Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler
- 336 pages, Hardcover
- Expected publication April 1, 2025 by MCD
When an author makes a debut like Mountain in the Sea, they have my attention for the rest of time. Two years ago my top read of 2023 was the very powerfully philosophical science fiction novel by Ray Nayler. The novel got plenty of attention that year, some readers were interested in the AI issues, some for the climate change horrors. For me, the very Lem-influenced SF novel hit about every sweet spot I have in a piece of SF.
Nayler’s combination of SF fandom, knowledge of science, and intergovernmental experience created a literary unicorn. One unbelievable alchemy of thought and talent spit out this incredible masterpiece that shook me to my core. If some thought The Mountain in the Sea was preaching to the choir, I would like to point out there has never been anything quite like it.
It was a beautiful feeling to read it. A science fiction novel that has so much to say is not rare, but one that does it with skill, style, and heart in equal measure is a pretty special treat. To follow up that novel was nearly an impossible task. Moving to the novella format was a smart move. Tusks of Extinction was a short but powerful work of Science fiction that had me nearly drooling for the next work. Nayler had shown with those first two books that he was capable of high-concept novels of philosophical SF. In PKD circles we are always looking for and recommending Dickian novels, and I will point out those Dickian moments for sure, but Nayler is more clearly influenced by Stanislaw Lem.
The sophomore novel is Where the Axe is Buried (Axe when I am lazy) when Ray hinted at this book in our second interview I was sold. So that also means looking for a third interview and at this pace, I hope we continue to make the podcast interview a tradition.
Where the Axe is Buried is a fantastic political science fiction novel that tells a story a few hundred years in the future to reflect the insane oligarchy developing right before our eyes. What you need to understand is Nayler’s allegorical lens is informed by the politics in several countries. Certainly it comments on Trump, but I suspect Putin is more of a target.
I also can’t ignore the fact that my next novel (Great America in Dead World - to be released by Quoir date TBA) and Axe comment on many of the same themes. They are very different, but I of course enjoy that Nayler is commenting on similar themes.
Where the Axe is Buried is not released until April so if you want to go unspoiled but you trust me here is where you stop reading and click away to pre-order it. Without spoilers, I would say this is a political thriller set a few centuries in the future, but no date is given. It is our future, it is Earth, but Nayler does a good job of world-building so it feels like a world we are centuries removed from. The politics of Axe are interesting, and the narrative is filled with more ideas than action. The ideas never overload the story and the well-defined characters help to balance it all out.
This novel is a meditation on power and resistance, oligarchy, and activism. Where the Axe is Buried is science fiction at its best because it uses the gee-whiz and the future setting to ask serious questions about the political push-pull between leaders and the population. In other words, I think it is an important piece of work.
There are Dickian, as Phil Dickian elements of world-building like the social credit score. Citizens get benefits by doing good deeds or at least being seen to do them. In a PKD novel the so-called subhuman characters would drive the action being desperate to raise their social credit. In Nayler's novel, it is one of many examples of how this society evolved. The plot is driven by political mechanics that become the structure for which many philosophical ideas are considered. Hell yeah. We are not talking about car chases or shoot-outs but a clash of ideas and I am here for it.
So now let's go deeper into what happened in this novel. When I first read about this I assumed this was a super far-future Dune-like civilization. Some elements border on Cyberpunk, but don’t go into this novel expecting that. This novel is a political drama that is built on Speculative allegory. This is a novel about a totalitarian Federation whose president has remained in power by downloading his mind to multiple new bodies. Lilia is the scientist who has leveled the playing field but figuring out how to digitize Zoya, an old activist in exile for writing the inspiring book The Forever Argument. Many excellent moments are quotes from this book inside the book.
“Zoya let honey run into her cup from a spoon. “I thought you were a ghost. That I was losing my mind. That is what I have been afraid of most of all. That the president exiled me here so the isolation would tear my mind apart. But then I understood - you are real, but my digital eye cannot see you. Only my human eye can. President did not blind me; With a rubber bullet, in that protest decades ago, when I was still young. Just like in Byzantine. He only half finished the job.”
So yes Axe plays with technology in lots of creative ways, these are really the only moments that border on cyberpunk. The idea that Zoya is on the edge of becoming a living computer program reminded me of the saying “You can kill the revolutionary but not the revolution” and this novel imagines if the revolutionary, at least her ideals, her mind cannot be destroyed. Nayler has already experimented with digital souls and disembodied simulated living. Some terrifying moments remind of his last novella, of course, he is expanding the idea here.
In this world, the President is already there. Moving from body to body, is a process that at this point is only available to him. “He hated touching the president. He hated being anywhere near him. He hated being here in the presidential palace, this fake monstrosity of real Italian marble, with its fake empire chairs in real gold leaf and real silk. He hated returning to the federation at all.”
