SPFBO Champions: Orconomics by J. Zachary Pike

Welcome to the SPFBO Champions’ League! As you know, this is a special edition where we try to find out who will be the ultimate Champion among the last 10 SPFBO winners. Check out our SPFBO Chamopions’ League page for more info! SPFBO Champions’ League ends on December 20th, and we’ll post our reviews every 3 weeks or so.

Our 2nd SPFBO Champion review is for Orconomics by J. Zachary Pike, the winner of SPFBO 4. The reviews within a post will be in alphabetical order.

A quick reminder about how we are proceeding in this edition: our judges had the freedom to opt out of reading any of the books due to personal interest, time restrictions, unforeseen life events, etc. Our aim is to have at least 4 reviews/scores for each Champion.

Once again, we’ll have a DNF rule in place: if a judge reads a book (if they didn’t opt out beforehand), they have to read at least 25% of it, although encouraged to read at least 50% since we are talking about champions. At whichever point they DNF, they’ll have to write a review and put a score in our spreadsheet.

As per the new rules for the SPFBO Champions’ Editidon, there aren’t going to be any public scores, but we’ll have them to help us decide the ranking. However, they won’t be shared anywhere. We will also have a mixed set of old and new reviews, meaning that if any of us reviewed a book before, we can reuse that review. Therefore, we’ll mark our reviews at the beginning as old or new.

For Orconomics, we have 5 reviews for your reading pleasure.

So, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at our 2nd Champion!

Table of Contents

• About the Book
• Book Blurb
• Reviews
  • Arina
  • Drew
  • Filip
  • Rari
  • Tru

Professional heroes kill and loot deadly monsters every day, but Gorm Ingerson’s latest quest will be anything but business as usual.

Making a Killing in Professional Heroics

The adventuring industry drives the economy of Arth, a world much like our own but with more magic and fewer vowels. Monsters’ hoards are claimed, bought by corporate interests, and sold off to plunder funds long before the beasts are slain. Once the contracts and paperwork are settled, the Heroes’ Guild issues a quest to kill the monster and bring back its treasure for disbursement to shareholders.

Life in The Shadows

Of course, while professional heroics has been a great boon for Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and all the other peoples of light, it’s a terrible arrangement for the Shadowkin. Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds, and their ilk must apply for to become Noncombatant Paper Carriers (or NPCs) to avoid being killed and looted by guild heroes. Even after getting their papers, NPCs are treated as second class citizens, driven into the margins of society.

An Insane Quest

Gorm Ingerson, a Dwarven ex-hero with a checkered past, has no idea what he’s getting himself into when he stands up for an undocumented Goblin. His act of kindness starts a series of events that ends with Gorm recruited by a prophet of the mad goddess Al’Matra to fulfill a prophecy so crazy that even the Al’Matran temple doesn’t believe it.

Money, Magic, and Mayhem

But there’s more to Gorm’s new job than an insane prophecy: powerful corporations and governments, usually indifferent to the affairs of the derelict Al’Matran temple, have shown an unusual interest in the quest. If his party of eccentric misfits can stop fighting each other long enough to recover the Elven Marbles, Gorm might be able to turn a bad deal into a golden opportunity and win back the fame and fortune he lost so long ago.

Arina

Read: 100%
Review: new

J. Zachary Pike’s Orconomics is a clever, irreverent satire of epic fantasy—part Critical Role, part Discworld, and unapologetically critical. It leans heavily on humor, poking fun at classic RPG tropes and D&D adventurer culture via relentless snark and clever quips. It’s funny—really fucking funny, but sometimes risks the loss of its own narrative voice in favor of a torrent of punchlines and constant interruption of pace to explain worldbuilding concepts.

In Orconomics, quests are profit-driven ventures taken on by heroes who work for a major entrepreneurial guild, and shadowfolk are little more than dehumanized assets in its brutal economy.

The novel’s most impressive feat is how it shapes the familiar trappings of fantasy RPGs to explore unexpected ground: economic systems, moral ambiguity, and the commodification of violence against a specific group of people. It asks difficult questions about how we define good and evil, and what it means to build a society on those assumptions—particularly the notion of “evil races” in traditional fantasy. 

