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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Persevere! It's worth it., June 28, 2005
This review is from: Market Forces (Paperback)
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.
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47 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great read despite the eye-rolling anti-capitalism, October 12, 2005
This review is from: Market Forces (Paperback)
Before Richard K. Morgan's provocative third novel even begins, he dedicates it to "all those, globally, whose lives have been wrecked or snuffed out by the Great Neoliberal Dream and Slash-and-Brun Globalization". He also makes sure the reader knows he drew inspiration from left-wing extremists like Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Michael Moore. The reader, upon encountering this, could be forgiven for slipping the book quietly back on the shelf with a slight shake of the head. But that would be a mistake.
Despite the ideological chest-thumping, "Market Forces" is not just a wisp of a story wrapped around a shrill anti-capitalist polemic. It's actually a rollicking good read that doesn't get swamped by the author's ideological crusade, except perhaps near the end. But more on that later.
The setting is deliciously twisted. Fifty years from now, the world is run by a handful of financial houses that deal in "conflict investment" -- giving financial assistance to tinpot dictators in exchange for a cut of the country's GDP if they stay in power. Executives vie for promotion or contract tenders by staging highway duels in armored cars. It's a bizzare mixture -- "Liar's Poker" meets "Mad Max" -- but Morgan deftly pulls it off.
Morgan's first novel proved that he is adept at drawing imperfect characters, and here he serves up a whole cast of scummy anti-heros and scummier villians. Chris Faulkner fought his way up from the slums and is a new hotshot executive. His wife, Carla, is a mechanic who keeps his sedan in prime dueling condition. Her father is an idealistic outcast whose socialist views are a constant source of tension in the family. Along the way, Chris falls in with a media vixen, a chummy but brutal partner, and a team of envious colleagues intent on seeing the newcomer go down in flames, quite literally if it should come to that.
The action ticks over nicely as Chris careens between stoking conflicts in Cambodia and Latin America, terrorizing street thugs with Mike, and grinding rival investors into scrap metal under the bumper of his armored Saab. All the while he is trying to rescue his foundering marriage and avoid the plasticene temptations of Liz, a powerful journalist tracking his career.
While Morgan's conclusions on the nature of the modern geo-political/economic system may be black and white, he lays it out for us through shades of gray. The rapacious corporations are clearly the bad guys, but characters like Mike are strangely charismatic, and it's easy to cheer the suits when they wield their power to wipe out white supremacists or permanently cripple an abusive husband for beating his wife. Likewise, those characters with the "right" socialist viewpoints are quick to espouse their ideals but are too weak or scared to act on them.
Morgan's contention that capitalism is inherently brutal and self-destructive only starts to become obvious in the last part of the book as Chris repeatedly snubs chances for redemption and mires himself deeper in the brutal corporate culture he once held at arm's length. But the book works despite this late-game heavy-handedness, and while I might have wished for a cheerier conclusion, I have to give credit to Morgan for pushing things to what he must see as their logical conclusion, insofar as that logic works in the fantasy version of capitalism and globalization he has constructed.
This *is* a sci-fi book, after all.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bring back their plastic, July 17, 2005
This review is from: Market Forces (Paperback)
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.]
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