Review of Counterweight by Djuna

It's fair to say time has proven Bruce Sterling right; cyberpunk may be a recognized aesthetic, but the underlying themes—corporate power over political power, the separation of people into the tech haves and tech nots, the blurring of the lines between natural and augmented existence—are foundation stones of such fictions. Looking to add a touch of Arthur C. Clarke' The Fountains of Paradise to this scene is Counterweight by Djuna (2023).

A Korean corporate conglomerate called LK is building a space elevator on the fictional island of Patusan in southeast Asia. The elevator's counterweight already in orbit, workers are connecting it to Patusan via a spider line. But things are not going smoothly at LK. The CEO died under abnormal circumstances just a couple years ago and the company's intellectual property is under constant attack from competitors. Industrial counter-espoinage is thus a critical company department. Things kick off when a senior LK ecurity consultant named Mac witnesses a strange incident on Patusan in which a rival corp seems to have made an attempt to infiltrate LK. Particularly fishy is one of the people involved who seems a little too perfect. And so Mac decides to dig a little deeper into them. Events escalating until the elevator itself is involved (natch), Mac gets caught in a tangled web that touches everything in his life, corporate to personal.

A fast-paced story featuring AI, industrial espionage, drones, high tech, and avariety of other cyberpunk elements, Counterweight feels like a stripped down version of an early William Gibson story. Prose and plot are minimalist, and the reader is called upon to connect some dots. For people who like that sleak, chrome style of storytelling, Djuna offers a morsel.

But where Counterweight differs from Gibson and several other cyberpunk writers is volume and depth. Gibson is the master of 'less is more'. His minimalist style is specific to the point of conjuring images and scenes in a direct line of words. Djuna minimalism is stark by comparison. The bare bones of plot are then engine, with little bits of character or setting detail thrown in to fuel matters when it slows down. It doesn't have an edge or nuance needed to color the setting or characters. Which is a shame. A line here, a line there could have fleshed the story out without sacrificing pace. As it stands the characters struggle to distinguish themselves and the reader has only a basic understanding of the world in which the story takes place. Theme must be extracted like a bullet from a cadaver (i.e. Mechanically) rather than intuitively through refinement and tinge. At only 176 pages, there was room for a little more.

In the end, Counterweight is a decent specimen of cyber-industrial noir. Djuna foregrounds plot machinations in a setting where bioaugmentation, AI, big data, and Earth-based space tech play roles in a wheels-within-wheels mystery about who is who and what their intentions are at the global, corporate scale. The story could have been more descriptive to give scene and character more edge—to have proper muscle on the bone. But for readers who enjoy splashy, speedy plots navigating tech-heavy near-future worlds, this is for you.