last contract, radiant star
Apr. 25th, 2026 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursulaPorting a pair of book reviews over from Bluesky:
Fonda Lee's Last Contract of Isako is terraforming cyberpunk. It's also a samurai movie in book form--directly, rather than in the secondhand way you'd get by riffing on cyberpunk without knowing the sources. Last Contract of Isako is thinking through what it means to have a moral code--an unrelenting and in some ways horrifying code--in service to someone who has no ethics at all. It comes down more or less on the side that some ethics are better than none, which is refreshing when you're used to grimdark, or real-world nihilism. It's also tremendously tightly plotted, in that way where as a reader you know one thing will happen but aren't ready for the sudden unfurling of ramifications!
Last Contract pairs well with Ann Leckie's Radiant Star, in the sense that both are portraits of people who are fucking things up for deeply embedded cultural reasons. Though the book I think you should read Radiant Star against is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Leckie loves point of view experiments, and Radiant Star is experimenting with an opinionated nineteenth-century style narrator who can dip in and out of other points of view.
Like Jonathan Strange, Radiant Star is particularly interested in the ways that social stratification of various kinds leads people to ignore the knowledge of those they think are inferior, at great peril. When the narrator of Radiant Star comments that a decision is really very understandable, it is about to become a giant clusterfuck, and this becomes funnier and funnier (and scarier and scarier) as the book goes on. You can read most of Radiant Star with general awareness of Ancillary Justice, but the end will be most satisfying if you remember the events of Ancillary Mercy (it's close in time to that book, though places & characters don't repeat).
I requested both of these books from Netgalley, and I'm very glad I did.
Fonda Lee's Last Contract of Isako is terraforming cyberpunk. It's also a samurai movie in book form--directly, rather than in the secondhand way you'd get by riffing on cyberpunk without knowing the sources. Last Contract of Isako is thinking through what it means to have a moral code--an unrelenting and in some ways horrifying code--in service to someone who has no ethics at all. It comes down more or less on the side that some ethics are better than none, which is refreshing when you're used to grimdark, or real-world nihilism. It's also tremendously tightly plotted, in that way where as a reader you know one thing will happen but aren't ready for the sudden unfurling of ramifications!
Last Contract pairs well with Ann Leckie's Radiant Star, in the sense that both are portraits of people who are fucking things up for deeply embedded cultural reasons. Though the book I think you should read Radiant Star against is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Leckie loves point of view experiments, and Radiant Star is experimenting with an opinionated nineteenth-century style narrator who can dip in and out of other points of view.
Like Jonathan Strange, Radiant Star is particularly interested in the ways that social stratification of various kinds leads people to ignore the knowledge of those they think are inferior, at great peril. When the narrator of Radiant Star comments that a decision is really very understandable, it is about to become a giant clusterfuck, and this becomes funnier and funnier (and scarier and scarier) as the book goes on. You can read most of Radiant Star with general awareness of Ancillary Justice, but the end will be most satisfying if you remember the events of Ancillary Mercy (it's close in time to that book, though places & characters don't repeat).
I requested both of these books from Netgalley, and I'm very glad I did.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-04-25 01:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-04-26 02:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-05-01 07:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-05-15 01:30 am (UTC)Is there a literary or even fanfic term for the kind of narrative POV Leckie uses in Radiant Star? When Dickens does it in Bleak House I call it "3rd person sarcastic", but I think overall one might call it "3rd person persona". Because in the 19th/late 18thC version it was assumed to be the *author's* voice, but that voice was itself a persona, a way of speaking the writer assumed for the purpose of a particular work. The narrative voice in Middlemarch is George Eliot, not Mary Ann Evans.
In the 2006 seminar about Jonathan Strange at Crooked Timber, Susanna Clarke said she didn't even *consider* who the narrator was until fairly late in the writing process, and after considering various alternatives has settled--this long after the book was finished--on "She isn’t anybody. She is a perfectly ordinary, nineteenth-century, all-seeing, all-knowing narrator. .. Of course Belle Waring is perfectly right to suggest that footnotes suggest a scholar. To which I can only respond who says God isn’t a scholar and doesn’t write footnotes? It seems to me, He writes quite a lot of them."
I actually think Clarke is wrong in thinking that Dickens' contemporary readers *ever* thought his 3rd-person narrators were supposed to be impersonal or god-like. I think they were always supposed to be *Dickens*, at least the Dickens-persona, the public storyteller.
Back to Radiant Star. I agree that it's fascinating how Leckie is writing stories at different parts of Raadch-adjacent space, but with such different techniques. Who do *you* think the narrator of RS is supposed to be? Why choose this kind of persona-POV?
One reason, I can guess, is to make a virtue or game of the amount of infodumping/backstory needed to tell this story, which even so has *thoroughly* confused many readers, judging by goodreads reviews.
But speaking of "social stratification of various kinds leads people to ignore the knowledge of those they think are inferior, at great peril" -- the thing that I kept tripping over is how limited the bio/ecological knowledge of the inhabitants of Aa seems to be, how *sloppy* they are about their most critical, life-sustaining systems. I know, I know *looks around* but at least we actually *have* experts, and people trying to learn more! and we haven't been locked into a patently artificial environment for a thousand years or more!
Meanwhile, the Justice of Albis doesn't seem to have experts on skel cultivation or hydroponics in general, because why aren't they on the planet, working with their counterparts? Because it's absolutely 100% impossible, regardless of what the Governor thinks, that they can just plop skel into the existing system & have it grow, that's what I now think of as "Andy Weir levels of biological understanding". Skel is nutritionally complete for humans, so it *must* have a carefully-calibrated fertilization scheme if it's to get the right mix of nutrients in. You can't grow a high-calcium vegetable with enough iron, iodine, etc, unless those things are in the soil/water!
I don't know if it's an Andy Weir situation, where Leckie is being super-sloppy about biology, or if we thoughtful readers are supposed to see that the *narrator* is ignoring the deep knowledge of marine biology, hydroponics, etc., that *has* to exist if human life on Aa is to persist at all, & that this mirrors the complacent ignorance of the ruling class (and of our own ruling classes FFS).