Market Forces - Style and Themes

Style and Themes

Market Forces is a science-fiction thriller set nearly fifty years after its writing featuring a protagonist who fights lethal battles to win contracts for his company and to retain his position within the company. While the story is fictional, the author included a bibliography section that informed the story's satire of globalization and modern corporate practices. Morgan extrapolates trends in free market capitalism out fifty years to a point where corporations are unfettered by domestic governments. It is a dystopian vision where large corporations constantly battle to rule entire countries using humans as pawns. The protagonist, Chris Faulkner, can be viewed as a personification of the story's take on the development of its economic system; the character is written to be likeable but becomes increasing brutal as he invests himself deeper into the corporate culture.

The review in The New York Times compared the corporate culture and market mechanisms that led to the Enron scandal with the fictional background of the novel. The same reviewer compared Market Forces to Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise which also concerns political and social issues but in a fictional Central American country. The story's use of social commentary is similar to the works of science fiction authors Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth in the 1950s. Book reviewer Nisi Shawl wrote that this story could be part of a sub-genre of stories using life-in-a-corporation as a background, along with Eileen Gunn's "Stable Strategies for Middle Management", Kelley Eskridge's "Solitaire", and Charles Stross' Accelerando. Morgan's use of action sequences and car chases led to several comparisons to similar movie sequences, and specifically to Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay movies.