We're currently living through a golden age of fantasy and science fiction, with more promising books being published every single month than any reader could possibly hope to consume. Standing out in the field has never been harder, which just makes it all the more notable when gems rise to the top of the heap. That was the case with The Green Bone Saga, the breakout urban fantasy trilogy from author Fonda Lee that began with Jade City (2017), built up bloody momentum in Jade War (2019), and came to a stunning conclusion with the masterpiece Jade Legacy (2021). One part East Asian-inspired martial arts extravaganza, one part generational crime family saga in the vein of The Godfather, and one part kick ass fantasy storytelling, The Green Bone Saga is an exceptional series with equally exceptional staying power.
But where does an author go after finishing such an opus? For several years following the release of Jade Legacy, Lee spent time publishing tighter, smaller-scale works like Green Bone short fiction and the standalone fantasy novella Untethered Sky, as well as Breath of the Dragon, the first part of a YA martial arts fantasy duology co-written with Bruce Lee's daughter, Shannon Lee.
Now, however, Fonda Lee is back with a new work that gives any of her larger novels a run for their money: The Last Contract of Isako. Set on the distant, inhospitable world of Aquilo, this dystopian sci-fi epic follows the titular corporate samurai Isthmus Isako as she takes on one last job, which leads her into the gritty depths of corporate espionage as each piece of the puzzle solved leads to even more unnerving revelations. Combining elements of cyberpunk, space opera, and samurai fiction, The Last Contract of Isako is a powerful standalone novel that's every bit as sharply crafted as any of the Lee's best works. Read our spoiler-free review here.
We had the chance to catch up with Lee for an interview marking the release of The Last Contract of Isako, where we discussed her road from Jade Legacy to this ambitious new adult sci-fi book, the influences that shaped Isako's story, plans for future books, and more. Watch the interview below, or read on for a transcription (edited for length and clarity).
DANIEL ROMAN for WINTER IS COMING: How would you pitch this book to readers who primarily know you for The Green Bone Saga?
FONDA LEE: First of all, I would say that it definitely goes in a different direction than Green Bone Saga. So for those of you who are familiar with my work, this will be a change of pace, and for those of you who aren't, it'll be an entry that you can enjoy on its own. It's a standalone science fiction novel. I have been describing it as my cyberpunk samurai epic with little splashes of Kurosawa, Dune, and John Wick. And it's featuring a middle-aged swordswoman who is on her final job.
WIC: I do want to talk to you about the journey for you, getting from Green Bone to this book, but since you brought up the cyberpunk elements of Isako...this novel is set on an alien world. It's not set on Earth like many other cyberpunk dystopian books. How did you arrive at setting this on a different planet? And was there ever a point where you considered Earth as a setting?
FL: Yeah, so that's a really good question. One of the things that I wanted to do with this story was kind of really lean into the thematic elements of cyberpunk that I saw overlapping with the genre of samurai fiction and Chambara film. And, what really kind of epitomizes cyberpunk is a combination of things. That idea of a high tech/low life story, right, where essentially we have this advanced technology but there are these layers of greed and corruption, and oftentimes the protagonists in these stories are outcasts, who are kind of like lone wolves against the system. And what kind of epitomizes a lot of popular samurai fiction overlaps with this, because oftentimes we do have like, that ronin who has been betrayed by their lord or is fighting injustice in a feudal society which is very strictly structured.
And so I saw these common threads across those two genres. Even the fact that like the term ronin shows up in cyberpunk in a number of contexts. And, actually in Japanese, the term ronin is sometimes used to describe like a salaryman who's lost his job and is no longer employed. So there's kind of these little connecting bits of tissue that I wanted to play with.
