Review

bcc: re: Dystopia After the Green Bone trilogy, Fonda Lee has earned the “I’ll take a pass at anything you write” slot. The Last Contract of Isako justifies that trust: dystopian corporate thriller, or possibly a lightly fictionalized onboarding document for the life we are all currently living. One conglomerate owns the employment stack; the planet still needs terraforming; retirement means death. It is science fiction, technically. Lee is very good at making systems feel lived-in rather than lore-dumped, and here the system is bureaucracy as atmosphere. The corporate memos are painfully real, If you are not ready for corporate speak, stay away. If you are, the book lands with the grim pleasure of recognizing the monster. ...

Millennial Nightmares Fifteen years ago I left public service, and I still have nightmares about going back. Specific nightmares. I’ve signed up for another year-long tour in Baghdad with the best intentions, certain that this time I will do real good, only to end up helpless, locked in an office and a compound, filling out safety forms and pushing emails. The Incandescent understands that trap. The novelty is the easy sell: magical school, but from the faculty side, with bureaucracy rendered as a system just as arcane as magic. The better trick is that Emily Tesh convincingly creates an alternate universe at the midpoint between Harry Potter and our own. The spellwork matters less than the paperwork. The demons matter less than the institutional incentives. Anyone can write “dark academia”; fewer books understand that the real horror is another committee meeting where everyone knows the right thing and does the easy thing anyway. Doing good does not mean doing well, and it certainly does not mean doing good well. ...