Fonda Lee is best known as the author The Green Bone Saga, which concluded in 2021 with the tremendous Jade Legacy. In the years since, Lee has written Green Bone short fiction, the Roc-trainer novella Untethered Sky, and the YA martial arts fantasy duology Breathmarked, co-written with Shannon Lee. But Lee's latest novel, The Last Contract of Isako, trades fantasy for sci-fi, and the smaller scope of some of her post-Green Bone Saga work for something just as epic as her seminal trilogy.
The Last Contract of Isako has been marketed by publisher Orbit as the "must-read science fiction novel of the year," and this is one of those rare instances where the book completely lives up to that sort of sweeping hype. Following the aging corporate samurai Isthmus Isako as she's roped into one last job, Lee's new novel combines cyberpunk elements with samurai fiction, epic sci-fi settings with corporate espionage, and the sort of deep, relatable character work that made her previous books so impactful. It's a twisty, brutal novel that will keep fans of Lee's work well satisfied — and also serves as a great entry point if you've never read any of her previous books.
Read on for our full, SPOILER-FREE review of The Last Contract of Isako.
Book review: The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee
The Last Contract of Isako begins as the legendary corporate samurai, Isthmus Isako, is nearing the end of her career. After suffering a horrible defeat in an inter-corporation espionage war, Isako finds herself in a desperately difficult situation that may force her into retirement — and on the inhospitable alien world of Aquilo, retirement means walking out of the fragile habitat keeping humanity alive and succumbing to the elements, the better to preserve resources for the gainfully employed. When she's forced into one last job which may give her a more honorable send-off (as well as a more lucrative one for her surviving daughter), the old samurai is swept into a web of mysteries and lies that is so dense it will keep readers guessing right down to the final pages.
I call Isako a corporate samurai, and she is that, but she's much more than just a warrior. Yes, she is famed for her lightning fast ability to draw her futuristic katana, launched by a "triggersheath" that gets it into her hand and through her opponent's neck with lightning speed. But she is also an "atier" — the absolute highest level of corporate fixer. She serves as an advisor to power players, a professional spy with a wide skill set, and a teacher who has raised a number of powerful students of her own in the ways of the atier. For all that, she's also a mother with a strained relationship with her adult daughter, who has devoted far more time to work than family and is forced to face those challenging feelings here at the end of the road.
If I've spent a lot of time describing the main character of this book, that's because it's necessary to properly lay the stage. It should be obvious from the title that much of The Last Contract of Isako hinges on the final mission of its protagonist, and while there are many aspects of this book that reeled me deeper into Lee's science fiction worldbuilding, Isako herself was the first. She's an excellently drawn character, cynical and hopeful by turns, whose reflection on her long career and what it all means is just as compelling as her breakneck fight scenes.
But don't expect this book to only hinge on Isako's character. There are plenty of other compelling figures in this book, from Isako's brother-in-arms Rain Kob, to her former protégés, to the powerful corporate elites who pull the strings. With the dozens of named characters who crop up throughout this book, there isn't a single weak link.
The Last Contract of Isako's worldbuilding is exceptional
As for the worldbuilding, and Lee is at the top of her game in that respect here. When I think of cyberpunk stories, I typically imagine them set on Earth, like William Gibson's Neuromancer or Cyberpunk 2077. However, The Last Contract of Isako is set on a distant world which has lost all contact with humanity's homeworld, which is run completely by the corporation which set out to colonize it for Earth's leadership centuries earleir. The result is a setting which feels just as much a character as Isako itself, which wrangles with the complexity of a corporate-run world with a razor-thin amount of resources to keep its inhabitants alive, where layoffs mean death and the rich decide the fate of an entire people.
Aquilo is every bit as good a setting as Kekon, the island at the heart of The Green Bone Saga, except it's a far bleaker place. You might want to live on Kekon; Aquilo, not so much. But it's a perfect backdrop for Isako's quest, and Lee brings gives many different elements of the planet and its unique culture focus in a way that makes it feel like a real, living place.
When you want an impossible task done, you hire Isako
And what is that quest, the titular "last contract," you may wonder? In a word: it's complicated. Aquilo's corporation is split between two factions: those who want to re-establish communication with Earth, and those who want to terraform Aquilo instead. With finite resources, this push and pull colors the entire power structure of the story.
Isako is initially contracted to dig up dirt on the head of the terraformer party, a well-connected man who will be nigh impossible to reach named Sandbar Uchi. But digging into Uchi's dirty business quickly leads Isako to other revelations, especially once her former student Dragonfly Martim enters the mix. He mysteriously vanished prior to the events of this book, and the slow unraveling of Uchi, Martim, and the vast conspiracies at play on Aquilo is an absolute highlight of this book.
In some ways, the mysteries on top of mysteries are one thing that truly sets The Last Contract of Isako apart from some of Lee's previous works, even The Green Bone Saga. The plot twists in this book are insane; even when I was certain I had figured pieces of the puzzle out, there always ended up being yet another layer that recontextualized everything. It's rare for a book to keep me on the back foot as consistently as The Last Contract of Isako, and that made for a total blast of a reading experience.
That was especially true around the halfway point of the book, where Lee really pulls out the stops on one of her biggest — and riskiest — plot twists in any of her works that I've read. There's a strong chance some readers may not love every new direction the book goes in, and there was definitely an adjustment period to the new normal after some of its more ambitious turns. But for me, it all worked excellently, elevating the brutal nature of corporate power in this dystopian sci-fi world.
Verdict
The Last Contract of Isako is a book that feels both fresh and familiar, leaning on a number of genre conventions from multiple different genres to create the sort of sweeping tale that only Fonda Lee could pull off. It's not the sort of book I expect to have quite as wide of an appeal as, say, Jade City, but for readers who love dark sci-fi, especially with a heavy dose of the bleakness that comes with cyberpunk or samurai stories following an aged warrior on one last ride, there's a lot to love here. Lee may have taken a bit of a breather from gigantic epics after Jade Legacy, but with The Last Contract of Isako she proves that she's very much still got the edge that made her previous books such hits.
The Last Contract of Isako is out now from Orbit, wherever fine books are sold.
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