But so much of cyberpunk as a genre gets associated with the aesthetic of cyberpunk. So, the neon lights, the rain splattered streets and the flying cars, and we immediately think Blade Runner. And although that aesthetic lends itself so well to that high tech/low life idea and setting, I wanted to take those thematic elements and transplant them somewhere else. And the idea of having a story that leans into cyberpunk-esque themes, especially those of transhumanism, and the wealthy having access to things that the rest of the people don't, and cyborgs or like uploading consciousness, all of those themes can be placed in a different setting.
And I like the idea of placing it in an isolated company town, essentially, because with the recent push for space exploration, but also the involvement of private enterprise and, you know, Elon Musk and his dick rockets and all of that...I went down the direction of, okay, let's say we do reach the stars. We colonize a planet and then we have this colony that is entirely dependent on the corporation that founded the colony. And what happens when that company loses funding or something happens to it, and it gets spun off or who knows what things happen in corporate life, and it loses contact with the mother planet. I ended up going down this research rat hole of learning about company towns and the history of them and the nature of them often being founded with somewhat utopic principles in mind. Everything from Lowell, Massachusetts, to mining and towns in the Appalachians, to suburbs that are developed by Disney and Google for their employees.
And so all of these company towns, there's sort of a sometimes a utopic element that's very paternalistic. Oftentimes, though, they lean very exploitative, where the only way that you can buy things in the company town or through the company store, you have currency that is like scrip, that's the only way that you can buy stuff.
So this is all a roundabout way of saying, I often find my way into a story by kind of pattern recognition across different things and genre and history and film, and being like, okay, how can I play with this? How can I take these different things that are interesting to me and put them in some blender, or put them in a new context. And that's how I ended up with a cyberpunk swordswoman on a colony planet.
WIC: It's a really cool melding of different elements that I hadn't seen before, because like you said, there are things that come immediately to mind for cyberpunk; even the the idea of a corporate samurai immediately makes me think, okay, we're in cyberpunk. You worked in the corporate world for a while, right? Were there any specific ways that you were able to bring your own experiences to bear here or that were cathartic?
FL: Yeah, definitely a lot. So I spent years in management consulting, and then corporate strategy. And so the character of Isako came to me with relatively little prompting. So oftentimes, authors, we write stories and we write characters to kind of work through our own issues, you know sort of a cheaper...well, it's not cheaper, but it's a form of therapy for us. And so there was a part of me that kind of wanted to play with this idea, this sort of personal imagining of like, what if I had stayed that path? You know, what if I had not just decided to follow my dreams and write science fiction and fantasy novels?
I used to fly all over the place and work 70 hours a week in client service, and, you know, with the expense account and the airline status and the C-suite and all the perks that came with that. And at the end of the day, what I was doing was I was, you know, putting my labor and my ability towards helping big companies get richer. That's what I was doing. And it was challenging, sometimes it was miserable, sometimes it was fantastic. There is a part of me that was like, okay...what would I be like at my age now? Isako's, I mean, slightly older than me....but what would that be? And so I kind of envisioned Isako as like, a bit of a stand-in for an alternate version of myself who just leaned in...I also did an MBA, so I remember, you know, those exhortations, especially for women who are trying to climb the corporate ladder, to lean in, to really like chase the getting to high levels in the corporate world.
And then also a lot of Isako's issues come down to, what does she feel like is her remaining path, her legacy, now that she's at the end of her career? So that also is a little bit of personal catharsis for me as well, getting older and being like, oh gosh, I've been training in martial arts for a long time, my knees hurt now, you know [laughs]. Things of that nature also come in. So there are a lot of personal elements to that character and to the sort of toxic productivity culture as well.
WIC: The Green Bone Saga was a very detailed, in-depth, ambitious series, and you took some time after to do a few smaller works, like the standalone fantasy novella Untethered Sky, Green Bone short fiction like Jade Shards, and Breathmarked, your YA duology, which has a second book coming out later this year. Isako feels like your next...I don't want to say more substantial book because that's not giving the right amount of credit to the other works that you've done since, but more ambitious length-wise we can say, and in depth of world. Can you walk me through the journey of how you landed on a science fiction cyberpunk book, far away from crime family urban fantasy, for your next large standalone novel?
