A WIRED “BOOK YOU NEED TO READ” • For fans of the worlds of
Philip K. Dick, Squid Game, and Severance: An absorbing tale of
corporate intrigue, political unrest, unsolved mysteries, and the
havoc wreaked by one company’s monomaniacal endeavor to build the
world’s first space elevator
An “antic,
madcap noir with flair” (Wired) and “fast-paced cyberpunk story”
(The New York Times Book Review) from one of South Korea’s most
revered science fiction writers, whose identity remains unknown.
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 caught
in a labyrinth of fake identities, neuro-implants called Worms, and
old political grievances held by the Patusan Liberation Front, the
army of island natives determined to protect Patusan’s sovereignty.
Originally
conceived by Djuna as a low-budget science fiction film, with
literary references as wide-ranging as Joseph Conrad and the Marquis
de Sade, Counterweight
is part cyberpunk, part hard-boiled detective fiction, and part
parable of South Korea’s neocolonial ambition and its rippling
effects.