Tales of Corporate Earth :: Richard K. Morgan

Richard K. Morgan's Market Forces is a very enjoyable, well-written and action-packed science-fiction novel that I suspect Morgan wrote with the word "movie" in mind. From what I've read, it looks as if it might be made into one. I just hope justice is done.

One of my friends described this novel as "conservative leftist." Sounds like an oxymoron, I know, but it's not. This book is conservative in the sense that it's partly a horror novel: good attacked by bad, order assaulted by evil. Morgan is upholding truth and decency and justice against what he sees as evil.

What makes him somewhat leftist is that he locates the evil in unrestrained and unbridled capitalism (he even makes an undeserved stab at free market economists having blood on their hands). However, to be accurate, Morgan is really describing "corporate capitalism," which is not free market capitalism at all but mercantilism and managed trade for the benefit of world-wide, globalized corporations against the average citizen.

The problem, as always, is not the free market but the government. Morgan's world could not exist except for the fact the government looks the other way about corporations making huge profits off of supporting wars. Where this unholy combination of the government and corporations (actually an unholy marriage of the government, corporations and the military) will lead in real life is a minority of super-rich, almost no middle-class, and a large mass of the poor, hopeless and violent.

That's one of our possible futures, folks, and Morgan is exactly right in his criticisms. In some ways the book is outrageous and unbelievable -- witness the armored-car duels on the highway, which are really just preposterous. Still, he's such a good writer he pulls it off.

But I quibble. Like all intelligent and perceptive writers, Morgan is a bit of prophet -- he sees to what Bad Place State-sponsored mercantilism is invariably going to lead. It was Erza Pound who said the artist is the antenna of the race, and I find that antenna particularly sensitive when it comes to great science fiction, which is what this novel is.

Posted by Bob Wallace, who ain't gonna be doing any dueling in a Chevy Cavalier.