Counterweight

A Novel

Hardcover, 176 pages

Published July 9, 2023 by Pantheon.

ISBN:
978-0-593-31721-1
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3 stars (9 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

Some potential, didn't work for me as a whole

2 stars

I found this book frustrating because it kept being just interesting enough to keep me reading, but never really seemed to develop the potentially more interesting of its ideas, and ultimately felt like a lot of SFF / cyberpunk cliches thrown into a pot and not quite stirred enough to become a whole.

[#SFFBookClub September; I am slowly catching up on reviews]

Counterweight

4 stars

Counterweight is a nearish-future scifi thriller set on the island of Patusan, which I have just learned today has a long literary legacy.

The plot follows an unnamed employee of the LK Corporation as he attempts to unravel a series of events revolving around the world's first space elevator, erected by LK on Patusan. I enjoyed the originality of the setting, but I found the whole thing fairly convoluted and somewhat difficult to follow.

The dystopian corporation-state future where having a literal worm implanted in your brain is a condition of employment is becoming all too plausible at this point.

#SFFBookClub

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.

Unusual

3 stars

I'm still not really sure about this book. I should probably reread it since I think I went to fast and missed some things. It was definitely interesting, but it seemed like there were too many characters for such a short work. None of the characters or the world itself were given much depth. #SFFBookClub

Review of 'Counterweight' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

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 …

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5 stars
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5 stars