272 pages.
First published on March 15, 2022.
Genre: SF
This review first appeared in The Sunday Long Read, April 3, 2022 — Issue 339.
Kaiju are giant monsters from a Japanese film genre of the same name. Godzilla (1954) is considered the first film of this genre, with Godzilla, the monster, understood to be a metaphor for nuclear power. Scalzi has borrowed from this mythology to create a story about an alternate, human-free Earth, populated by kaiju with nuclear capabilities. To share more would be to spoil the light plot for you.
As Scalzi says in the acknowledgements:
[The Kaiju Preservation Society] is not, and I say this with absolutely no slight intended, a brooding symphony of a novel. It’s a pop song. It’s meant to be light and catchy…
The tone of this book is exactly that. There is very little development of characters, and all of the characters seem to communicate in the same, snarky tone (Scalzi’s, basically, if you’ve ever been to his Twitter account). There are monsters, human and otherwise. There is action. There’s something that could pass for science. A masterpiece, however, this is not.
This book is all fluff and lightness, a fun little read that you may forget about as soon as you close the pages. It’s probably exactly what you need if you don’t mind a little sci-fi with humour, and if you want to get away from the world for a while. I enjoyed it for what it was.
Scalzi is the very popular and award-winning author of numerous and accessible works of speculative fiction. He lives in the US.
Rated: 7/10.
Harare Review of Books 
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