“What a world, Nikolai,” the president had said. “no old age, no sickness, and no death. Finally, we can have both our wisdom and our health.”
The president said we - but it was only he who could have those things. It was only he who could escape old age, sickness, and death.”
The President certainly has hallmarks of both Trump and Putin, even in the short quote above but I suspect it is Putin who is most often satirizing. It doesn’t matter as Axe is about the strongman and oligarchic leader.
At times the novel does a wonderful job of commenting on the tech bros and their approach of trying tech solutions to the functions of wider society. While the Federation in the novel is run by a strong man, another group of nations has given control to the PM’s, AI-run Prime Ministers. This is the Tech Bros ideal leadership. One they don’t just buy governments but programs them. As Elon Musk essentially just bought America this felt prophetic. Sure, they will sell you that it is efficient, rational, practical, and ethical.
“I think the PM is doing what it is designed to do,” George said.
“cause a revolution?”
“No. We designed it to calculate human needs and deconflict those needs in order to promote human thriving. Deconfliction of needs is the core of its assignment. But from the outside it can look chaotic. When Greece rationalized, there were riots. People even died. But their PM pulled grease out of debt, and did it without getting their social services. Their PM saw ways forward no human mind could see. Their economy is humming along now. It's a success story. But they hung by their fingernails for a while. They almost voted to pull the plug. Rationalization one in a secret session by a single vote. It was our biggest test period and rationalization pulled through.”
Look at all the ideas, and commentary in this one paragraph. The humans who have given control to the technology often believe that it always has their best interests at heart. Nayler wrote this a while ago, so how could he have predicted we would have a foreign-born billionaire tech bro shadow president rationalizing suffering in the economy. Multiple political systems are explored through the mirror of SF, and throughout the novel you find dense idea rich passages and no matter how I try to convey them I don’t think I will do them justice. While the topic matter is not as groundbreaking as Mountain in the Sea this novel is a powerful commentary on one of the most important issues of the moment. The stress points of democracy.
“That was how it was. One day you had your own country. Next day you were a refugee. You were in a line, waiting to be someone again. To be legal again. Not to be nothing.
You could spend your whole life waiting.”
As we await the oligarch’s insurrectionist man baby who never stopped crying over the last four years to return to an office he should be disqualified from. The question of becoming refugees in our country hits harder. I know Nayler was hoping he was writing about the fate we narrowly missed, instead, we are left processing this type of SF novel at a time wondering if it is hitting to close to home.
“They came for him at night. There was a knock at the door. Vitaly had been in bed fully dressed, staring at the ceiling, waiting. He had taken two pain pills in preparation for the journey.
He had known they were coming. Late in the evening, his social credit score dropped to 0. The digital lock clicked shut, bolting him inside the apartment. The feed screen on the wall went dark period his portable terminal shut down.”
But Zoya exists out there, her book, and the books she is yet to write, her exile ended as she waits a new body and freedom from the forms that the Federation can jail or destroy.
“But she could not find a body.
Help.
Yes, there it was. Her voice.
We will. You are with friends. And soon, you will have a body as well.
A body?
Yes. Soon. This intermediate space can be disorienting. You are used to having a form, and now you have none. The brain is not meant to operate this way. You are looking for feedback, the feeling of pressing against something in the world. But there is none. We know this is distressing. We won't keep you here for long but we need you to know what is going to happen.
I am dead.
You are a pattern of the person you were all of her, all of Zoya Alekseyena. But yes that person is gone in the physical world.
“… if there were a government out there that could build us a perfect world, our first instinct would be to destroy it…
What I ask most urgently is that someone write the book that counters this one…”
And there is one last part that struck me. As the democrats offer pathetic resistance to the oligarchs, as big tech leaders and media members fly down to Florida to kiss Trump’s ring this next passage hit me like a ton of bricks.
“This morning he read; Imagine what you would be without resistance. Everyone complicit in your plans, or helpless in the face of them. Every desire that flickered in your brain fulfilled. Every person obedient to you. Imagine how, as the day followed and everything was granted to you, your desires would metastasize there is no cancer like the will unopposed.
What we need most is opposition it keeps us not only honest but human. Without it, any one of us is a monster. Where there is complacency, every human power becomes monstrous. Toughness is not agreement; it is the collective act of resisting one another.”
Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe is Buried is a third piece of evidence that science fiction has found one of its most important voices. Here is hoping that our systems are as fragile as the ones in this book. This made an interesting pairing with my current read Jack London’s The Iron Heel. I hope in a hundred years we can talk about how we should’ve listened to Nayler.
