Market Forces

Richard Morgan offers some of his best prose in this near future cyberpunk novel which may yet be regarded by some as a classic in the genre. However, I still think that Morgan isn't nearly as accomplished a literary stylist as China Mieville, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, or especially, William Gibson. But frankly, to his credit, Morgan has written yet another cinematic cyberpunk thriller with a captivating protagonist, Chris Faulkner, whom I find more compelling a character than his cyberpunk space opera creation Takeshi Kovacs.

Set some fifty years in the future, "Market Forces" is a thoughtful, exciting exploration of capitalism run amok, with a strong "Road Warrior" sensibility towards blood and gore. It is a virulent form of free market capitalism where successful businessmen like Chris Faulkner have become the media icons of the age, surpassing in popularity, those in entertainment. In Morgan's richly imagined future, Western corporations, not governments, hold sway over most of the world's impoverished billions, dictating the survival of brutal, corrupt regimes in places as far flung as Southeast Asia and South America. The United Nations has become a largely discredited shell of itself, hoping to find some balance between the moral excesses of these corporations and the desperate needs of the impoverished peoples of the Third World. We are also treated to extremes between wealth and poverty within a London divided into rich and impoverished zones; the latter are literally living versions of Hell where survival depends on drug dealing and committing other crimes up to and including murder.

I find Chris Faulkner so compelling a literary creation since he is quite literally torn between following the immoral dictates of his corporation, and deciding on whether he should adhere to his natural instincts for common sense decency and justice. Surrounded almost entirely by workers who have no moral compass at all, except to play by "market forces", Faulkner manages somehow to hold onto his instincts, but at a great personal cost to himself, his wife and beloved colleagues. So here, in Chris Faulkner, Richard Morgan has offered his most compelling literary creation to date. Simply for this very reason, I can't hesitate giving "Market Forces" a strong endorsement, hoping that Morgan may yet offer a compelling sequel (I might add too that I strongly disagree with Morgan's political leanings, but at least he still manages to tell such a compelling saga.).

Richard K. Morgan's third novel was published in the U.K. about a year before it was available in the U.S. I awaited it eagerly. Oh, I was a bit worried because it's not a Takeshi Kovacs novel -- but it turns out that I needn't have been concerned.

The backdrop of this comparatively near-future tale owes a lot (as Morgan himself tells us in his Acknowledgements) to _Mad Max_ and _Rollerball_. In fact the tone of the whole thing is rather like a screenplay or a graphic novel (and it's probably not a coincidence that Morgan has also written a series of Black Widow comics for Marvel). But hoo-boy, it's a good 'un.

Yuppie road warrior ('Blaaaaade runner -- coyote's after you . . . ') Chris Faulkner is the hero(?) this time out. He's just recently joined the Conflict Investments division of Shorn Associates, see . . .

But enough. You can read the other reviews and the Amazon summary if you want to know more. Better yet, you can read the book.

Other reviewers are correct: this one may take you a bit longer to get into than Morgan's previous two books. But keep going; it's worth the wait. (Actually I didn't find the first portion hard to get through, but I can understand why some readers might, especially after Morgan's first two constant slam-bang page-turners.) It's got the trademark Morgan oomph, as well as his wicked sense of humor; for example, Morgan's own _Altered Carbon_ makes an uncredited cameo appearance near the end. (And a paradoxical one if this is, as it appears to be, Takeshi Kovacs's own universe. Or isn't Shorn Associates a corporate ancestor of Shorn Biotech? [Later note: Morgan says it's not; he just likes to reuse the name 'Shorn'.])

Although it's fiction, it's got a bit of an agenda: a short bibliography lists works by e.g. Noam Chomsky and John Pilger. If you're not a fan of that crowd, don't let it put you off; Morgan is very good on this subject. (It may help pro-free-market readers to bear in mind that Morgan's target is corporate capitalism and Western-style globalization, not the happy fantasyland of the libertarian ideal. Indeed, Morgan has a keen sense of just exactly why multinational corporations _don't_ want to export the "free market" to the Third World, although he doesn't put it in those terms. It may also help to recall that SF writers of a small-l libertarian bent -- e.g. Heinlein and James P. Hogan -- are every bit as critical of corporations as they are of governments. At any rate, it's not as though Morgan's earlier two novels are notable for their bright and cheery optimism about the future of corporatism.)

It's timely, it's trenchant, it's well-written and well-plotted, it's got a disturbingly plausible vision of the future, and it's got plenty of the harda$$ed brutality we've come to know and love in Morgan's work (and even what I think are a couple of sly, oblique references to Chuck Palahniuk's _Fight Club_). In short, it's got Major Motion Picture written all over it -- which reminds me that Hollywood has optioned _Altered Carbon_, too, so let's wait and see what happens.

In the meantime, we can look forward to _Woken Furies_, the new Takeshi Kovacs novel due out this fall. (It's already available in the U.K. and getting excellent reviews.)

[Update: I see from the author's website that a film deal for _Market Forces_ has already been signed -- and that the book actually began life as a screenplay. I can't post the URL here, but it's exactly the one you'd expect richardkmorgan's website to have.]

100 pages into this 464 page bug killer I was ready to slam it. This book doesn't even deserve one star, I thought. How did I get from there to matching the highest rating I've given a book thus far? I finished it.

The premise is an eye catcher: corporations rule the world, funding, starting and stopping wars based on economic prospects only, and the way you work your way up in the corporation is by performance and road raging. Yup. It's Mad Max meets Wall Street. When I read the back cover, I laughed out loud, and I knew I had to read it.

