COUNTERWEIGHT, by Djuna. Translated by Anton Hur.
In the last years of the 19th century the visionary Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky conducted a thought experiment about a tower tall enough that its top would escape gravity. By the 1960s, the idea developed into that of the “space elevator,” a transport system consisting of a cable attached to the earth’s surface near the Equator, anchored by a counterweight out beyond geosynchronous orbit. “Crawlers,” or elevator cars, would ascend and descend, without the need for rocketry. Though popular with science fiction writers and the longer-haired kind of engineer, space elevators remain theoretical. Contemporary building materials are too heavy and lack the strength for such a titanic cable, so a precondition for the existence of a space elevator would be the invention of new materials such as carbon nanotubes.
In “Counterweight,” by the pseudonymous Korean science fiction writer Djuna, nanotubes are part of the intellectual property of the sprawling, multinational LK corporation. LK has built a space elevator on the fictional island of Patusan in Southeast Asia, a moribund fragment of the global periphery with “a respectably thick tropical forest with pitifully low biodiversity … and villages and cities that had collapsed after draining their aquifers with no consideration of the consequences.” The corporation has transformed Patusan into a “gateway to Earth,” a global hub for space exploration and commerce. Corporate dominance has inspired protest and armed resistance. The narrator, Mac, a high-level LK security operative, arrives on the ground as part of an antiterrorist operation, tracking and detaining cadres of the Patusan Liberation Front.
Caught up in the dragnet is a hapless midlevel LK employee called Choi Gangwu, who is in regular contact with one of the Liberation Front’s agents. Choi seems to be, by nature, a dreamy and unmotivated person — his hobby is watching butterflies — yet after several failed attempts he mysteriously scored very highly on LK’s entrance tests, and when he talks about the space elevator, he becomes intense and opinionated, as if his personality has changed. Detained by the company for his involvement with the resistance, Choi is instructed to meet his contact, who he appears to believe is just a fellow butterfly enthusiast. The meeting turns violent; suddenly something explodes in the contact’s brain, killing him instantly and leaving Mac, who is already aware of more than one intersecting conspiracy, wondering whether there are still more wheels within wheels.
Djuna has been publishing science fiction (and film criticism) in South Korea for over 25 years, without making any biographical revelations. “Counterweight,” their first full-length work to appear in English, in a crisp translation by Anton Hur, is an efficient, fast-paced cyberpunk story that is at its best when unpacking the ramifications of the ubiquitous “Worms,” neural implants that network users together and offer various kinds of augmentation, from internet-like access to information to much stranger mutations in perception and personality.
While never as deeply mired in paranoia as the vertiginously indeterminate fictions of Philip K. Dick, this is a world where agency and identity are always in doubt. Do these feelings of love belong to you or have they been planted? Is the terrorist acting of his own volition, or is he a meat-puppet, under the sway of shadowy controllers elsewhere? The experience of “always-on” involuntary connectivity even functions as a deterrent to crime: “The Worm, at the slightest sign of violence, would have alerted the company immediately.” Vastly increased powers have been bought at the expense of human autonomy, and it’s clear that as the network becomes ever tighter, humans are adapting to accommodate it. When an electromagnetic pulse weapon takes Mac’s worm offline, he experiences a “feeling of queasiness” at being “separated from the herd.”
From the rainy neon of “Blade Runner” to the Vanta-Black corporate Japan of “Neuromancer,” Anglophone near-future speculation has long had a streak of Orientalism, a fascination (often admiring) with the liquid modernity of East Asian urbanism, and the distinctiveness of the region’s approaches to technology. After the global success of Cixin Liu’s “Three Bodies” trilogy, American publishers are belatedly bringing Asian science-fiction narratives to an Anglophone readership that has a demonstrable hunger for its culture in various forms. “Counterweight” is also, in a small way, an expression of soft power, part of a wave of South Korean film, popular music and literature that has in recent years given Seoul an unprecedented global cultural clout.
“Counterweight” brings a particular tone to its tale of corporate skulduggery. LK is a “chaebol,” a distinctively Korean structure of corporate ownership by a single family, and the plot hinges on questions of inheritance, of whether it’s possible to pass on through a corporation something more than culture, some kind of personal essence.
The novel’s speculations about human agency resonate in the current moment, when American tech C.E.O.s oscillate between issuing sonorous warnings about the existential risks of the A.I. systems they’re developing and breathless hype about brain-computer interfaces. The book imagines the imminent emergence of companies run by artificial intelligence — companies as intelligence, a fusion of technology and economic logic that will definitively outrun humanity. LK, we discover, is “slowly slipping the bounds of human control.”
Hari Kunzru’s next novel, “Blue Ruin,” will be published in May 2024.
COUNTERWEIGHT | By Djuna | Translated by Anton Hur | 160 pp. | Pantheon Books | $24