Market Forces by Richard Morgan

“Do you really think we can afford to have the developing world develop?

Who is going to soak up our subsidised food surplus for us? Who is going to make our shoes and shirts? Who is going to supply us with cheap labour and cheap materials? Who is going store our nuclear waste, balance out our CO2 misdemeanours? Who is going to buy our arms?”

I greatly enjoyed mr. Morgan’s earlier works, so I was very eager to get stuck into Market Forces. It turned out to be a very different book than I expected, but no less satisfying. Unlike his previous hard sci-fi offerings, Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, Market forces is a cyberpunk novel, set into uncomfortably near future. In a world run by big businesses, only the rich are allowed to drive cars and fly planes (not too far from reality if you look at UK nowadays), and the poor are forced into ghettoes called ‘Zones’. The top corporations settle their differences in carefully controlled gladiatorial duels between the executives where the aim is to murder the opposing suits in their jacked-up cars.

The main character of the book, Chris Faulkner, is a hard-as-nails Corporate executive who has a new job at Shorn Associates Conflict investments funding wars in the developing countries in exchange for the access to the natural resources and GDP of the countries that they interfere in. The utterly immoral practices of his company start straining his relationship with his working-class Norwegian wife Carla. When he is given an assignment to take over a Latin-American nation, it is Chris’ opportunity to make it really big but also to completely destroy his marriage. But as a child who grew up in the Zones himself, poverty is a fate worse than death as far as Chris Faulkner is concerned...

All this acts as a backdrop for sex, big business deals, violence practiced by the corporation executives that goes unpunished, drugs, gang wars, corrupt police that bow and scrape before big businesses, car chases and Latin-American guerrilla warfare as well as Faulkner’s chance for salvation to become a UN agent working against the corporations. The pace is unrelenting, and there are almost no calm periods in the book. Morgan keeps his foot on the gas through all 385 pages.

To his Credit, Morgan does turn the arguments against the corporations around. Can you actually make any difference whatsoever if you are outside the system, since all the power in the world is concentrated in the hands of the market forces? Is it not true that all the demonstrations and left-wing writings have achieved nothing at all? Can anyone dispute the astounding success of the multinational corporations over the nations states? Is it not the only system for global management system that works? Is it not better to be a changemaker than some insignificant critic who is only able to complain because of the wealth generated by capitalism?

The book also makes a uncomfortable reading for a corporate samurai like me. How far different am I from Chris Faulkner? Morgan is very clever because he makes Faulkner a guy that you could like if it was not for his line of work. But that makes him like so many people in the world right now.

Morgan does commit some of writers’ cardinal sins, underlining his own ideas and finger-pointing the injustices he feels strongly about being the most blatant ones. But when writing is this good and the author’s imagination this bountiful, who cares?

As for the ending of the book, be it sufficient to say that it was far more realistic (and sadder) than I thought it would be.

Powerful stuff.

Posted by Dragon at 1 June 23:51, 2004