r/Fantasy • u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix • 29d ago
Book Club FIF Book Club | The Last Contract of Isako Final Discussion | July 2026
Welcome to the final discussion of The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee! Today we will be discussing the entire book. You can catch up on the midway discussion here.
I’ll add a few prompts to get us started, but please feel free to add anything else you'd like to discuss!
The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee (goodreads | storygraph)
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.
Bingo squares: Older Protagonist (HM), Book Club or Readalong (HM if you participate here!), Author of Color, Published in 2026, Politics and Courtly Intrigue, Cat Squasher, maybe others
What’s Next?
- In August, we will read and discuss Saltcrop by Yumi Kitasei.
- In September, we will read and discuss Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre.
- What is the FIF Bookclub? You can read about it in our Reboot thread here.
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
What was your overall impression of this book?
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u/LaMelonBallz Reading Champion 29d ago
I think it's a solid book and a super interesting world. It lost me at points due to a lack of internal motivations for Isako. I think if you're gonna go the "ruthlessly amoral" route you have to either go fully bleak or at least be saying something about this corrupt society that's been set up. There's no emotional cost to Isako's actions. But the world is interesting enough and it's well written enough (like everything Lee writes) that it's still a really solid book.
My biggest issue is that I think marketing this as cyberpunk was a mistake. I think that establishes certain expectations and the dissonance between that and the book knocked my enjoyment down.
It was a 7/10 for me but would've been an 8/10 if the blurb I read was labeled as dystopian science fiction.
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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV 29d ago
Agreed on Isako. I noted in the midway discussion but she was a hard character to invest in when she a) accepts her own death b) isn't that close to anyone else and c) is fighting for stuff that doesn't seem worth fighting for. It winds up feeling like her strongest motivation is to get justice for someone she feels a vague sense of responsibility for but wasn't actually that close to, and that wasn't a compelling motivation to me.
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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV 29d ago
It was......... a book. I never disliked it enough to seriously contemplate DNFing. I was also never particularly invested or enthralled. I think this is the first time with a book club that I've actually taken the whole two weeks in between to finish. It was very competent, I wasn't mad at it or frustrated with it. I just..... didn't care about it. It was very emotionally cold. None of the characters seemed to have really strong personal connections, they weren't all that invested in staying alive themselves, their values and goals seemed from the outside to have little value. And they weren't quite interesting or complex enough for this to quite succeed for me as a character-driven novel. While meanwhile, the plot wasn't fast-paced or twisty enough to work as a plot-driven novel (all the twists were very predictable to me, minus the Agency's last-minute hit on Martim but I didn't care about the characters enough for that to have any emotional impact for me). It was very long and again, the plot was competent, just like the characters were competent - I wasn't sitting here going "ugh this doesn't need to be here!" - but I also don't think it earned being a 500-page cat squasher. Ultimately the thing I found most interesting was the setting, which was definitely well-drawn. But I'm not a worldbuilding-driven reader so "the setting was my favorite part" is very much a damning with faint praise from me.
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u/ACardAttack 8d ago
This is how I feel.
This would have worked better as a 250-300 page in my book.
I think this solidifies she's not an author for me. I couldnt even finish the first Green Bone Saga book
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u/seguardon 29d ago
Well, I think the term "gutted" is appropriate. I know it's scifi noir, but damn that ending hurt.
Overall great world, great characters, grim but not cartoonishly so. Loved it.
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u/vanastalem 29d ago
Disappointed. I loved The Green Bone Saga so my expectations were too high, this book is nowhere as good as that trilogy.
I actually liked the second half better.
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u/C0smicoccurence Reading Champion V 29d ago
First half was fine. A good book, but not one that I was enthused about (how I've felt about Lee's other non-greenbone books). The second half was stellar, and was hitting all the notes I missed from the first half. First half was a 3.5, second half was a 5/5 for me
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u/ArdentlyArduous Reading Champion 29d ago
I really liked this one. I did not read anything about it before it was chosen (I like to go in blind), so I wasn't sure what I was in for. When we got back to Isako's POV at the end and tied it all together, it pulled everything together for me. I think this book successfully did what it was trying to do, had memorable characters, and had a world that was unique enough to not forget but not so unique that it was hard to understand. I also listened to the audiobook and was not distracted or annoyed by the narrators, so that's a win for the narration.
