47 pages • 1 hour read
John ScalziThe Kaiju Preservation Society
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: John Scalzi
John Scalzi (b. 1969- ) is an American science fiction author. He is a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Scalzi became interested in science fiction as a child and graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1991. His influences include authors Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card. He wrote his first novel, Agent to the Stars, in 1997 and published it on his website in 1999. His most notable novels are the Old Man’s War series (2005-2015), which follows an elderly man recruited into a war for space colonization. Other series include Android’s Dream, Lock In, Interdependency, and The Dispatcher. Other standalone novels include Fuzzy Nation (2011), Redshirts (2012), and Starter Villain (2023). The Kaiju Preservation Society features many science fiction elements, including kaiju and extremely advanced technology and medicine.
Scalzi’s political beliefs greatly inform The Kaiju Preservation Society. Scalzi is an avowed feminist and supporter of the LGBTQ+ community. His views on gender identity and gender roles appear throughout the novel. For example, Jamie’s gender identity remains ambiguous, undermining the impulse to attach gender role assumptions to them. This allows Jamie’s actions to define them, rather than their gender. Scalzi indicates his support of the LGBTQ+ community through the novel’s nonbinary character, Niamh. Everyone at the KPS respects Niamh and their gender identity, and Niamh forms strong friendships with the crew. Scalzi is also a member of the US Democratic Party. He wrote the novel at the end of the Trump administration in 2020 and has said that the novel grapples with the stresses and fears that arose during the Trump years. For example, opportunistic and charismatic billionaire Rob Sanders has a striking resemblance to former US President Donald Trump. Sanders explicitly describes his plan of selling his company for billions as “the art of the deal,” the title of Trump’s book (151). The COVID-19 pandemic also influenced the novel. Scalzi explains in the Author’s Note that, when he started writing the novel in 2020, he intended it to be darker, but rethought the concept due to the pandemic. Ultimately, he wrote a novel that he says is “meant to be light and catchy, with three minutes of hooks and choruses for you to sing along with, and then you’re done and you can go on with your day, hopefully with a smile on your face” (262).
Genre Context: Kaiju Fiction
Kaiju fiction is a Japanese media genre and science fiction subgenre that incorporates giant monsters who battle militaries or other monsters. The term kaiju is Japanese for “strange beast” and originally referred to monsters in ancient Japanese folklore. An early example of the kaiju genre is the 1934 film The Great Buddha Arrival. The first major work to popularize the genre was Ishiro Honda’s 1954 film, Godzilla, which served as a metaphor for postwar Japan’s fear and trauma following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film became immensely popular and more Godzilla films followed over subsequent decades, both in Japan and the United States. The Godzilla franchise also includes other kaiju, such as King Kong, Mothra, King Ghidorah, Rodan, Mechagodzilla, Gigan, Destroyah, Gamera, and Megalon. Recent kaiju films outside of the Godzilla franchise include Pacific Rim (2013) and its sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), the King Kong series, and the Jurassic Park series
The Kaiju Preservation Society frequently references the kaiju genre, including Godzilla. For example, the narrative reveals that the KPS’s bases are named after people who worked on the original Godzilla film. Brynn MacDonald also holds a celebratory tradition of watching Godzilla and Pacific Rim (61). Further, the novel incorporates the kaiju’s relationship with nuclear energy, giving the kaiju in the novel nuclear reactors and having them feed on nuclear energy. Malfunctioning reactors explode, causing a nuclear reaction. This highlights the kaiju’s role as a metaphor for nuclear weapons and fallout.
