Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler

Ray Nayler burst onto the science fiction scene with his debut novel The Mountain in the Sea. That novel, which included, among other things, sentient octopuses and AI fishing fleets, told its story across a number of seemingly unrelated but thematically connected strands all of which were pulled together cleverly by the close. Nayler does something similar in his second novel Where the Axe is Buried but with very different themes.

As with The Mountain in the Sea, Where the Axe is Buried is set in a near, not unrecognisable future. Russia is known as the Federation and is ruled by a despotic leader who has used technology to extend his reign for generations. But there is a plot bubbling to bring him down that involves one of his most trenchant critics who has been banished to the taiga for expressing her political views. Most of Europe is run by Artificially Intelligent leaders known and PMs although they don’t make things much better and at least one of these seems to have glitched leading to a popular uprising. In the UK, a young man is forced to go on the run after his girlfriend’s disappearance to protect a potentially world changing piece of technology that she has created.

There is plenty going on here thematically. Nayler is interested in what is needed for a society to function effectively, and different forms of authoritarianism. He is curious about the impact of AI but does not take the AI strands of this story in any typical directions. There is plenty here about how humans connect, what it takes to make a working society and what we owe each other. Once again Nayler has a seminal text which he uses to explore his key themes and which is quoted through the story.

But there is nothing dry about Where the Axe is Buried. The enterprise is powered by a number of fascinating, complex point of view characters with intersecting agendas, some of which are being driven by forces even they do not understand. And because of this the fate of any one character is never certain.
Nayler develops a believable day-after-tomorrow world and then starts to pull it apart to see how it ticks but also to explore whether it could be better but what the cost of that improvement might be. There are a number of layers of mystery here that interact with each other only come clear as the stories themselves start to converge. Driven by a cast of fascinating characters, Where the Axe is Buried is another great piece of thought provoking science fiction from Nayler.

Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler

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9.0/10