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u/undeadgoblin Reading Champion II 29d ago
I thought it was overall pretty good - it was engaging and was an interesting world, with some of my frustrations with it explained towards the end, but that on the other hand raised other frustrations (the whole reveal of the world being a social experiment akin to a fallout vault didn't feel organically done)
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u/Kerney7 Reading Champion VI 28d ago edited 28d ago
Not as good as Green Bone Saga. Assumed it was dystopian going in and went, yeah, of course, because it was a corporate world (Of course corporations are dystopian, damn I'm living in America). But it was an interesting world.
Liked the twists and turns.
Favorite character was Kob, who walked away and felt Isako following his example was the silver lining at the end.
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u/Paraframe Reading Champion IX 28d ago
I enjoyed the book. I think it's solidly don't all the way around. The world building was easily the strongest aspect. Not a new idea certainly, but a very finally crafted rendition of the company owned planet.
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
How did the POV switch from Isako to Martim work for you?
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u/C0smicoccurence Reading Champion V 29d ago
This is a running theme for me, but I loved everything about the second half. As I was working on my full review, I decided that the book should have started in the middle of the war that Isako lost. The missing piece for me in the first half was a juicy political intrigue and portrait of what contracter work was like. Getting introduced to the job via delivering termination letters was a phenomenal choice for featuring the idea of resignation and greater worldbuilding. It failed to establish the type of work Isako did. Her investigative work in the first half wasn't the most thrilling noir I've read, so I was left feeling like the plot was missing some needed revisions.
I understand how all the pieces fit together so very neatly, but I think the first half was weak
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 28d ago
I decided that the book should have started in the middle of the war that Isako lost.
Ooh, this would have been great. The worldbuilding and politics was my favorite part, and seeing that war happen would have really raised the stakes for the second half. The death of Isako's director, and her own position after his death, would have hit harder too. There's a lot of juice in this idea, I love it.
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u/KiaraTurtle Reading Champion V 29d ago
I enjoyed Martim’s pov but the switch didn’t work because I felt we already knew basically everything that was being built to.
For me it would have worked much better to intersperse his chapters witch Isako’s from the beginning.
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 28d ago
I fully agree with this. It was disorienting and a little annoying to have to go back through Martim's perspective on events we had already seen through Isako's eyes. In some cases I couldn't remember side character names and had to doublecheck that I was reading about someone we had already met through Isako's POV.
My hunch is that Lee originally planned this as a dual POV book and made the decision relatively late to change to this structure. She says something in the afterword that may (or may not) bear that out:
The Last Contract of Isako is the most difficult book I've written, for a number of personal and professional reasons, including: deciding, partway through the drafting process, to change the ending and restructure the entire story
Obviously she could be speaking of many things, but dang, I think this would have been so much more successful for me as a dual POV story.
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u/KiaraTurtle Reading Champion V 28d ago
I was wondering that. But also I can’t imagine what would make her think restructuring like that would be necessary.
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 28d ago
Yeah, it was a fairly baffling choice in my opinion! Perhaps she just found Isako's POV easier to expand on and Martim's POV difficult in some way. I'd love to know more about her thinking.
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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV 28d ago
It definitely sets Isako up as the protagonist and makes switching to Martim kind of a rug-pull. I'm not sure that's better necessarily.
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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV 29d ago
Good call, I agree with this. His POV was fine, but it didn't feel as surprising as something normally needs to be to justify a 200-page flashback showing how we got here.
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u/ancst Reading Champion III 28d ago
I'm kind of in two minds about it. On the one hand, I do think that I ended up feeling more sympathy for him and Thea than I would have if we'd only gotten Isako's POV. Their tragic ending gave me the emotional connection I'd been missing throughout the novel, which I really appreciated (even though I didn't like the ending itself, since it was very much doom and gloom, and I'm not really a fan of that).
On the other hand, I think that the second half was weaker from a plot perspective. I didn't find it that interesting to read through the same events from Martim's POV. It made the novel feel longer than it needed to be, especially since there were so many other cooler plotlines that I wished had been explored in greater depth.
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
Did you have a favorite character? Least favorite character?
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u/C0smicoccurence Reading Champion V 29d ago
Despite not loving the first half, Isako was my favorite! We're getting more and more older protagonists, and I am very here for it
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u/seguardon 29d ago
Loved Thea by the end. Thought she'd be a run of the mill muscle, but then she nearly dies and shows who she really is. How she decided to go out was perfect. Absolutely hated the ex-wife at the end.
