Richard Morgan - straight talking about Market Forces

"I was shocked at how crude and unfinessed it was," said Richard Morgan about his original screenplay for Market Forces, written many years ago. So he overhauled and improved the script and it's out now in paperback from Gollancz publishers. "Basically, the narrative backbone was fine, but what was needed was a quality upgrade."

The story for Market Forces changed significantly in that transformation from script to novel. Now it is set in a brutal near-future Earth, where the Green Party has taken over the UK and only the extremely rich can afford cars and the expensive fuel to run them. Chris Faulkner has just landed the job of his life at Shorn Associates. Working in the Conflict Investment department, with colleague Mike Bryant, he helps guerrillas run wars against governments, but only if he can turn a profit from it. Several other finance companies also bid for the contracts to run a war and the tender is decided on the roads – on deserted motorways they race each other, and the winner is the one still breathing.

"With a two hour movie script," said Morgan, "you don't really have time to explore all the angles, so the screenplay was focused pretty brutally on Chris and Mike and the friendship between them, without a lot of insight into the secondary characters. I had to do a lot of re-wiring to bring these other people to life at a level that satisfied my sense of balance.

"Also, in a novel you've got a lot more room to explore the world you've created, which meant I could establish a much wider selection of settings and sub-themes. All the stuff in Latin America and Norway, the revolutionaries and the ombudsmen, is new to the novel - it was never in the screenplay at all."

One ingredient missing from Market Forces is Morgan's much-loved character, Kovacs. "It was refreshing taking a break," he said. "I think the benefits went both ways - there was a real sense of freedom not being constrained by an already defined future, being able to carve out new parameters and basically make up a whole load of cool new stuff.

"But at the same time, it gave me a year in which to gain some distance and perspective on the two previous Kovacs novels and the character of Kovacs himself. All of which meant I came back fresh to Woken Furies [Morgan's latest novel], and I found myself rediscovering a lot of the pleasure I'd got out of inventing Kovacs and his world first time around in Altered Carbon."

One of the traits Market Forcesshares with it's predecessor, Altered Carbon, is a particularly bleak view of the future. "Well, anything else would be dishonest," said Morgan. "I have no great faith in the human capacity to create utopias - or rather I have a great deal of faith in said race's capacity to fuck up any utopia our technological prowess makes possible.

"For the first time in human history, we're able to feed the whole world, have been able to for a couple of decades in fact, but instead we let millions starve. We have the knowledge and understanding to see that democratic, egalitarian and just societies are the ones that deliver best and most, but we continue to promote exactly the opposite the world over.

"We know that education, law and science are the only things that allow us to hold a Darwinian universe at bay, and we bury ourselves instead in religious superstition or New Age bullshit. And in the west, where we have less excuse than anybody, we know that we have the power to change things for the better and instead we go shopping. That's the present, and it's pretty bleak - I see no reason to suppose the future will be much different."

So would Morgan say that Market Forces deliberately carries a warning? "Yes," he said. "It's probably the angriest book I have in me. You remember that scene in Lethal Weapon where Martin Riggs, the borderline psycho cop, goes up on the roof to talk down a suicide jumper? He tries a variety of strategies to persuade the man not to kill himself including handcuffing himself to him. Then, in the end, he loses his temper, grabs the guy by the throat and says: "Do you really wanna jump? Do you really? Well okay asshole, that's fine by me. Let's do it, let's jump" and proceeds to throw himself and the suicidal guy screaming off the roof. That's Market Forces - it's me cuffing myself to all those neocon free market morons out there and saying "Do you really want a world run by market forces? Do you really? Well okay assholes, that's fine by me. Let's do it, let's jump."

For more information about the author, check out Richard Morgan's website.

© Sandy Auden 2005

Pete Crowther, Ed Gorman and Richard Dean Starr on Hellboy stories

Everyone's favourite red-skinned, 'goggle-wearing' hero from Hell has suddenly found he's the latest comics-to-movie big screen success. Hellboy is now celebrating his good fortune in the UK with an new prose anthology, called Odder Jobs, released by Titan Books.

A sequel to the first anthology, Odd Jobs, this new offering is edited by Christopher Golden and features stories from UK writers Graham Joyce, Tim Lebbon and Peter Crowther, and a host of US authors like Ed Gorman and Richard Dean Starr, Tom Picirilli, and Charles de Lint. And, of course, artwork from Hellboy creator Mike Mignola.

Ed Gorman and Richard Dean Starr's story is 'Unfinished Business'. It tells the tale of supernatural events around an army camp near Wisconsin, when a seductive she-demon starts ensnaring members of the military. When the corpses are found, their strange condition prompts a call for Hellboy's help.