Underneath all the jokes resurfaces a biting critique of capitalism and hero worship, couched in dungeons, dragons, and debt (both moral and financial).

Orconomics might initially feel like nothing more than one never-ending joke, but it slowly evolves into something much more substantial. What begins as a sharp-edged parody gradually morphs into a more nuanced story with real character development and emotional weight, leading the reader into philosophical ponderings on the nature of the great dichotomy between light and dark. 

Pike’s cast of “snarky bastards” begins to feel like more than a collection of wisecracks constantly throwing attitude at one another (and whoever passes them by), revealing wounds, regrets, and depth beneath it all.

It’s a surprisingly heartfelt, socially aware fantasy satire that plays the long game—and wins.

Drew

Read: 100%
Review: new

As a comic fantasy, it’s not too hard to see where Orconomics took its inspiration, both in terms of style and in the real-world events being satirised.

The primary storyline follows the former professional hero, Gorm Ingerson, and his (mis)adventures after a rare act of kindness leads to him being drawn into a mission with a motley collection of has-beens, ne’er-do-wells and others also looking for a second chance. While that may sound like your standard fantasy quest, which it is, it also has enough self-knowledge and trope familiarity to incorporate those elements into both the plot and the world-building. 

As the character we spend the most time with, Gorm is the most well-drawn of the so-called Heroes of Destiny and one that is fairly easy to identify with. Someone who wants to help and do what he can for those closest to him, a number that grows as the book progresses, but remains wary and guarded after years of scorn and self-imposed solitude. His relationship with the goblin squire Gleebek is emblematic of his growth and is one of the standout parts of the book. A few of the other members of the group are given some time to shine as well, showing off their hopes and flaws, maybe not in as much detail as Gorm, but are memorable nonetheless. 

The part of the novel that doesn’t directly involve Gorm and his compatriots is arguably the part that lends the book its name and the part that has many of the strongest real-world parallels. I won’t go into them too much detail here, since I’m a strong believer that spotting these things is more fun when you do it for yourself, but I don’t think it’s any spoiler to say that several aspects of the past 50 years or so of financial history come in for some jabs.

One thing that I have seen criticised about Orconomics, aside from the fact that it’s some time before any orcs show up, is that there are several instances where the narrative essentially stops while an omniscient narrator explains some aspect of the world-building. While I can’t deny this, I think I found it less objectionable than most and, as others will point out, it does lessen the deeper into the book you get. 

Similarly, I’m not sure if the humour is necessarily going to work for everyone, but for those it does, there is certainly a lot to enjoy and, with two further instalments, more still to come.

Filip

Read: 100%
Review: new

I’m in two minds about Orconomics. I loved its sincerity, the honest emotion and vulnerability its characters displayed, on those occasions that they did; yet its worldbuilding has elements that well and truly frustrated me, to begin with. That said, as soon as I finished the audiobook of *Orconomics*, I purchased *Son of a Liche*, which should tell you that my enjoyment of Zachary J. Pike‘s characters outstripped my frustration with the text’s tendency towards self-parody. 

Orconomics follows the disgraced dwarven berserker Gorm Ingerson as he is offered a supposed chance at redemption after years of drunken stupor and self-pity. Before he knows it, Gorm joins the latest iteration of a group of adventures fated to save the world – at least according to one of several local religions. It’s really not as big a deal as you’d think; groups like this one come together way more often than world-ending catastrophes do. It’s just Gorm’s foul luck that leads him and his fellow party members into one of those catastrophes. 

Well, maybe not ‘just’ his luck; economic forces are conspiring to make the best of a bad situation. And as is the way of capitalism, what’s good for the economy leads to terrible consequences for those on its lowest rungs (don’t @ me). Gorm’s fetch quest becomes the catalyst for an economic boom fully reliant on a singular engine of growth: the Hero/Quest industry. Honestly, that’s what you get when you let a financial company call itself Goldson Baggs.