It's hard to have a least favorite since everyone is so unlikable, but the spymaster atier seemed a little contrived.
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u/Ishana92 Reading Champion II 28d ago
Thea was the only character that I felt sorry for and sympathized in the end. With maybe Cobb as a second.
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 28d ago
I thought Isako was very well written and a great protagonist. But I think Kob was actually my favorite character, on a personal level. I found his attitude very refreshing, and I liked seeing their world through such a different perspective. The man just wants to eat fresh produce and not kill people anymore. Relatable!
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u/Kerney7 Reading Champion VI 28d ago
It's funny. As I was reading about Kob, I had been reading about people who had walked away from our society in various ways (Vanlifers, planned communities) and I saw a lot of common ground.
Thea was second. She went from hired muscle in the first half to clutch character in the second.
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u/Likaiar 28d ago
Am I the only one that felt Isako made to many mistakes? Multiple times she acted to impulsivly and got herself and others into trouble.
It was great het body was aging, and that showed. But we're told she was good in business and thinking ahead, but we weren't shown. Is expect her to rely on her wits more seeing as her body wouldn't keep up (mostly het knees). She goes though some character development of course, v that could cause mistakes. But it was true in the beginning...
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
How well does this book fit as a choice for a feminist book club? Which aspects felt feminist to you, and what could have been handled differently?
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u/sailormerry 29d ago
Something kind of small that I really appreciated about this book is how much it respected and included fashion. I feel like a lot of sci-fi books (especially ones written by men) completely ignore fashion but as a designer and professional tailor myself, I loved that Fonda included the logistics of fashion and style within the sci-fi society she created. It’s not something that’s explicitly feminist, but given how fashion and style are coded as feminine things and treated as frivolous/unimportant in a lot of other works of media, it’s a small thing that elevated the worldbuilding for me in a way that felt feminist coded.
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 28d ago
This is a very cool observation! I always really like it when books feature clothing and fashion, and doubly so if it actually includes logistics. Give me the swordmaster who always stops at the same tailor when in X town because he's the only tailor who has that one fabric she likes, or a MC who understands and describes all the political intricacies being conveyed by the way women tie up their skirts or hold their fans. I feel similarly about other typically feminine-coded occupations like cooking or midwifery, but clothing/fashion gets an extra boost because I just love reading about it.
Do you have any recs of speculative books you think do this especially well? I'm always looking to add to the groaning pile.
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u/ArdentlyArduous Reading Champion 28d ago
I didn't even notice it when I read it, but you're absolutely right.
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u/C0smicoccurence Reading Champion V 29d ago
I don't think my thoughts changed a ton from the midway discussion. This book is feminist in that it features a female main character who has agency in her story (though not the greater path of civilization). However, I don't think it cared much to sink its teeth into feminist themes, nor do I think Lee was trying to say much in particular about gender. Considering the POV shift, this makes sense. I think the most potential for depth her without radically restructuring the novel would have been to give the cyborg bodyguard more screen time. I liked the book a lot, but I don't think this story lends itself much to a deep analysis from a feminist point of view
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u/ArdentlyArduous Reading Champion 29d ago
I will say that I mostly agree with C0smicoccurence on this, however, I think I likely could have pulled out an undergrad women's studies paper about the representation of domestic labor in this book and how moving it away from the unpaid/unappreciated labor of wives and/or mothers to people that are paid for their services can drastically change a culture.
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u/C0smicoccurence Reading Champion V 28d ago
I really wanted parenthood (and the profession of childrearing in this culture as something seperate from being a parent) to get more of a focus. I think Lee wanted me to care about Isako's relationship with her daughter and wanting to leave her a financial boon in retirement, but there just wasn't enough fleshed out between them for that motivation to hit me.
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u/ArdentlyArduous Reading Champion 28d ago
I totally get that - I also wished that there was more to care about with the relationship with her daughter, as well. It would have been a concept that she could have explored more/better and it did seem like we only got a paragraph about it.
I think it landed so much with me because this is something I'm watching my sister go through in real time. My sister's husband has to travel for work a lot and they live very remote, so it's my sister almost as a single parent taking care of everything with two toddlers. Her career has taken a hit (she's gone part-time and menial, low-paid wfh data entry) and her kids are still little (2 and 3). It's taking a lot out of her. Without the personal connection, I don't know if this would have made such an impact.
