The Last Contract of Isako

 The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee (2026) 528 pages

This is my first book by Fonda Lee. The synopsis of this standalone sci-fi adventure caught my attention. I love samurai movies, so a legendary swordswoman in the future on a planet gradually being terraformed and controlled by corporate interests is an intriguing twist on the genre. On this planet, Aquilo, in the future, humans are in a strict hierarchy and are divided over terraforming taking top priority to make the planet more habitable or trying to re-establish contact with Earth (which was lost centuries ago). Stay in the corporate hierarchy, with a wide gulf between the rich and the poor, or look outward toward exploration and potential better opportunities? Isthmus Isako is our heroine. Everyone has a personal name of a plant, animal, or geographic feature from old Earth and a kith name, or family name, on Aquilo. Isako and everyone with the same sort of job as her, an atier, operates with a modified Bushido code and fights with longknives. Their job is part bodyguard, part espionage, and all about strategy. The rich and powerful who control the corporations and govern the domed habitat of multiple cities have the means to transfer their brains into synthetic bodies when they reach 80 or 90 years old. This ruling class calls in second stage, while everyone under them tends to call them jarbrains. In this world, Isako's contract surprisingly changes hands and she is sent on a final mission to dig up dirt on an executive of a gas production corporation pushing to be nominated to the highest Board of Directors. This man, in his 70s, is young for the recent second stage transfer operation he went through. His atier, Dragonfly Martim, was mentored by Isako. Martim is a young overachiever just beginning his career, who suddenly supposedly dies of a drug overdose... Isako knows something is wrong with this reported cause of death and turns her final mission into an investigation of Martim's death. About a quarter of the book changes perspective to show us Martim's life. Then we return to Isako's point of view to wrap it up. I liked the action and the surprises and the cautionary future sci-fi world presented.

Automatic Noodle

 Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (2025), 163 pages

There is a lot to unpack in this short book. It is hard to even know where to begin, but I very much enjoyed the concept. A group of restaurant service robots in the not-so-distant future find themselves abandoned by their owners. They decide to take their future into their own hands and re-open the restaurant, but with better food. And they succeed! Except, as in real-life, there are those who want to spoil a good thing through their own xenophobia and biases. This is a thought-provoking look into the future of technology while also touching upon current day issues of immigration, economics, and resilience.

Automatic Noodle

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz, 176 pages

When former military robot Staybehind and his mechanical coworkers wake up in a ruined restaurant, they quickly realize that the corporation that was running the restaurant has abandoned them. Determined to remain free and choose their own path, the robots embark upon their own restaurant venture, Authentic Noodles, hoping that nobody will realize that they don't have a human running things. What starts out great (fantastic online ratings, rave reviews about the tasty noodles) turns sour when they start to get review-bombed by anti-robot online trolls. They'll have to learn to lean on one another and give it everything they've got to survive.

Set in a post-war San Francisco — the war being that of California's successful fight for independence from the USA — this book is thought-provoking, heartwarming, and has the ability to make you crave noodles you've never tasted. Newitz created some amazing characters, and I would love to read more about Staybehind and his friends. Highly recommended.

*This book will be published Aug. 5, 2025.

Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters

 Sea-Daughters, Sun-Daughters by Aimee Ogden (2021) 110 Pages

A brief, beautiful sci-fi novella. In a futuristic world where multiple human-hybrids live in different clans across the globe and stars, many of whom are developing viruses. Artuale, a former sea-dwelling human hybrid is on the hunt for a cure for the current plague that is terrorizing her new clan and home. Her husband, whom she genetically changed for, lives above water on land and is currently dying. The land-dwelling hybrids do not get along with the clans of the ocean-dwellers. Artuale seeks out the World Witch, a former lover, but also someone who can get a hold of just about anything, for a price. Artuale is hoping the World Witch can help save her husband. The World Witch, Yanja, has also changed...he is now a male. In this world, it is much easier to shape or genetic variance or even sex. Yanja takes Artuale through the gates, off-world, where they come to a place which might be able to genetically formulate a cure for the plague. They are told they must quarantine for two weeks, which they decide is too much time to waste. Artuale suits up and cuts into the station, hoping to infiltrate the place in order to get her samples tested. She is found and arrested, along with the Yanja. Artuale believes that all hope is lost when the guild responsible for medical experimentation and creation intervenes and allows the samples to be tested. They have values in which the human hybrids must be saved by all means. Artuale is given a choice...she must either leave this civilization forever and never leave her place with her husband again or become a citizen of star civilization. She chooses to return to her world, never to leave. She saves her village and her new hybrid species. On the return flight, her and Yanja have relations, which results later in a pregnancy which her body accepts (since she was previously ocean-clan, her body would not produce children with her current husband). Overall, I really loved this short novella. The various ways in which the author dives into sexuality and LGBTQ themes really melds well with the story. I definitely will be reading more from this author, as I wish this story wasn't so brief!

Contagion

Contagion, by Erin Bowman. 432 pg, 2018.
Teen space adventure meets John Carpenter's The Thing in Contagion! Smart and determined student Thea is working as a research intern when she becomes part of a search and rescue crew for a far-away drilling operation. The mission quickly descends into chaos as the corpses and questions pile up around the team. As Thea and her companions fight to survive, forces both inexplicable and all-too-human are at work against them.
If you need a fast paced space mystery with a dollop of creepy, this one might be for you!

Contagion, by Erin Bowman. 432 pg, 2018.

Ancestor

Ancestor by Matt Sheean and Malachi Ward, 120 pages.

A group of people, all slavishly devoted to the "Service" a constant connection to an all-encompassing network, find themselves freed from said service by a homicidal futurist who has found a way to hasten human evolution and transform us into our ultimate selves. A very strong statement on something or another that shows just how bright the author really is, or how dumb, old, and crabby I am. I made it all the way through the book, despite my age and poor temper, because it is a graphic novel and it is only 120 pages.

Down and out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and out in the Magic Kingdom / Cory Doctorow 208 pgs.

This book, set sometime in the future where the world has evolved and gone beyond some of the problems we have today.  People are immortal...they can back up their brains and be restored in clones and all kinds of hacks and updates can be done to their bodies. Julius is the narrator of this tale.  He is over a century old and living his best life at Disney World.  He has a young beautiful girlfriend and a best friend, Dan. But all is not great at the Magic Kingdom, Julius fears that evil Debra is trying to take over Liberty Square.  Julius is murdered (but quickly restored) but the disruption is enough to allow Debra to make changes in the Hall of Presidents.  Now Julius is afraid Debra is marching towards his baby, Haunted Mansion.  Julius is probably losing his mind but ignores pleas to refresh himself because his last backup will mean he forgets that previous year with friend Dan.  Is Julius really losing it or is there an overthrow afoot?  Read to find out.

Red Queen

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard, 383 pages

Mare's world isn't just stratified by the haves and have nots, but by the color of blood. If you have silver blood, then you have all the wealth, prosperity, and power in world - both the power to rule, but also physical power in the form of a special ability. But if your blood is red, then your life is not much more than a fight to survive. Mare is a Red. Her three older brothers have all been sent to the frontlines of Norta's never-ending war, and unless a miracle happens, she will likely be next. After a series of unfortunate events, she finds herself where she thought she would never be - with a job, working for the Silvers attending the Queenstrial. As the favored silver daughters demonstrate their abilities for the king and queen, hoping to be picked for betrothal to Cal, the crown prince, an accident happens, and Mare finds herself plummeting to an early death by electrified shield. Except she doesn't die. It's determined that she is something new and different and scary for the silvers in power - a Red with silver abilities, specifically the ability to manipulate and use electricity. And so she is thrust into the world of the silvers, hiding in plain sight, so to speak, as the betrothed of the younger prince, Maven. But when she's contacted by the Red Guard, a group of guerrilla fighters determined to take down the system oppressing them, she decides to work for them and help them further their cause. But trust in a world of secrets, lies, and machinations is a fragile thing to maintain.

