Market Forces (Gollancz S.F.) - Softcover

Morgan, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0575081260 ISBN 13: 9780575081260

Publisher: Gollancz, 2008

Synopsis

In a bleak future world, the big players in global capitalism have moved on from commodities. The big money is in conflict investment. The corporations keep a careful watch on the wars of liberation and revolution. They gauge who the winners will be and sell them arms, intelligence and power.

About this title

Review

Richard Morgan, the award-winning author of Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, strikes out into new territory with Market Forces, leaving behind the farflung battlegrounds of Takeshi Kovacs for the not-so-distant future of corporate Earth. Here, Morgan extrapolates a world where commodities trading reaches a brutal pitch and the outcomes of banana republic uprisings are the new market. Now, on the road to success, the brokers of the new economy compete for status and promotions via road rage on the freeways of new London.

Morgan's conflicted protagonist, Chris Faulkner, is a comer known for one spectacular kill that shot him to the top of mid-range global capital firm. He parlays his reputation and skills as a driver into a job in the emerging field of "Conflict Investment" at the world's hottest and hardest firm. Soon he finds himself running with the big dogs and rises to the top of a brutal realm, but his ascent is quickly threatened by vicious senior partners, gold-digging suitors, fame, fair-weather friends, and his own nagging conscience.

Market Forces is at once an anti-globalization treatise and anime fantasy meets The Road Warrior. Morgan employs the graphic-novel imagery of his two previous novels to create a disturbingly brutal picture of slash-and-burn capitalism run amok. There are times when Faulker's moral quandries seem hollow in the face of his actions but this isn't Crime and Punishment. Enjoy the ride and "come back with blood on your wheels or don't come back at all." --Jeremy Pugh

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From the Inside Flap

"From the award-winning author of Altered Carbon" and Broken Angels"-a turbocharged new thriller set in a world where killers are stars, media is mass entertainment,
and freedom is a dangerous proposition . . .
A coup in Cambodia. Guns to Guatemala. For the men and women of Shorn Associates, opportunity is calling. In the superheated global village of the near future, big money is made by finding the right little war and supporting one side against the other-in exchange for a share of the spoils. To succeed, Shorn uses a new kind of corporate gladiator: sharp-suited, hard-driving gunslingers who operate armored vehicles and follow a Samurai code. And Chris Faulkner is just the man for the job.
He fought his way out of London's zone of destitution. And his kills are making him famous. But unlike his best friend and competitor at Shorn, Faulkner has a side that outsiders cannot see: the side his wife is trying to salvage, that another woman-a porn star turned TV news reporter-is trying to exploit. Steeped in blood, eyed by common criminals looking for a shot at fame, Faulkner is living on borrowed time. Until he's given one last shot at getting out alive. . . .

Edition details

• Publisher: Gollancz
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0575081260
• ISBN 13: 9780575081260
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 464