Andrew Smith's Reviews > The Kaiju Preservation Society

I have mixed history with Scalzi: I loved The Dispatcher but hated Lock In. In fact I’m a bit picky with sci-fi generally, having a penchant for time travel (I know, some consider this a different genre) and stories I can get my limited imagination around. Generally, monsters and too clever gizmos turn me cold. So perhaps I made a mistake in choosing this one – it’s big on monsters.

I’m not going to delve too deeply into the plot, suffice to say that an unemployed sci-fi ‘expert’ finds himself transported to a parallel Earth in which humongous flying creatures are considered a species heading for extinction and therefore worthy of treatment that in this Earth are afforded to Giant Pandas. There’s a lot of science here, a good deal of humour and a posse of characters with PhDs.

I only made it a third of the way through: the humour didn’t work for me - I prefer my sci-if to be on the serious side - but mainly it was the monsters, I just couldn’t buy into them or, in fact, the overall premise of this tale. I’ve seen some reviews from readers who absolutely love this book and I’m tempted to say that I made an error on picking a book that included elements I was never going to appreciate. My bad, so I’m awarding this one an extra star (I normally award only one star to any book I fail to finish).

My thanks to Pan MacMillan for providing a copy of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review.