Counterweight

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 general).

Here's some more blabs about AI in this book that I've left in a second comment for length.

#SFFBookClub

The first half of this worked better than the second half. I was enjoying it at the beginning, I was intrigued by this puzzling Choi Gangwu person and the corporate shenanigans.

But the second half involves a lot of long character monologues - telling you what happened or explaining some plot. That’s always very awkward to read (or watch). I’d rather be involved in the stuff that I’m being told about - via other POVs or something. Or perhaps the story needed to slow down so that there was time to piecemeal this information. Or it was just too complex for the space given - which I did feel was part of the problem. The scope and the layers were a lot for 156 pages, and I got muddled. I couldn’t summarize the end of this book for you.

One of my favorites of this type of story is Cyteen by Cherryh. There are lots of layers, but it’s also very long.