The world is close to its final dissolution. In his hubris man created creatures which looked like human beings and constructed them to do the work that man was no longer willing to do for himself, with a centralised brain to control the Ficials. But that superior intellect turned its eyes on its creators and found them wanting and so started the cull of the human race...

Barricade (2014 264 pages) is the debut science fiction novel by Jon Wallace.

In the novel the war has not gone well for either side, the Ficials are holed up in the cities behind their barricades and whilst their nano technology gives then super human endurance and healing abilities they remain at an uneasy stalemate with the humans who control the countryside. The only thing both sides agree on is that they will shoot, on sight, any member of the opposite race.

The book opens up with a flash back and Wallace alternates these flashbacks with the contemporary story, which helps build up a picture of how this world came to be whilst at the same time contrasting the past with the present.

The main protagonist is Kenstibec, created as a construction model, who has found alternative employ as a taxi driver, whose job it is to get other important Ficials through the human lines and safely into other barricaded cities.

Now a lot of the ideas are pretty standard post-apocalyptic fare, including the permanent cloud cover of a nuclear winter, which should have made human life impossible, but for some reason doesn’t, robots who are, in the words of the Tyrell Corporation “More human than human”. But none of this really matters. At its heart the book is a road movie, a journey through a shattered land.

The great achievement of the book is in the portrayal of Kenstibec, the construction Ficial who was not designed to have emotions. This could have been a problem as it is difficult to empathise with a character that completely lacks empathy. In the guise of Kenstibec, Wallace questions just what it is to be human as Kenstibec finally comes to be seen as possibly one of the most humane humans in the book. He does not kill for joy or revenge, although he would think nothing of culling a human, but in comparison the surviving humans he is positively a paragon of virtue.

As they cross the land with ‘Fatty’ a captured Real who they use as a guide, Kenstibec and his fare Starvie encounter the King of Newcastle, a faded entertainer who leads a group of survivors. He seems to have been chosen, not for any great leadership qualities, but because the survivors remember that he was once an entertainer on television. Even at the precipice of extinction the people have let go of art, let go of books, but kept their televisions.

The book is wonderfully constructed and leads to a satisfying climax that you will never see coming. All in all it is a very accomplished first novel.

7

Charles Packer