FL: I mean, a lot of my career has been doing what seems cool to me at the time [laughs]. And often it's just like, well what's calling to me right now? So after The Green Bones Saga I was like, I want to write short stuff. That was a lot of large, doorstopper novels. And so I ended up doing novellas, short fiction, young adult fiction — which is very fast paced. And then, of course, the opportunity came up to work with Shannon on the Breathmarked duology, and I had not done young adult for a while. So [I said], well, that sounds fun, it sounds fresh and fast paced. So I went down that path.
And Isako came about really because I was a bit torn. I'm known for The Green Bone Saga, and so there was a part of me that was like, I want to do another fantasy series. I love fantasy series.
But, you know, I also really love science fiction, and that's that's how I started my career, I had young adult science fiction novels, [Zeroboxer and the Exo Duology], which are kind of in that gray zone between young adult and adult. And I had this chat with my editor...which direction should I go? And she said, well, if you want to do both, now would be time to do the science fiction story, so that you don't get too down the path of doing [only fantasy]. Because I do have another fantasy series in me, that I want to tackle. But it was like, okay, what's kind of the right order to do these? And the science fiction story had been sitting with me for years. It was like it was its time. And I very much wanted to do an adult science fiction novel, because I've written adult fantasy, I've written young adult science fiction, I've written young adult fantasy, I've written novellas...and I was like, okay, a nice chonky, really substantial adult science fiction novel is calling to me. So that's how we went down that path.
WIC: Were there any particular elements of The Last Contract of Isako as a sci-fi novel that you were especially excited to be able to play with in this book?
FL: Yeah, for sure. I've always loved worldbuilding, and that's a thing that's very common across both my fantasy fiction [and] my science fiction building, is I love the little tangible details of worldbuilding. And with a science fiction novel, although the process of worldbuilding is very similar, the things that appeal to me about worldbuilding in a science fiction novel are like, getting to play with the ramifications of technology, and especially playing with tropes like the cyborg body or uploading your consciousness and, you know, Altered Carbon and Neuromancer and all of those, right? Because those are such common, well-worn staples of the genre.
So I wanted to kind of do my spin on it...like, what can I do with that idea? And I ended up having this class of people on the planet who are called jarbrains. But they're the elite, they're the powerful and the wealthy, who have the means to extend their lives by more than double the average person by having their brain literally put into a new body. And there are two things that I really enjoyed when it came to exploring these jarbrains. One was the fact that they're machines, and so they're kind of janky. Even though we love to romanticize the idea of high tech and spaceships and faster-than-light and cyborg bodies and all that, the reality is technology never works the way we want it to, really. And things get outdated — my iPhone is what, a few years old, and it's already outdated, right? So I wanted to play with this idea of the cyberpunk trends, the cyborg body with the human consciousness in it, but the machines are kind of creepy and messed up, and they get outdated, and when you interact with them they don't quite cross the uncanny valley because they're very lifelike, but they're still not quite as realistic as real humans. And so nobody really wants to associate with these people. They're already set apart from the rest of society by virtue of the fact that they're super rich and disconnected from the average person, but now they're also in these creepy machine bodies. And of course, there's technological advancement and evolution, and there's different models of them and so on. So I wanted to play with that.
And then there's just the thought experiment of like, would you sign up for this? If you had the money, and you could at age 70 be like, well I don't need to be in this old, slow body that's just deteriorating, I can just get a new one. I mean, it's not gonna be perfect, but I'm gonna live another 70 years. Would you do it? And so I wanted that to kind of be this question always sort of in the back of the reader's mind as well, because it's like, the rich and the famous have bought in, the people who have the money have bought in, right? Like, they get to live longer than everyone else. But everyone else is kind of creeped out by it, and...is it just because they can't access it? Like Isako, for example, finds the jarbrains incredibly off-putting, and she's like, I would never do that. I'm gonna like retire, I'm gonna walk in to basically end my life before I do that. But they don't have access to it, and yet it's kind of this question that I want people to sort of have in the back of their mind of like...how much humanity are you willing to give up for more time?
