Product Description

Chris Faulkner has just landed the job of his dreams. But Shorn Associates are market leaders in Conflict Investment. They expect results, they expect the best. Chris has one very high-profile kill to his name already but he will have to drive hard and go for kill after kill if he's to keep his bosses happy. All he has to do in the meantime is stay alive . . . Morgan's new futuristic thriller is perfect for any fan of the modern thriller. It combines the big ideas of Michael Crichton with a pounding narrative drive.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99630 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
With his third novel Market Forces, Richard Morgan moves from the far-future SF violence of Altered Carbon and Broken Angels to almost equally extreme corporate violence in the mid-21st century. The hero, or antihero, Chris Faulkner is a rising executive in a Britain where the gap between suits and the underclass is huger than ever. Both promotion and competitive tendering in the cut-throat world of Conflict Investment (arms dealing) are settled by duels to the death: "Road-raging is here to stay."

The action happens in the nearly derelict arena of our motorway system--an executive playground--since the lower orders can no longer afford petrol. Individual drivers or teams manoeuvre to run the opposition permanently off the road in a Mad Max frenzy, no mercy asked or given. At first, Faulkner has a black mark for taking a defeated opponent to hospital instead of finishing the kill. He won't make that mistake again. After all, the latest management status symbol is the exclusive Nemesis-10 handgun.

International business decisions are tough ("Regime change is our worst-case scenario"), and there's no longer any safe distance between boardroom decisions and blood on the streets. As a big deal with revolutionary South American factions goes badly wrong, both careers and lives are on the line. This deadly game still has some rules of conduct, but getting to the top means pushing the envelope. Faulkner pushes hard enough to make you wince.

With terminal stress on his marriage, his battered conscience, and his few friendships, our man seems doomed to become either a monster or a mutilated corpse. Company backstabbing intensifies; the stakes are higher with each new challenge. One chancy way out of the rat race is offered, but maybe it's possible to get addicted to living on the edge?

An ultra-black, ultra-violent and intensely depressing vision of 2049's amoral Masters of the World. Compulsive reading for the un-squeamish; you can almost hear Michael Moore saying "I told you so". --David Langford

Synopsis
Chris Faulkner has just landed the job of his dreams. But Shorn Associates are market leaders in Conflict Investment. They expect results, they expect the best. Chris has one very high-profile kill to his name already but he will have to drive hard and go for kill after kill if he's to keep his bosses happy. All he has to do in the meantime is stay alive ...Morgan's new futuristic thriller is perfect for any fan of the modern thriller. It combines the big ideas of Michael Crichton with a pounding narrative drive.

About the Author
Until recently Richard Morgan taught the teaching of English as a foreign language at Strathclyde University. He now writes full time. He is 37, married and lives in Glasgow. He has also worked and lived in London, Madrid and Istanbul.

Customer Reviews

Richard Morgan's Best Cyberpunk Novel
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.).

Flawed, but politically relevant
Abandoning Takeshi Kovacs for this novel (although Morgan ironically refers to a TK novel within the text through the thoughts of his main character, describing it as `a little far-fetched') the author takes us to a near-future Britain, controlled by media and big business. It's a Britain where rich and poor are separated geographically, the disaffected being confined to `the zones'.
Chris Faulkner is a hot-shot rising star in the world of Investment, but this is a Britain where boardroom battles are conducted on the road. Road rage has been legalised and is now the preferred method by which executives battle for promotion.
It is a mark of Morgan's persuasiveness as a writer that this rather `far-fetched' and farcical idea is made entirely convincing.
Chris is head-hunted for a post at Conflict Investments, a company specialising in profiting from the destabilisjng of foreign regimes, usually by selling weapons to their opponents, and immediately comes into conflict with almost everyone. From this point on, Morgan drags us into a relentless Shakespearean tragedy in which Faulkner is gradually pushed down a road where paradoxically, through doing what he thinks is the right thing, he is gradually dehumanising himself and transforming into a man numb to the feelings of those around him.
What lets the novel down is the dialogue which, for some reason, never rings true. Maybe it's because the major characters, particularly Chris Faulkner and his new best mate, fellow executive Mike Bryant, who are interchangeable in terms of dialogue. There is no real difference in their speech patterns and although Morgan has written Bryant as a wise-cracking wit, it never really comes off the page that way.
In some ways it is Morgan's best book so far. Certainly he has done his homework on Politics and Commerce in a Capitalist world and has served us up a horrifying vision of what our society could grow into.
Oddly, it also owes a debt to Zelazny's `Damnation Alley' via its spiritual descendant, `Mad Max'. The film was an early and powerful influence on Morgan and some of its scenes were no doubt in the back of his mind as he set about creating this.

Corporate greed extrapolated to a logical conclusion
This is an excellent book that combines classic future society angst with Death Race 2000. If that sounds awful, trust me, it makes for a very compelling read.

As usual Morgan's writing and characterisation is gritty and in-your-face. Our (anti-) hero elicits limited sympathy from the reader as he ruthlessly and sefishly battles up the corporate ladder. British society has virtually collapsed into a semi-anarchic state where a corporate elite pretty much writes its own rules. Competion in business is literally cut-throat with 'road raging' being the preferred method of negotiation: to the survivors the spoils.

This isn't an intellectually challenging book but I found it emotionally satisfying at a number of levels. I think most fans of the cyber-punk genre will find it so too.