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: #331031 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-07
• Original language: English
• 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

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

Pure Hate
I'll not detail this review with all the things that go on in the book. I have read all Richard Morgan's work so far, and I love his style.

This book, I feel , is largely underrated because of its Chomsky-ish overtones, and people tend to get bogged down in politics. That is why I'm not going to go through that here. Instead, I found the real message of this book to be about relationships.

Morgan has a style rarely seen that details relationships very subtly, and doesn't get too involved. All the same I found myself caring more and more about what happened to the other characters in the book rather than the anti-hero Chris Faulkner. His wife, while caring and worrying, dealt nobly and realistically with the hate coming from Chris. I could also feel an affinity for Mike Bryant, Chris's immediate superior and friend, even though a cold killer.

Anyway, for my tuppence worth, I liked this book. It was dark, depressing, and in a Global Corporation/Republican regime, it was scarily possible (apart from the car duels).

As oil prices rise and work is the new religion, money is becoming the new god. I'm not religious. I'm just worried. As we spend more time away from our loved ones, into the arms of our jobs, who do we love?

I scared that all we may be left with is money and hand-wringing from the ones who care.

William Gibson's heir
Readers expecting a space opera along the lines of Altered Carbon and Broken Angels could be disappointed as the style here is somewhat different. But approach this allegorical tale of globalisation gone mad in the near future with an open mind and it is hugely enjoyable. It is also a more intimate and human story offering some insights into the gradual cooling of a relationship, which could be familiar to many modern males fighting to balance career with the demands of conscience and family life.

As with Morgan's other works, it contains dark humour, some well-depicted scenes of ultra-violence, and a wealth of ideas about the direction of future society. It also has something to say about business ethics; the unconverted could find this objectionable and the converted could find it unnecessary, but take it as a novelised version of Naomi Klein's No Logo and you should be just fine.

Richard Morgan quite clearly takes several ideas from William Gibson and runs with them - in this case mostly from Count Zero, one of the very best Gibson novels. (Identifying these is left as an exercise for the reader.) Morgan writes with the same outstanding clarity and precision and that is itself, to this reviewer, more than enough to make him truly Gibson's heir.

Possibly the whole book was sparked off by the geekly use of the expression 'road warrior' meaning a laptop-equipped corporate executive.

Some other potential inspirations:
Stand on Zanzibar (1969) by John Brunner
Gladiator-At-Law (1955) by Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth
Mindstar Rising (1993) by Peter Hamilton
Snow Crash (1992) by Neil Stephenson

A Let Down
From the high standards set by the Takeshi Kovacs novels by the same author this is something of a let down.

The authors notes hint at how this story might have come to be. Someone gave him a neat idea with elements of the Road Warrior in, improbably set in a dystopian version of the UK in the future. As a resident of the UK I can honestly say that familiarity with the places being written about makes it all the more improbable. Perhaps to a foreign reader that would be less the case.

While it might've made a good short story it's not material for a lengthy novel. There are just too many things that defy any form of logic. Big business deciding contracts via car wars? If that was the case do we really think that they'd allow one or three drivers to decide their profit and loss?

Personally I'd have been a lot happier to keep the personal grudge matches to the car wars and then tell a story around that. There's just too great a lack of thinking in the story, or at least what we can see there. Morgan has always written as if the reader already knows the background/explanations behind his plots - then revealed the details to us very gradually over a hundred or more pages. That worked in the Kovacs novels. Here... not at all.

After the first person story-telling of his other books I found the third person here much less intimate in a way that'd always worked well for Morgan before.

I was stuck on a plane to the US with this book, anticipating something much better. I still gave it a couple of stars for the idea and for the characterisation of the hero and his wife, I did like them both as characters.

It just feels like the author wanted a change of pace and scene, without really caring what he was writing about at the time.

Oh, keep a look out for the references to things mentioned in the Kovacs novels. It suggests - perhaps - this is part of the past of that world?