Its tongue-in-cheek humour made me cackle but it also failed to land at times. There’s a conscious choice here, whereby some of the world’s vocabulary is borrowed from the language of role-playing games. Non-Combatants are dubbed NPCs (non-player characters in the lingo of RPGs), and a lot of the game apes on various gaming/fantasy in-group humour. A lot of the worldbuilding initially draws from these generic sources with the intent to purely satirize; it mines generic fantasy widely rather than deeply and that’s a shame because when J. Zachary Pike focuses on polishing individual aspects of this world, 

Gorm and the rest of the Seven Sacred Heroes have excellent arcs that don’t wholly rely on the sequels to see everyone fully developed. Gorm’s growth as a character is phenomenal: from a cynic at the book’s opening he has truly embraced the spirit (rather than title) of a hero. I shed actual tears during the book’s emotional climax and honestly, that’s unreasonable for a book called *Orconomics* to do to me. Katha, Jin, Laruna, the rest of the band – these are genuinely fantastic characters who go so much further than their initial first impression. J. Zachary Pike tends to start with caricatures; to my awe, he then develops these into full characters.

Is *Orconomics* a satire? Aye, certainly. It satirizes the British Museum’s Parthenon (or Elgin) Marbles through the much-contested Elven Stones, which were pilfered from an orcish tribe by a powerful elven family centuries ago and have been the reason for conflict (political and otherwise) between elves and orcs ever since. The Elven Stones are the relics that the entire fetch quest revolves around; though things are certainly not as straightforward as they might first seem where those stones are concerned.

The more I think about this novel and world, the more fond I become of them. This is big: I tend to be the kind of reader who goes the other way, finding more and more to nit-pick as time goes on. *Orconomics*, then, is a joy to read and think about.

Rari

Read: 100%
Review: new

The title caught my attention since Economics was one of my minors and I used to be a banker.

Well, there were orcs and the whole is a well written satire on capitalism, so that’s there.

On the surface it’s about a group of unlikely heroes who are literally forced to go on a quest to retrieve some lost marbles. The main pov character is a dwarf called Gorm who was a berserker who has disgraced himself by running away once, thereby sabotaging his promising career as a professional hero. This quest is his chance to redeem himself and reestablish his career. His companions are a bunch of heroes/apprentices who don’t seem to be able to work together or stay sober, but Gorm is determined to make this work.

Though the story centres around Gorm mostly, I loved the worldbuilding and the other characters. The book more or less ends in a cliffhanger and while I’m eager to know more, I don’t think I’ll be able to read it immediately.

I loved the satire and the plot and would recommend this to anyone who likes fantasy with a dash of humour.

Tru

Read: 100%
Review: new

I’ve never been more disappointed and utterly surprised by a book in my life. I went into Orconomics knowing absolutely nothing about it, but based on the cover, I was expecting it to be a fantasy satire about orcs running banks. Imagine my disappointment when the main character isn’t even an orc! Instead of banks, I was given what I thought was a classic fantasy Dungeons and Dragons-like adventure, and I’m not a big fan of those. They bore me to tears, in fact, and despite the humour (I love humour!) I found the first part of Orconomics to be a slog. There were too many pauses where our main character (not an orc) would interrupt their own story to explain the vastness of his world, the intricacies of society, and yes, the economy.

But then it turned out that this was no mere classic fantasy adventure, and our party of heroes were no mere classic heroes, either.

Our main not-an-orc character is in fact Gorm, a dwarf, who was disgraced from the Heroes Guild and forced onto a deadly fetch quest with a group of equally disgraced misfits, including a retired thief who prefers to be known as a bard, despite lacking musical talent, an elf dealing with potion addiction, a deadly warrior who won’t talk but can kick your ass at board games, two warring mages who can’t have a conversation without lobbing fireballs at each other, a useless goblin squire (I love you Gleebek), and the scholarly-priest who knows nothing about professional adventuring, but it’s his prophecy that sets them off on a quest.

What follows are classic fantasy tropes turned on their head and bashed with humour. Once the party begins on their quest, I became enthralled by their adventure, by the ups and downs of life as a professional Hero, and especially what that means for the designated bad guys of the world (including orcs!) who are trying to find their own way to thrive in a world based on capitalism.

By the end of this story, I was fully invested in Gorm’s journey and rooting for our heroes, and it even managed to tug on my heartstrings and hurt my feelings. Could the start be a little tighter? Sure, and I think there is a lesson there for both author and reader, because if I’d given up on this book at the start, I would have missed out on something truly special. Orconomics is THE take on classic fantasy I didn’t realise I was missing.

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