Market Forces | ||||||||
Richard Morgan | ||||||||
Gollancz, 385 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Greg L. Johnson
This is the world in which Chris Faulkner finds himself a privileged member. Newly head-hunted into a position with Shorn
Investments' Conflict Investment division, Chris quickly finds it necessary to prove himself to his new bosses and
clients. Market Forces gives us the unrelentingly violent tale of a man who would probably be a fairly decent human being,
if his own past, and the world he lived in would only allow it.
Market Forces is being promoted as a thriller, a look into the edge of near-future corporate politics. The author himself
cites Mad Max and Rollerball as influences, and for the mass audience that will relate to Market Forces through
those films the comparison makes sense. But science fiction readers will see plenty of other precedents, including Frederik Pohl
and C.M. Kornbluth, Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, and the darker side of cyberpunk. For quite some time now, writers
of mass-market thrillers have been borrowing ideas from science fiction and re-casting them as high-tech adventures. Richard Morgan
isn't the first SF writer to attempt to break into that market, but Market Forces' combination of street-level grit and
corporate immorality may just make him the most successful.
The book has one serious flaw. The social and economic conditions that Morgan envisions are a result of picking several trends and
following them all to their worst-case conclusions. The technique works in that it allows the reader to step inside a world that is
demonstrably insane; its inhabitants have lost the ability to discern right from wrong. The few characters who do question the status
quo are presented as either ineffectual idealists, arrogant meddlers, or simply disappear by the end of the novel. The playing field
is so tilted that Morgan is required to continually increase the levels of tension and violence in order to keep the reader from
stopping and seeing the holes in the character's thinking.
But if you can stick along for the ride, Market Forces is an exhilarating and maddening look at a nightmare future that's just
plausible enough to haunt anyone who contemplates how close we may already be to living there.
Though it's a disturbing scene, reviewer Greg L. Johnson has to acknowledge the sheer efficiency of solving a contract dispute by simply clubbing one of the clients to death. His reviews also appear in the The New York Review of Science Fiction. |
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