The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi

[emperor]

This is the first Scalzi I've read. On this showing, I'm not inclined to read another (which is a surprise, because I know he's very popular). It feels like it ought to be a great premise for a book - a secret organisation, an alternate reality close to ours, giant monsters. But there's an awful lot of nothing much of note happening, the characters are all broadly the same wise-cracking smartarse, the plot developments such as they were were telegraphed a mile off (even I saw them nearly all coming), and I managed to come away with no real idea of what anything looked like. And this wasn't a Lovecraftian horrors that defy sanity and coherent description sort of thing, either: our narrator doesn't think it's interesting to note much other than that they're very big and very loud (and similarly doesn't bother describing anything else).

It's still quite fun - the villain is odiously hateable, there are a lot of one-liners since basically all the characters are that sort of person, and it's a great premise. There's just not enough material here to go with that premise.

Comments

[ceb]

I vacillate on Scalzi; or rather, his writing vacillates into and out of things I like. I thought this one was enjoyable fluff. The Emperox books are I think his best (but weirdly I found the second one better than the first, which is unusual in a trilogy).

[hilarita]

+1 on this one is enjoyable fluff, but nothing brilliant, and that there are otters you might like better. Though he does tend towards having at least some characters with snarky one-liners in most situations, and his general market pitch is "fairly interesting and well-written sci-fi, not notably deep".

[griffen]

Try Old Man's War.

[wpadmirer]

I'm not a Scalzi fan. I think he gets by on cleverness rather than actually being a good writer.

I was in a creative writing program at the university with a guy like that. Drove me crazy. He ended up teaching English, and was probably a good teacher, but never published.

[sparrowsion]

That's not the first review I've read with exactly the same criticisms. It is, by all accounts, not good Scalzi. (Personally, I've only read Redshirts and a lot of Tweets.)

[andrewducker]

I quite enjoyed Old Mans War.

And really liked "The God Engines", which is (from my understanding) unlike anything else he's written, and unlikely to ever be expanded in any way.