The narrative fictions of John Muckle reflect the increased motion and mobility of people and things in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This increase is a significant, although often invisible, part of the narrative and can be read through both the form and content of the writing. The working lives of his characters, and their sense of identity, are changed through acts of movement, while the objects that make up the environment they live in are similarly always in the process of change. Motion is not, however, the article claims, initiated or determined by social forces, or the inevitable consequence of a capitalist system that demands ever more productivity and growth. Motion is always and already there, and therefore is changed, but not initiated, by economic and social pressures. It is this interplay between people and things that are always and already moving, and a capitalism that seeks to change or direct that movement, that provides the tensions within the narrative and the events in the lives of the characters, both tragic and joyful. Narratives, and the movements they often describe, become less about beginnings and endings, and more about sequences of collisions and moments of change in direction and velocity.