The last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee. Over Fifty, Bad Knees, and Still the Best: Isako is the Heroine I Needed

Samurai code meets corporate dystopia, on a planet where your worth is measured in oxygen.

Synopsis

Get ready to be blown away by this searing standalone space opera where corporate samurai fight beneath merciless stars, and death is always a mere breath away.

Isako is a legendary swordswoman, but every legend has to come to an end. When her long-time client unexpectedly retires, she plans to follow–to walk out into the frozen wasteland of their planet with her head held high and her family enriched by her legacy. But when a competitor offers her a final mission, it’s one she can’t refuse. Soon, she’s thrust deep into a world of corporate espionage, duty-bound duels, and shadowy secrets. What she uncovers will change humanity’s existence in the stars forever.

The Last Contract of Isako is the space opera you didn’t know you needed: corporate samurai… in space. This is the first adult science fiction novel from the award-winning author of Jade City.

Review

5 stars

I don’t often read sci-fi, but when I do, I tend to love it, and The Last Contract of Isako is no exception.

Want proof? I have nearly as many tabs, highlights and annotations as the book has pages!

The setting alone fascinated me: a hostile, freezing planet that humans have inhabited for several hundred years, living beneath enormous domes. But what really gripped me was the organization of that society, fascinating and frightening in equal measure. You could live as long as you were useful and contributed to the collective. Once past your usefulness, you were no longer allowed access to oxygen, water and warmth, and had to go outside, where death came within minutes from cold and exposure. It makes a brutal kind of sense when an entire population is in survival mode, but it’s still harsh to read, and it hits uncomfortably close to home given everything happening in our world right now.

And yet Fonda Lee didn’t stop there. She layered Samurai culture over corporate rules in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does. She was a former consultant, and it shows: the Agency sets standards for training and licensing, negotiates contracts for their longknives, and takes a cut of every deal. Longknives live by the code and die by the knife. I genuinely admired her genius for blending two such different worlds and making it feel inevitable.

But the real cherry on top, for me, is Isako herself. She is a legend. The best longknife on the planet, and she is over fifty. I adore having an older main character, and Isako, with her bad knees, her light sleep, her decades of hard-won experience and her uncompromising ethics, was an extraordinary heroine to spend time with. Like her, I am over fifty. I love mentoring. I have my share of aches, but I still have strong ethics and plenty left to teach. Reading Isako felt, at times, like reading someone I recognized. It’s so refreshing to have an older female main character in sci-fi: someone who is still completely badass, still determined, still capable of going out on her own terms.

As for the plot: something goes wrong with her client, and Isako finds herself with one last contract to fulfill. She must gather information to prove that SoCon Gas Pro director Uchi is unfit to join the board that rules the entire population. If she succeeds, she will be permitted to end her life with honor, and her daughter will receive her full bonus. Things grow considerably more complicated when Isako realizes that everything is connected to the suspicious disappearance of Martim, her former trainee.

What follows is conspiracies, fights, old allies resurfacing at the right moment, shocking reveals, and betrayals so bitter that I was genuinely enraged on Isako’s behalf. I have two full paragraphs of expletives and outraged annotations that I wrote in the moment, because I was so flummoxed I simply had to vent somewhere!!!

To sum it up: I was completely engrossed, rooting for Isako at every turn, and utterly fascinated by this universe. Isako is the kind of heroine who makes you want to be a better version of yourself. Badass, ethical, and still standing. I want to be her when I grow up.

Thank you SO MUCH to Orbit Books for my copy!

Thanks for reading.

Sophie