Book Review: ‘Counterweight,’ by Djuna
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.
Source: The New York Times
