BEYOND THE TRILOGY
Richard K. Morgan's work extends well beyond the Kovacs trilogy. These three standalone novels — Market Forces, Thirteen, and Thin Air — share the same political intelligence and unsparing prose, but each explores different aspects of Morgan's central preoccupations: power, violence, identity, and the question of what a person becomes when the world they live in demands they become something they shouldn't be.
Near-Future Thriller · 2004
"The market decides everything. Including who lives."
SETTING: NEAR-FUTURE LONDON AND THE DEVELOPING WORLD
THE PREMISE
Corporate road warrior Chris Faulkner has just been hired by Shorn Associates — one of the most powerful investment banks in a near-future Britain where the gap between the wealthy and the poor has become a physical geography. The rich live in secure zones. The poor live in the zones. And corporate advancement is decided by road combat: executives fight duels on the motorway, and the winner takes the loser's position.
Market Forces is set in a near-future Britain that is recognisably descended from the present — a world where neoliberal economics have been taken to their logical extreme. Corporations are the dominant power. Government is a service provider. The developing world is managed as a portfolio of investment opportunities, and conflicts are funded and sustained as long as they remain profitable.
Chris Faulkner is talented, ambitious, and recently hired by Shorn Associates to manage their conflict investment portfolio — funding wars in the developing world and maximising returns. He is also, at the start of the novel, a man who still has a conscience. The novel is the story of what happens to that conscience.
The road combat system — executives fighting motorway duels to settle disputes and determine promotion — is Morgan's most savage satirical invention. It literalises the violence that corporate competition already contains, makes it explicit and physical. The executives who thrive are not the most intelligent or the most ethical — they are the most willing to kill.
Market Forces is the angriest of Morgan's novels. It was written in the early 2000s, during the height of the Iraq War and the era of corporate globalisation, and its fury at the way power operates — the way institutions convert human suffering into profit — is barely contained on every page. It is also, despite its anger, a deeply human novel about the cost of compromise and the question of whether a person can be changed by the choices they make.
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