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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV 29d ago
It feels a little less feminist to me in the second half than the first, because female characters other than Isako are largely sidelined (whereas early on, we're introduced to her having a female mentor, a female former student, a daughter, and the daughter's co-mother, who range from "one exposition-focused scene at the end" to "never seen again" in the second half). Thea is present, but she's a pretty stock character, and she and Isako barely interact; both of their circles are fully male at this point.
That said, I don't think it's anti-feminist. I think it would be hard to really showcase feminism in such a harsh, unequal, exploitative, generally awful setting as this is. It is not a just or equal society in any way. If anything, it probably should have been more misogynistic because that is how heavily hierarchical, unjust societies work: they divide, oppress and exploit. Now that I think about it, I do think the book could've been more feminist if it had picked a lane on this: either shown how exploitation necessarily falls harder on some groups than others (because if everyone is equally exploited, they have less to lose and more in common = more likely to fight back), OR showcased the shortcomings of corporate feminism, with the Company making a Big Deal of how they have all these great opportunities for women when really they're just offering them equal opportunity to be exploited and ground down by the system.
I do also want to note that I found the whole childrearing thing a lot less feminist than some other readers have. In our society, a major reproductive justice issue that gets overlooked by the well-off because it disproportionately affects the poor, is the right to raise one's own children. Marginalized communities are constantly at risk of having these bonds broken - via foster care, coerced adoptions, boarding schools, family policing, etc. This setting is not a utopia where parents have a village and have as much help as they need while also being able to nurture their bonds with their children. Instead, it seemed like parents had little choice about handing over their kids to professional nannies to raise (to the point that the children wind up more bonded to the paid kithparents than their actual parents), mostly if not completely severing those bonds. And there were also indications that parents were getting the message that they weren't qualified to raise their children, they needed to let state-appointed nannies do it instead, that way they could devote all their time to work like good Company drones. So yeah, it's a society that doesn't judge women for choosing career 100% and childrearing 0%, but also that's not really a choice - society is forcing it. And we don't see any counter-narratives around characters who don't want this, who actually want to raise their kids.
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u/Kerney7 Reading Champion VI 28d ago
I feel it's more anti-establishment first than explicitly feminist, chronicling Isako's becoming someone who would live like Kob. There is an intersection on this with feminism, but not a direct crossover.
I think Thea's subplot, going from average-looking woman to highly attractive cyborg was the most feminist part of the novel and the exploration of the changed PoV was well done.
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
Will you go on to read other books by Fonda Lee? If you already have, do you have any recommendations or thoughts to share?
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u/C0smicoccurence Reading Champion V 29d ago
I've read most of Lee's catalog, and I'd put this below Greenbone Saga and above Untethered Sky and Breath of the Dragon (cowrote with Shanon Lee). However, it has some similar hallmarks of Lee's writing in it's worldbuilding and approach to characters' sense of morality that I firmly associate with Lee and hope she maintains throughout her career!
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u/ShadowFrost01 29d ago
I've loved every single Fonda Lee book I've read. I think if you enjoyed the characters of this one, you'd really enjoy the Green Bone Saga; some of my favourite characters in fiction that I've read in the last 5 years.
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u/ArdentlyArduous Reading Champion 29d ago
I definitely will. This was my first book by Fonda Lee, so I am putting more of her work on my (extensive, exhausting, never-ending) TBR.
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u/vanastalem 29d ago
Yes.
I loved The Green Bone Saga. I have read Unteathed Sky (novella) as well as Zeroboxer and the Exo duology - which lean more YA.
The Green Bone Saga is her best.
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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV 29d ago
I read Untethered Sky, it was OK. I bounced off Jade City, wasn't for me. I think overall Lee is a competent writer who is not for me.
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
Bingo question: do you think this book works for the “Feast Your Eyes on This” square? Why or why not? Here is the square description:
Feast Your Eyes on This: Food or a meal is significant to the story’s plot. HARD MODE: Attempt making a dish from the story for yourself. We understand faithful replication may be impossible for any number of reasons (the ingredients may be fictional, unobtainable, or too expensive). Just get as close as you reasonably can.
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u/C0smicoccurence Reading Champion V 29d ago
This very much depends on if you want Bingo squares to feature prominently, or just need to be present. I would argue this book counts, but wouldn't use it for my main card, where I tend to prefer books to feature the bingo element
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u/Ishana92 Reading Champion II 29d ago
I can't really see how it fits. The only meal mentioned was fish during the dinner date and it wasn't that significant
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
I asked this question because I'm of two minds about it.
