When it comes to architecting perilous, unforgiving universes, Locus Award-winner Fonda Lee never holds back.
In her critically acclaimed Green Bone Saga trilogy—comprising Jade City, Jade War, and Jade Legacy—she masterfully depicts the brutal consequences of intergenerational turf wars. Set on the island of Kekon, the world’s sole source of a potent, magical jade, the story follows crime syndicates vying for control. While the stone bestows superhuman abilities, it extracts a heavy toll, often leaving users physically devastated or slowly descending into madness. Similarly, in her high-octane novella Untethered Sky, Lee places her characters in a world ravaged by seismic disasters, where the struggle to hunt manticores from atop massive rocs often proves fatal for both beast and trainer alike.
Now, venturing into adult science fiction, Lee confronts the stark, freezing dangers of outer space on a terraformed world known as Aquilo.
It is refreshingly rare for the lead in a sprawling, 500-page science fiction epic to be a woman in her 50s, complete with the aches of hip pain and failing knees. This subversion of tropes feels even more radical in a setting where the elite can circumvent mortality by migrating their consciousness into synthetic bodies to secure a second lease on life. This is the premise of Lee’s latest release, The Last Contract of Isako, which arrived in bookstores today.
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Time to go back to the moon
Isthmus Isako, a legendary swordswoman and corporate samurai, is prepared to vanish into the icy, desolate wastes of her home planet for a permanent retirement. That plan is upended when an irresistible final contract lands on her desk. Plunged back into a cutthroat environment defined by corporate espionage and shifting political loyalties, Isako finds herself in a direct standoff with her former, and most dangerous, apprentice: Martim. Blending the tension of corporate noir with the grit of a cyberpunk thriller, Lee has delivered a stellar space opera that will resonate with fans of John Wick, Logan, and Blade Runner.
Source: Polygon