Red Queen is a hard book for me to judge, and if the reviews on Goodreads are any indication, I'm not the only one. While reading it, I found myself greatly enjoying it, but when I wasn't reading it, it was largely forgettable. Part of the reason why probably has to do with the fact that it seems to mash together elements of several other popular YA series (Bardugo's Grisha trilogy and The Hunger Games for sure come to mind) with the more unique elements of the world Aveyard is creating. It has a weird almost love square at play between Mare and the other male main characters her age that was sometimes intriguing, but not enough to get me to root hard for anyone. I figured out the reveal at the end fairly early, but the twist took me surprisingly longer to figure out. It definitely benefits from Aveyard's skills as a scriptwriter. Despite the feeling of having read much of this before, she kept the plot moving perfectly, so it should adapt to the big screen without much of a challenge. So basically I enjoyed it, but there wasn't much there to make it a stand-out for me. Pick it up if you're a die-hard YA fan like me, but otherwise, you're not missing much.

The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir, 384 pages
A 2015 Alex Award Winner

Mark Watney was dead when the rest of the crew aborted their mission due to a horrible dust storm on Mars and evacuated back to their spaceship. Except he wasn't, mostly due to a lot of weird circumstances that managed to keep him alive (though, of course, his biometric scanner stopped working, so that's why his crew thought he was dead), despite the puncture in his suit caused by a piece of antenna ripped off the communications equipment by the storm. Now Mark is faced with surviving on an inhospitable planet all by himself, with nobody knowing that he's actually alive, and with little chance of him making it back home. But Mark is a botanist and a mechanical engineer, and he's surrounded by equipment designed and tested by the best minds science has to offer. As long as he can make it to the site of the next Mars mission, he might survive...

I really enjoyed this one. Despite Mark's predicament, he manages to calm down from his initial despair and start pulling a plan together that just might save him. And he does it all with a very self-deprecating sense of humor. Weir writes the first chapter or so of the book in what is essentially blog format, and it works really well in establishing him as a character. But we also get all sides of this - spoiler alert - NASA's, once they figure out he's still alive, and the rest of the crew, once they're finally told. By the end of the book, I was just like everyone else in the story, eager to see what would happen next, and if he could make it as NASA and the rest of the world pull together to bring him home. The science-y parts are possibly a little too science-y (I kind of skimmed past them a bit), but you definitely get a sense that Weir knows what he's talking about. Don't let the hard science keep you from reading this one.

(Read as part of YALSA's Hub Reading Challenge.)

The Lord of Opium

The Lord of Opium by Nancy Farmer, 411 pages

In this sequel to The House of the Scorpion, Matt returns to Opium after the death of El Patrón and all his family. As the last living copy of El Patrón, Matt is now legally human and, more importantly, recognized as El Patrón himself. With opium shipments piling up and a rival drug lord at his door, what is a fourteen-year-old boy in charge of a drug empire to do? Matt wants to do the right thing by fixing the eejits, those who tried to cross Opium to go to either the US or Aztlán and were instead captured and turned into mindless slaves, and pulling up the opium to plant real crops, but those around him, like Cienfuegos, the head of the Farm Patrol, are determined to turn him into El Patrón Junior. So Matt sets about learning about his kingdom, including the hospital in the mountains where he and other drug lord clones were grown, the biome where all the habitats of the world have been preserved, and the observatory linked to the Scorpion Star, El Patrón's space station. As he digs deeper into the life he has inherited, he learns more and more about the lengths El Patrón went to build and protect his kingdom. Can he figure out how to do the right thing while keeping the power El Patrón left him? Or will he turn into El Patrón, living out his ninth life as the old man would have wanted?