It's a story that works both on the human level and as a Hellboy tale. "A successful Hellboy story should have a good mystery or adventure plot with supernatural elements," explained co-author, Starr. "Hellboy is, after all, an angst-ridden superhero with a Sam Spade-like personality. Humour is also essential to the success of a Hellboy piece, because it makes the character, and the story, more accessible and appealing. Bottom line: there needs to be some laughs, no matter how grim it gets. Of course, no Hellboy story would be complete without a fight scene (or two, or three)."

Also capturing the Hellboy feel is Pete Crowther's story, 'From An Enchanter Fleeing'. "Hellboy stories have three elements: humour, tension and heart," Crowther said. "The humour anchors the tale in the everyday by having the various characters comment on the fantastical elements. Hellboy is a fairly amusing character, given to snappy one-liners.

"Humour is also important because, let's face it, the basic premise of most Hellboy tales (and most private eye yarns for that matter) is implausible to say the least. Thus, when one is confronted by a monstrous worm or a horde of shambling zombies then, in order to give the tale a basis in the readers' minds ("hey, we know this whole idea is a little kooky but so does Hellboy - look, see what he says now!") you give a little one-liner to rein things in a little. Simple as that. But I didn't want the humour to take over 'Enchanter' and wrest the underlying theme (my usual shtick about death and loss, and separation and carrying on) away from it, so I hope it hasn't. It's intended as a serious tale, despite the gags (such as they are)."

"The excitement/tension part," Crowther continued, "is crucial to comicbook storytelling. Heck, it's pretty important to prose storytelling, but if you haven't got it in a comicbook story then (unless it's what I'd call a 'mainstream' comicbook, by such luminaries in the field as Dan Clowes, Seth or Adrian Tomine etc) you've got yourself a turkey.

"But the most important element as far as I'm concerned, is Heart. And that's what drew me to it as a project when Chris Golden asked if I'd like to take part. Mike Mignola is an expert in all of these areas, and that's why the series and the character are so phenomenally successful. But most of all, he's got a big heart . . . and so has Hellboy. He cares. Sad things sadden him; the world pisses him off and the bad guys and the monsters make him mad, but it's his heart and his empathy for the human condition that stands him tall amongst most other comicbook characters."

Crowther's tale is bursting with heart, and is, unusually, written in the present tense. "I'd love to be able to give you a clear reason why I wrote it in the present tense but, alas, I don't have one. I guess this comes in on the same level as 'why did you make the lead character a man/woman?' or, wearing my editor's hat for a moment, 'why did you accept this story when you rejected that one?'. It all comes down to what feels right.

"Sitting in front of a blank screen and the blinking cursor right at the start of the Hellboy story, I reached out and started writing . . . and, lo and behold, the words came up in the present tense. "That'll do," I mused to myself. "Gives it a sense of immediacy." (I often muse to myself when I'm writing), and I simply carried on.

For Ed Gorman and Richard Dean Starr, there was the extra dynamic of collaboration. Two authors will bring different skills to a writing partnership and when they work, like 'Unfinished Business' does, the final result is a seamless merging of skills. "Ed has the reputation and experience to get the feel for the mystery end of things," said Starr. "I have more of the absurd sense of humor and a feel for the bizarre, supernatural world of Hellboy. Working together, I think we created a story that is a passable hybrid of our two different styles."

Both of their prose styles have done a good job of creating a vivid Hellboy. It's not easy for a collection of words to compete with the sheer visual impact of a Hellboy comic. Ed Gorman acknowledged the task: "Somebody once remarked that cave paintings were man's first artistic expression because they turned the things of everyday into the iconic. That's also true of comic books and movies, I think. A single story panel/frame can elevate an object, a face, a landscape into something far greater than itself, something that suggests many meanings (the Mona Lisa for instance). A prose writer has a much more difficult time achieving that same impact and then the result is rarely that immediate."

They believe that words have a lot of offer though. Starr added: "A prose story can deliver more complex character motivations and more detailed descriptions of people and places. Also, a story without pictures provides the reader with more opportunity to use their imagination, to get into the minds of the characters and to really feel the immediacy of the story. As the reader, you're making up your own, mental comic panels, and that's a more intimate - although not necessarily better - way to experience a story."

Crowther also appreciates what he's up against. "Mike Mignola's artwork and prose marry up so perfectly," he said. "In fact, I think that the artwork is so much a part of Hellboy's mythos that a prose-only story is starting off with a profound disadvantage.

"But I knew this right from the start and thus I set off determined that my words would make up for the absence of pictures. Having read most of the stuff in the anthology, it would appear that the other contributors did exactly the same."

For more information, check out the Ed Gorman Blogspot, Richard Dean Starr website and Peter Crowther's PS Publishing website.

© Sandy Auden 2005