277 pages
Published 2024
Read from March 12 to May 4
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I haven’t read much economic sci-fi, so perhaps it’s inevitable that this novel would remind me of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. There’s only partial overlap between Gateway and Contango’s near-future corporate dystopia of asteroid cities and indebted labor. But their structures are a little bit similar: both begin in the aftermath of a major change in the narrator’s life, which gets revealed piecemeal over the course of alternating flashbacks and scenes in the present.
Flashback or present day, Contango comes front-loaded with exposition and worldbuilding details. We begin in media res with narrator Con inadvertently winning a bet that threatens to ruin all the regular customers at the titular underground gambling club. I found it a bit difficult to get invested in all the contextless wisps of backstory and setting, until enough had accumulated that I finally got into the book’s rhythm, somewhere around page 60 or so (which just happens to be around the time the narrative finally explains the nature of the bet). It’s a slow start, given my current struggles with attention span.
Once it clicks, Boey’s universe of contract workers, predatory employers, hustling holograms, and gamified work is compelling, offering a grim but lived-in vision of working class neo-serfdom. It functions equally well as a projection of the climate-fucked future and an allegory for the present. The story also becomes a gutting account of impoverished parenthood in a society built around exploitation. It also turns into a murder mystery and develops a touch of the classic Philip K. Dickian “who or what is even real?” dislocation.
Contango is a lot. It’s ambitious, and not all of it worked for me. But there’s also a lot to enjoy here, a moving, well-realized texture of life, full of food and heartache and uncertainty. “People shouldn’t have to be strong just to survive,” says one character—words just as relevant now as they are to any possible future.