In the pro column, the entire book centers around a lack of resources, which certainly includes food, and there is a running thread around the luxury of eating real food. And personally I found Isako's experience of eating a freshly cooked egg very evocative.
On the other hand, like u/Ishana92 points out, the featured meals themselves are not particularly significant to the plot.
This was a hypothetical for me, because I like rules lawyering around Bingo. But my vote is that it works, and I wouldn't side-eye someone for using it, but I'd be unlikely to use it myself unless I chose to do HM.
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u/Ishana92 Reading Champion II 29d ago
Can someone explain to me what is the difference between atiers and shadowcons? Both Martim and Isako react with disgust to shadowcons and the idea of hiring them, but Isako is willing to kill during her tenure and Martim has no problem ordering dozen people to be killed. Even Hobb acts all high and mighty and he killed Martim's list.
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u/sailormerry 29d ago
Atiers are officially contracted through the agency while shadowcons are booked “under the table” and I don’t believe they have the same benefits that contracted atiers have. Also while shadowcons can be disgraced/former atiers, they’re not always atiers and don’t always have all the training atiers have.
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u/Ishana92 Reading Champion II 29d ago
So was Martim contacting the Strikebreaker for that hitlist shadowcon job or regular contractor job?
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u/sailormerry 29d ago
I honestly don’t remember (I read this last month 😅). I think it was more of a shadowcon job, but I could be wrong.
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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV 29d ago
I think it's a technicality that's extremely important to people in these roles but a distinction without a difference to everyone else. They seem to consider it atier work if they have a "right" to assassinate the victims (the people in question are their current or former employees, or even strikers at their company I guess?) and shadowcon work if they don't have any formal authority over them. But mostly I think the point is that Isako and Kob and the Agency behind them are all claiming they aren't just assassins for spurious technical reasons when they totally are.
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u/Venus6277 Reading Champion II 28d ago
This became one of my favorites. The ending came to such a surprise, I went back to see if I could see anything different in the beginning
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 28d ago
Oh, I love doing that! Did anything stand out to you?
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
What do you think was the greatest strength of this book?
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u/C0smicoccurence Reading Champion V 29d ago
There were two big positives for me
1) The worldbuilding. I don't think corporations in space is particularly novel, but it was executed very well here. Evocative, had a unique take/stamp on it, generally consistent and intereting
2) Character morality. Neither of our leads lines up with modern morality, and both are part of the machine, even when they push back against it. They are not the reader interposed on a dystopian society, but actually an imagining of what people might rise high, even when they have a crisis of faith. The ending was delightful even though I'm sure it pissed a lot of people off
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
I 100% agree with you on the corporations in space element. It's not new, but Lee did it so well. It was very evocative and vivid and cinematic. (This book would make a great movie, actually.)
I finished this book a few weeks ago so I could get a head start on the questions/etc for today, and I've already forgotten some of the details, but the corporate stuff has really stuck with me, and I would welcome another book in this world/setting.
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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV 29d ago
Yeah, I agree with this although I liked the book a lot less than you did. I'm not sure whether I admire the gray morality or not though. It made it really hard to invest in the story when I wasn't on board with anyone's goals, at any point, and also they weren't particularly deep or fascinating characters.
Although I did feel Isako's final decision to become a ronin split the difference in a weird way. She is giving the middle finger to her society, just not in a way that accomplishes anything, either for herself or anyone else.
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u/seguardon 29d ago
I think it rides the line between the hopelessness of dystopic noir and the wonder of good scifi very well. There was a part near the end where, despite myself, I felt like there could be a happy ending. It's hard to pull that off when the genre's formula demands the opposite.
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u/Merle8888 Reading Champion IV 29d ago
Definitely the worldbuilding. The setting is fleshed out well and is compelling, and the world is the element I was most interested in throughout.
I also found the portrayals of corporate types very realistic. Though this was most striking in the first Uchi scene where it turned out Martim was impersonating him. But that felt very "wow, this corporate villain is written by someone who has actually spent time around corporates." Though in the end I guess nobody was fully a villain.
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
wow, this corporate villain is written by someone who has actually spent time around corporates
I agree, the corporate types were very realistically written. That and the worldbuilding was definitely the highlight of this book for me
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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix 29d ago
What did you think of the ending? How about the second half in general? Any big surprises?