Counterweight

<b>A <i>WIRED </i>"BOOK YOU NEED TO READ" • For fans of the worlds of Philip K. Dick, <i>Squid Game</i>, and <i>Severance: </i>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</b><br><br><b>From one of South Korea's most revered science fiction writers, whose identity remains unknown, "an antic, madcap noir with flair" (</b><i><b>Wired).</b></i><br><br><i><b> </b></i>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.<br><br>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-implant “Worms,” and old political grievances held by the Patusan Liberation Front, the army of island natives determined to protect  Patusan’s sovereignty.<br><br>Conceived by Djuna as a low-budget science fiction film, with literary references as wide-ranging as Joseph Conrad and the Marquis de Sade, <i>Counterweight</i> is part cyberpunk, part hardboiled detective fiction, and part parable of South Korea’s neocolonial ambition and its rippling effects.