clock … watching time, the only true currency

Richard K. Morgan’s third book, Market Forces, steps away from the world of Takeshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon and Broken Angels). Like much notable fiction, Morgan spun a good story here out of a single exploratory thread: what happens to corporate politics in a world which is a state of managed disintegration?

Morgan’s answer? Sanctioned violence, with defined rules, is the new corporate ladder. You can’t be an unthinking thug, but you need the morals of a crocodile (i.e., none). This story of corporate aggression gone very, very wrong takes place in and around London, which now controls the poor in the “Zones.” This sharpening of the existing divide between rich and poor divides London as if by apartheid, though more directly economic in nature. That’s where the epithet whispered or graffitied in the Zones comes from: Zek-tiv. It took me a while, but that’s short for “executive.”

The corporates duel each other, with and without authorization, in their cars. Instead of competing bids being fought out over price ranges and other factors, the duelling firms literally duel, in their automobiles. To the death, if/as necessary — and leaving the opponent beaten yet alive is seen as weakness. Delivering the coup de grace often means shooting someone at close range, so the protective cocoon of the car doesn’t remove these individuals from the messy business of “getting ahead.”

While the author acknowledges a debt to the movie Mad Max, and lists a few anti-globalization volumes in a single page at the end of the book, my immediate comparison was to Car Wars.

Car Wars was Dungeons & Dragons, with a critical difference. Instead of rolling dice to match wizards and orcs, you found out whether your pickup truck’s armor could keep you from being scorched by a flamethrower in the neighboring Lincoln Town Car. I played this game for couple of years in middle school, before I could drive (fortunately!?). I sold all my remaining material on eBay back in 2000. The only drastic difference between Car Wars and Market Forces? One of the rules in Market Forces is no projectiles fired from a moving car.

Anyway… the novel ranges far beyond the battles on the highways, but those duels do center the story, viscerally. It’s not a happy tale. I found it more compelling (if disturbing) than Morgan’s first two books. I will proceed on to Woken Furies, another Kovacs novel, and it appears a title Black Man is coming out this year. I’ll be reading.