Market Forces Again

Well, I finished Market Forces over lunch today, and I'm very pleased. Not the ending I may have expected, but logical and satisfying nonetheless. Morgan has a way of making you care about even the most despicable characters that's quite unnerving - you find yourself rooting for the guy who regularly cheats on his wife, or the one who just murdered a colleaugue in the most brutal fashion possible.

Here's yet another book in which Canada survives a future crisis, one of the last lights of hope in a decaying world. It really is a theme, or at least a significant bit of background, in plenty of postapocalyptic and distopian literature, and I'm beginning to wonder why so many authors, most of them not Canadian, choose Canada as "the place that made it through." In Market Forces, there are only a couple of references to Canada, but it's implied that Canada is one of the few nations that still tries to participate in humanitarian aid, as well as one of the last with a free and independent fourth estate. Pretty cool - I only hope the author's optimism is warranted.