If Barricade had been a little less hyped by its publicist then I might have enjoyed it more. Instead, the sketchy characters and derivative plot struggled to live up to the publisher’s promise of a ‘cold-blooded yet magnetic’ genetically-engineered artificial anti-hero to rival Takeshi Kovacs. That comparison with Richard Morgan’s brilliant Altered Carbon series did Barricade no favours, in fact…

But Barricade is written in an easily-accessible style and the opening chapters scramble along from one violent encounter to the next, swapping between here-and-now action and flashback sequences which explain how society collapsed. We meet a female pleasure model who instantly converts any human male into a dribbling sex-crazed loon (just a tiny bit unlikely in the circumstance) and a no-hoper human who acts as a guide through the badlands.
The protagonist is a Ficial, Kenstibec, a biological conscious and thinking entity – more like a Replicant from Blade Runner than a C3PO android – who has been optimised for working in construction under human masters in the pre-collapse civilisation. Like all Ficials, he’s not burdened by feelings or irrational desires, and his nanos rapidly repair any damage to his physical structure.
The unlikely trio travel deep into trouble and – at roughly the halfway point – the purpose of their journey starts to reveal itself.

The result is a reasonably enjoyable romp. There’s heaps of action, plenty of gunplay and physical violence. In fact, it seems absurd how much punishment the humans seems to be able to take and how they kinda line up to be gunned down by the efficient Ficials. But the extended fight sequences become much like the rest of the novel; a dreary trudge through a muddy wasteland. They can’t match the razor-edge tension or black humour of Richard Morgan’s ruthless futuristic killer.

More thoughts here: http://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/barricade-the-end-of-the-wor...

Overall, it's a 7/10.
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