Jamie Gray goes to a six-month performance review as an employee for food delivery startup füdmüd expecting to impress boss Rob Sanders with plans to grow the company, only to be terminated and offered a delivery contract instead. At first rejecting the offer, Jamie is eventually forced to take it after all to make rent, as jobs are scarce in COVID-19-afflicted New York City. One delivery client turns out to be Tom Stevens, an old acquaintance, and over the next few weeks of deliveries they renew their friendship. Tom has a lucrative position with KPS, a secretive animal rights NGO, and is slated to head out into the field right about the same time Jamie loses the delivery job (füdmüd having been bought out). Tom offers Jamie a job with his own employer, and Jamie, again out of options, goes in for the interview, is accepted, and is soon on a plane to Thule Air Base in Greenland. I took it this time. “I’ll let Gracia know you’re coming.” Tom said, and looked at his watch. “It’s one pm now. You can see her today, probably. Or early tomorrow. But that’s pushing it in terms of timing.” Scalzi is great with the science-fiction references, I was enjoying them a lot. And he doesn't overdo it, like, say, Ernest Cline who just is TOO MUCH. Scalzi is just the right amount. Lisa Tuttle in The Guardian calls the book "Hugely enjoyable, intelligent and good-humoured fun." [13] I sat on my shitty twin bed, sighed, then laid down and stared at the ceiling for a good hour. Then I sighed again, sat up, and pulled out my phone. I turned it on.

It also needs to be said how wonderfully diverse the characters are and how that is treated as a given. For example, Niamh is non-binary and their pronouns are respected by all. They are who they are, no prejudice, no judgement. The villains in this tale are not people with any form of bigotry, Scalzi doesn’t use that as a point of conflict which I very much appreciated. Instead the villains are corporate, they are in the field of business, of getting disgustingly rich and not giving one damn about the cost. You would think, right? It’s only a modern classic of genre. But no one gets it. First, no one cares,” I waved wildly to encompass all of the philistine Lower East Side, and possibly, all five boroughs of New York City, “and second of all when anyone comments on it they think it’s a play on The Terminator.” John Scalzi's newest book is brought down by an under-developed, rushed plot that's focused more on the “society” of the title than the “kaiju.” Any comparison to Jurassic Park applies only insofar as this is a story about humans living alongside huge, dangerous creatures. Scalzi didn’t flesh out his characters (human and monster alike) or include any high-adrenaline thrills. Supremely,” I said. As discreetly as possible, I adjusted my center of gravity so I was no longer listing ever-so-slightly starboard. Absurdly, gloriously entertaining. A story that hits all the beats and tropes you might think, and that's not a criticism: you read this book with the feelings you read a tropey romance, ie a knowing expectation of what will happen, plus gleeful anticipation for how you're going to get there.

I’m glad you asked, Rob. I feel really good about it. And in fact”—I held up my tablet—“I’d like to spend some time in this session talking about how I think we can improve not just the füdmüd app, but our relationships with restaurants, delivery people, and users. It’s 2020 now, and the food delivery app space has matured. We really need to go all out to distinguish ourselves if we want to genuinely compete with Grubhub and Uber Eats and all the others, here in NYC and beyond.”

The Kaiju Preservation Society pays homage to monster-movies such as Godzilla and Jurassic Park, but with a twist. Scalzi expertly delivers a tale where the humans don’t need saving from the gigantic creatures, this is where the gigantic creatures need saving from humans. I urge everyone to read this, it’s fun, it’s clever and best of all it has so much heart. Second, this book has a B-Movie action plot attached to it, along with some melodrama and deaths that were pushed to the side with "Everyone was suuuper sad about it for a week :(((". I don't think it was appropriate for this book. If fun was what we were gunning for, I would've liked seeing this as more of a Parks and Rec kind of thing. think to look past it. We were looking at creating nuclear bombs and didn't think about how nuclear energy might mess with a multiverse. We didn't consider there was a multiverse. It's not built into our model."You have no idea how difficult it was for me to not say, ‘Welcome to Jurassic Park!’ to all of you just now.” Food app delivery driver Jamie Gray has just about had it—with work, New York City and the pandemic. But a chance encounter leads Jamie to Tom, an old friend who offers Jamie a job working for a mysterious animal rights organization called the KPS. Eager to do anything to get out of town, Jamie jumps at the chance. But this job is unlike anything anyone could have imagined. On another Earth, one warmer and devoid of humankind, gargantuan creatures called Kaiju roam. It’s up to the Kaiju Preservation Society to make sure the incredible, powerful monsters don’t hurt anyone—and that no one tries to hurt the Kaiju. Stone dead,” I said, and walked into the CEO’s office. It was time for my performance review, and I’m not gonna lie, I was going to crush it. Turns out, these "pandas" are in mating trouble and not all humans want to preserve them and their world. Tourists are a menace in any world, I guess. So Jamie and his team need to get creative, evade huge-ass tree-crabs, and get some Twilight monsters to get a groove on, all while fending off more sinister threats. 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.