crawl back to their judgey families to wait out the pandemic. So, swallowing all pride, Jamie accepts a job in food delivery and works in mostly sullen misery until a customer makes a very interesting offer.
“The NGO I work for. It’s an animal rights organization. Large animals.”
When I saw the title, my first thought was that this book would be about a team of plucky environmentalists trying to protect poor misunderstood Godzilla from the big-bad military. Played for pathos if Godzilla really was misunderstood, or comedy if they’re screaming “ENDANGERED SPECIES” while it’s in the process of destroying Tokyo.
The book that we actually get is a lot more complicated, subtle, more than occasionally madcap, and all-around fun (Scalzi’s afterward goes into detail about what was going on as the book was being written, or rather as the book that was supposed to released next was being written, and how much he desperately needed something light-hearted to work on). We have plenty of Scalzi’s witty back-and-forth dialog (scientists bickering about crazy hypothesis, a video game-playing roommate that I’m fairly sure we only see as shouted comments from another room). There’s also the highly amusing moments where newcomers to the Kaiju Preservation Society learn just how bafflingly weird their situation is. The section where Jamie is debriefed on the dozen or so mandatory vaccines and their side effects is just gold, full of non sequiturs delivered by a doctor who’s given enough of them to be bored by it.
“Also, you may find the color blue giving you a migraine for the next couple of days.”
Scalzi uses an interesting character to immerse the reader in a world where Kaiju not only exist, but are studied with government funding. Jamie isn’t a super-scientist or action hero or even someone with a science degree, just a part-time delivery person who jumped at a job opening for someone to “lift stuff”. It made it quite easy to put myself into Jamie’s position, someone who can at least understand manual labor, but who also needs to have every bit of the science explained.
(There’s also the fact that readers of any gender can identify with Jamie. Have you noticed I’ve never said whether Jamie’s male or female? Not an accident; I’m almost positive it’s never stated one way or another.)
The science behind the Kaiju and the alternate-reality where they live is also immersive, as well as fascinating and sometimes a bit hand-wavey, with a touch of meta. This is a present-day world with all of the usual hazards like COVID, start-up tech bros, and truly awful politicians who are never named. But it also has all of the present day fiction, and that includes Godzilla movies which were somehow inspired by the actual Kaiju that nuclear testing didn’t wake up or create, they summoned.
The scientists are told over and over to not think of the Kaiju as animals because they aren’t. They aren’t anything like any other living creature, and they are quite literally too big to actually exist. But they do. And their biology is bizarre, and their reproductive process is violent and predatory, and they are literally nuclear-powered, and their existence is impossible to ignore and somehow completely hushed up on our side of reality, and sometimes Scalzi has to get a little tongue-in-cheek so the reader can just accept things and move on to the next part of the story.
“It’s a reverse lampshade,” I said.
“I don’t know what ‘lampshade’ means here, much less its reverse.”
“It’s a literary term. It means calling attention to something improbable, acknowledging its improbability in the text, and then moving on.”
“And that works?”
“More than you might think.”
This book is one of the many I’ve come across that I would love to see as a movie. Ooo, or maybe a TV series (Netflix, something else for you to cancel?). So many of the scenes in this book are just delightful, whether it’s an impromptu celebration with coworkers getting drunk and giving ridiculous awards (The Ancient and Sacred Order of the Tasty Snack Cake), or a brutal verbal takedown of some smug jackass who desperately deserves it, or badass scenes of fighting human-sized parasites or being chased by an amorous mountain with teeth. In fact all of the scenes with the Kaiju are cinematic, up to and including what happens when they die.
So here is what happens when a kaiju explodes with the force of a nuclear bomb.
As with many books, movies, and TV shows that feature a terrifying unstoppable force of nature, the actual antagonists here? Other humans. We’re talking about nuclear-powered living creatures and research that’s government-funded, of course someone’s going to look at the Kaiju and see dollar signs. No surprise here, the obscenely wealthy don’t across as the heroes in Scalzi’s writings. And really, with *gestures around at the current news cycle* everything that’s going on today, the opinion is hard to argue against. When someone has gobs of money, all the concerns about human welfare and benefit to civilization and maybe not making choices that cause the suffering of thousands of people, all of that comes a distant third behind a) holding onto the billions they already have and b) making more. I’m not saying we should abolish the super-wealthy or anything like that. But jeez, a warning label wouldn’t hurt.
“The only real question is, who are the monsters?”
“They ask that question in every monster movie, you know. It’s an actual trope.”
“I know,” Tom said. “What does it say about us that it’s relevant every single time they ask it?”