Counterweight

by

eBook, 176 pages

English language

Published July 11, 2023 by Vintage.

ISBN:
978-0-593-31722-8
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OCLC Number:
1355905054
ISFDB ID:
3187926

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1 star (2 reviews)

On the fictional island of Patusan—and much to the ire of the Patusan natives—the Korean conglomerate LK is constructing an elevator into Earth’s orbit, gradually turning this one-time tropical resort town into a teeming travel hub: a gateway to and from our planet. Up in space, holding the elevator’s “spider cable” taut, is a mass of space junk known as the counterweight. And stashed within that junk is a trove of crucial data: a memory fragment left by LK’s former CEO, the control of which will determine the company’s—and humanity’s—future.

Racing up the elevator to retrieve the data is a host of rival forces: Mac, the novel’s narrator and LK’s chief of External Affairs, increasingly disillusioned with his employer; the everyman Choi Gangwu, unwittingly at the center of Mac’s investigations; the former CEO’s brilliant niece and power-hungry son; and Rex Tamaki, a violent officer in LK’s Security Division. They’re all …

3 editions

reviewed Counterweight by Djuna

Counterweight

2 stars

Overall, this book didn't work for me. After finishing it, I found out that Counterweight was originally intended as a low budget scifi movie and it feels like it. The characters are thin, and there are almost more characters talked about off page than we see on page. The book emits its ideas in a smoke cloud of cyberpunk chaff without engaging deeply with any of their implications.

This is a cliché critique, but most of what didn't work for me was how much this book told instead of showed. There's an entire chapter midway through where the protagonist dumps the backstory of the old LK president's misdeeds that they've chosen not to share with the reader until that point. The book continually laments how AI will slowly run more of the world and humans won't be necessary, but we see little evidence (and directly very little of AI in …

reviewed Counterweight by Djuna

Confusing AF

1 star

I have little idea what the hell was going on in this novel. See, there's a space elevator. And a corporation. And AIs that are made from the memories of living people. And an island nation that holds the base of the space elevator and which has been subsumed by the corporation that owns the space elevator.

But I can't even tell what the conflict is about. Confusing AF.