The book starts out.... feh. It's crude. Too crude, especially in the graphic soft core sex descriptions, foul language and violence. And if you're too offended by the first few pages, it only gets worse. It's simplistic. The characters are typical and predictable, the movement of the book, in spite of the crudeness, is rather dull. The world the book paints is typical of so many bleak future books. Class disparity, no ethics, ultra violent.

But then, much earlier than the Joseph Heller book, something happened.

Morgan has used the first part of the book to build up the characters, (unfortunately through long drawn out dialogue, though one wonders if the effect would have been as strong without it) to make a basis for the development he's about to write. The protagonist, Chris Faulkner, is a gem of character development. Young and up and coming in the beginning. An idealist thrown in among sharks, yet determined to succeed on his own terms. His wife, his new best friend, his father in law....all very real.

The book suddenly becomes very very good. The interpersonal conflicts become idealistic battles and I found myself choosing sides rather quickly as the story moves on. Faulkner goes from sly kid to someone I found myself cheering for rather loudly at 1 AM beside my sleeping wife (sorry, honey ) and then CONTINUES to develop in ways that I will not, for spoilers sake, explain how I responded to them.

Unfortunately, I have to stop there to not ruin the plot. Every relationship in this book is very real, and very gut twisting. As for the plot, there are sure to be initial guffawing, as there was in my case, at the premise. But the corporate manipulation, some say, is already occuring in foreign governments. Anyone with any sort of experience in business knows the cutthroat nature of the "game." Taking that one step further into the corporate ladder, who's to say all pretenses couldn't be set aside and bloodthirsty kills on the road take the place of backstabbing and gladhanding.

The corporate setting and dealings is also very real, until nearing the end of the book, where it becomes almost surreal, but in a very intriguing way.

Bottomline is this book starts out crude and boring. I was very put off by it. However, the character development and the way Morgan wrote the part of Faulkner was utterly brilliant, and I have not encountered a character I have enjoyed reading in quite some time.

This review is painfully inadequate for how large an impact this book had on me. Get it. Read it. It's a solid piece of work.

Last year Richard Morgan won the Philip K. Dick award for his distant future opus on identity-crisis, "Altered Carbon." This year, "Market Forces" already has won a nomination for the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke award--a well deserved accolade.

"Market Forces" is a brutal, turbo-charged thriller set in a not-too-distant future London. More than science fiction, it is a horror novel--the fear factor comes from the story's prophetic potential. The novel puts "Mad Max" on the road with J.G. Ballard, with signposts provided by Che Guevara.

Chris Faulkner, the protagonist-cum-antagonist of the novel, uses his reputation as a ruthless, corporate assassin to win a position with Shorn Associates, aptly named because they shear through their competition, leaving burning cars and bloody corpses behind as they win contracts for "Conflict Investment" in third world countries. But Faulkner is having a crisis of conscience-he has shown weakness by mercifully sparing the life of a competitor, and now needs to prove he has the brutality for the job. In intense gladiatorial car races, he must prove he's able to kill without remorse. In the words of his boss, there's no economic gain without blood on your hands. We follow Faulkner into an urban Heart of Darkness, where he is forced to chose between leaping from the financial tower or putting a bullet through a crippled competitor's head. And that is only the beginning of his plunge into the abyss.

Morgan has crafted a high-octane, politically challenging novel--a polemic on the greed and power of increasingly consolidated corporate entities, and the de-socialization of the individual within these structures. Forget the Constitution of the European Union, say goodbye to privacy and civil rights, offer a eulogy for the Rule of Law in this world where the only law is "Kill and Consolidate Capital." The corporate oligarchies dominate the political landscape, and the media is only a mouthpiece capitalizing on horror for the ratings war. The evening news is just another Corporate despot that has whored itself out to big money. With the recent political pressure on media over the Iraq conflict-this dynamic is all too familiar. There are clear parallels to the oft-missed message behind Bret Easton Ellis' novel, "American Psycho," where the sociopathic behaviors of corporations in the 1980's, the leverage buyouts and hostile takeovers that ruined tens of thousands of lives, were sandwiched between scenes of depraved, sexual-sadism and murder by a serial killer. The murder scenes in that novel were truth-revealing mirrors of the corporate mentality that dominated financial institutions. "Market Forces" is another house of mirrors, with brutal car races juxtaposed against arms manufacturers and financial institutions. It is a powerful indictment of corporate politics, and a criticism of globalization, which he decries as nothing more than neo-imperialism. Morgan cuts deep, asking us to examine the class stratification of the new world order, where more and more is owned by fewer and fewer. Like witnesses of a bloody car wreck, we cannot look away.

This is science fiction at it's finest hour--would that every student rabidly pursuing another MBA was required to read this novel before putting on the jack boots of the money army.

This novel is a departure from Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs universe that I've so enjoyed in the past, but it was a great read. Took me a bit to 'get into it' as I tried to figure out what this new world's rules are, but once I'd settled in, I found the ride interesting and compelling.

Morgan finds a nice balance of trend-extrapolation and mayhem. I found the novel's anti-hero to be complicated and layered. Sometimes I identified with him, sometimes I hated him, most times both simultaneously.

The end was a bit ragged - there were some plot lines I would've liked to see resolved, but I accept this novel's faults. Morgan's ideas and vivid prose are great.