WIC: Another worldbuilding element that I want to shout out is the surnames that people have, which are all based on things like geological features or animal species from old Earth. When I interviewed you about Jade Legacy, you had a very detailed timeline software that you used to keep track of everything. Do you have a similarly in-depth database of these names — because there are a lot of them — or did you come up with them on the fly?
FL: I did have a database. I also came up with them on the fly. So I'd come up with them and then put them into my list, make sure I didn't like, duplicate them. And then I also was like, okay, what's sort of the logic behind them? I liked the idea of the naming convention, I just love names. I did that with The Green Bone Saga, I love car names and street names and restaurant names. So I love names. And in Isako, I wanted the names to have some connection to the heritage of Earth. And it kind of feeds back into the culture, because names and culture are so interconnected. A key element of the culture on this planet is this ongoing dream, goal by the corporation to terraform the planet, even though it's happening much more slowly than it would if they had the support of Earth. But this dream that the corporation continues to perpetuate throughout the generations is that the planet can be turned into one that's like that of Earth. And so these names, the family names essentially, of the people are all associated with something that is related to Earth that doesn't exist yet on this planet, whether that be lake, or rain, or animal names. So that's the story behind the naming.
And also they're more fluid, right? One of the elements of the society is that people are organized into what are called kiths, but they're called kiths because they have a corporate acronym of like Community Trade Habitations. And these Community Trade Habitations are organized to make division of labor more efficient. Not everyone has the nuclear family like we do now, with like double working parents and you're trying to figure out childcare and all that. So they're organized so that there's social support for people to be able to work for the company, and they transfer into these different kith groups, to some extent based on the division they work for and their profession, and they're matched. And so it's kind of like the company helps you to get matched with people who are compatible. So there's definitely cultural societal elements in the sort of inherent mythology around how people think about Earth that's tied to the naming conventions.
WIC: There are two primary factions within the corporation in The Last Contract of Isako: terraformists, who want to make the planet Aquilo habitable, and reunionists, who want to re-establish contact with Earth. If you lived on this planet, would you be a terraformist or reunionist?
FL: Oh my gosh...that is a good question. I hate to say it, because some of the worst characters in this book are the terraformists, but I would be a terraformist, I think. Because of essentially the philosophy that they have around...you know, you've got to kind of take destiny into your own hands and make the place that you're living now the place you want to live. And so that is the admirable thing about the terraformists, is that they've hung onto this dream that they can make the planet better, they can make the planet have water and oxygen and grass and animals.
There's some characters that are really pretty unlikable and very morally compromised terraformists, so I kind of feel like, bad about saying that [laughs]...There's also some really bad reunionists too, to be fair...and I think I may be a little bit biased because as the author, my like head canon is like, some bad stuff went down on Earth. You don't necessarily want to get back in touch with Earth.
WIC: Final question for this non-spoiler portion of our interview! You mentioned earlier that you have another fantasy series in you. Do you think you're going to write any more in the world of The Last Contract of Isako, or are you going on to fantasy next?
FL: I never say never, but I definitely intended this book to be a standalone and for it to feel complete at the end of it. So I don't see myself coming back to this one, unless some other story that really fits the setting comes into my mind. No, I see this one being on its own.
A massive thank you to Fonda Lee for stopping by the site to discuss The Last Contract of Isako! We'll be releasing the second, full spoiler part of our interview with Lee later this month, where we go in depth about some of Isako's most shocking twists and turns, including its original, scrapped ending.
The Last Contract of Isako is available now from Orbit, wherever fine books are sold. You can find out more about Fonda Lee's works at her website.
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