Like The House of the Scorpion, I enjoyed this one, but I probably would have enjoyed it more had it come out more quickly after the first one. There is a focus on the ethics of altering people without their consent, and Nancy Farmer allows the reader to wrestle with that issue along with Matt without presenting one right answer. She has also managed to create a world that's just futuristic enough that it feels like it could still be our own. The ending is open enough for another sequel, but it's also satisfying in case she doesn't. This is a good one if you enjoy your YA dystopias free of love triangles or romance in general and with less of an emphasis on chosen-one-saves-the-world narratives.

The House of the Scorpion

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, 380 pages

Matteo Alacrán wasn't born, but cloned. The copy of the notorious drug lord who rules the land of Opium, a strip of land that exists between the United States and Mexico (now called Aztlán), The House of the Scorpion chronicles Matt's life, from his isolated existence at the edge of the poppy fields with Celia, to the years spent alone in a cell under the cruel Rosa, to his life in the big house as the treasured guest of the real Matteo Alacrán (known as El Patrón). Tutored and pampered, Matt believes that he's destined for something more, but he quickly learns the real reason why El Patrón needs him. A dystopia written for young people before dystopia was the hot thing, The House of the Scorpion is written more in the vein of 1984 or The Giver than any of the more popular dystopias since. Nancy Farmer provides a critical look at the ethical issues surrounding cloning, as well as issues like the drug trade and slavery through the scope of Matt's life, making a compelling case for nurture over nature in the raising of a child. I first read this way back when it first came out, and I remember it blowing my young mind, but the second time around, not so much. It's still a fantastic story, so if you like your dystopias more sci fi based, you'll like this one.

Under the Never Sky trilogy

Under the Never Sky, 374 pages
Through the Ever Night, 341 pages
Into the Still Blue, 392 pages, all by Veronica Rossi

Three hundred years ago, a massive solar flare disrupted the upper atmosphere, causing the earth's magnetic poles to fluctuate wildly and allowing cosmic storms past the atmosphere, blocking out the sky. With Aether storms making it nearly impossible to live out in the open, a lottery was held to determine who would live in the new, self-sustaining pods and who would be stuck to fend for themselves outside. Aria has only ever known life inside Reverie, one of the pods. But when the link to another pod goes down, cutting her off from her mother, she's willing to do anything to find out what's going on. With her friend Paisley in tow, she sneaks into a damaged part of Reverie with Soren, the son of Hess, a leader of the pod, with the hope that Soren will have some info about what happened to her mother. What happens instead is that all hell breaks lose. Helped by an Outsider that just so happened to have snuck in, Aria manages to avoid losing her life, just to find herself kicked out of Reverie by Hess in an effort to keep Soren out of trouble and to smooth everything over.

Perry, brother to the Blood Lord of the Tides, has been pushing his brother to move their tribe further inland in an effort to get away from the Aether storms. Vale will have nothing of it, meaning Perry feels like he's forced into either challenging Vale for leadership of the Tides (something that usually ends in death) or leaving for good. But he doesn't want to leave his nephew, Talon, behind. But when Talon is taken by Dwellers and Vale mysteriously returns home with lots of food for the hungry Tiders, Perry knows he has to leave. It doesn't take long for Perry to find Aria and save her again. After a rocky start, they soon figure out that they're stronger together, kicking into motion events that could lead them to the last refuge from the Aether, possibly saving them all.

I feel like pretty much every review I write ends up with me squeeing over how good a book or series is, but whatever, I guess it's my thing. Veronica Rossi has crafted an intriguing future world, opting to go more sci fi than straight dystopia/speculative fiction. And, since it's YA, there's plenty of wonderful romance - in fact, it might be just as much a romance as it is a dystopic action adventure story. I also really enjoyed how she switches perspectives between Aria and Perry, making the story about them and how they're affecting change, as opposed to the whole chosen one trope. Not that I have anything against chosen one stories, it's just that a LOT of YA dystopia uses that as its starting point, so it's refreshing to get a story that is about two people, not just one. It's an engaging, rollicking adventure that manages to keep churning along breathlessly without losing steam. If you're a YA dystopia fan, then this is a trilogy you'll definitely want to check out if you haven't already.