Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler

“The irony that haunts our entire history is that we humans have been the ones standing in the way of our own happiness the whole time.” - Ray Nayler

Astute observations soak the pages. Ray Nayler, author of the Locus Award-winning novel The Mountain and the Sea, delivers a poignant story about society's trust in AI to deliver a better human experience. The collapsing infrastructure of futuristic government forces change. Citizens lean on the intelligence of AI to govern. The slight problem being who governs the AI? Does it manage itself? In a horrific, yet all-too-realistic sign of the times, a re-skinned president runs the federation, and prime minister robots run Western Europe. Anarchy runs abound, as Nayler incorporates characters who fight against the machine, literally. Persons planted within the robotic regimes looking to thwart the opposition. Others placed to further the plan of domination. The reader has an up-close look. The artificial intelligence plays a part in its facade it casts over the public; surely it knows best. The algorithms weaving perfect plans for the success of humanity. What comes to fruition is a tightening of the screws, turn by turn; they tighten until the enjoyment of freedom comes to an end. Big Brother is watching, scoring, and exercising punishment without remorse. What can one expect from the all-knowing robotic leadership, deadened with a lack of emotion?

“Somehow, there were never enough resources to help everyone. Somehow, after rationalization, that had not changed. The same systems, replicating themselves through nonhuman means.” - Ray Nayler

A surreal novel that invokes a certain amount of fear for the future. I remember as a child growing up with Burger King’s slogan, “BK, have it your way,” replaced with a slogan telling me there is one menu item, done their way, the optimal way, the way that is best for you. The eyes in the sky looking for a bead of sweat, a flinch of distaste, a slight emotional downturn to dock points off your score. That score being your lifeline to luxury, enjoying BK’s one menu item, for example. Nayler incited a riot not only in the novel but within the confines of my brain. I want to believe in humanity. The good-natured inhabitants on Earth, those upstanding people, will prevail against big corporations and those that seek to control us. As time wears on, it would seem that power is the true currency.

In the end, a form of this story has been told by many. I enjoyed Nayler’s prose and the depth of the characters. It was complex, with plenty of deception I wasn’t anticipating. Cleverly, all things derive to the common theme of recognition that things worked fine the way they were in the “Old Times.” I concluded with the thought that perhaps progression shouldn’t be a focal point until the socialistic problems of today are dealt with. Unfortunately, the agenda of a select few has other ideas. I am giving this 4 out of 5 stars and highly recommend it.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for the ARC through Netgalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion.

After reading two of his previous works, I can say that Nayler is an auto-read for me.
In a near-future, Nayler imagines a world in which most of the West is led by AI prime ministers that have been programmed through the basis of rationalization. This means that they are designed to do what is best for humanity’s success and prosperity, but this decision making does not place human’s happiness and individualism at its center. In contrast, a country known as The Federation is led by an autocrat who has cheated death by having his consciousness uploaded into a new host when his body has decayed.
The book itself follows a host of characters that oppose these regimes in different ways. The chapters switch through these characters and their individual struggles, which turn out to be shared.
Nayler’s political commentary is intriguing. It’s an exploration of how integral “the argument” is for human expression and societal progress. The argument ensures that people care, that there is a capacity for understanding and empathy and without it we are impoverished of that what makes us community.

The many characters connect well, and I felt invested in their stories. Excellent book.

I received an early review copy of this from Netgalley. I don't think it affected my review.

I was super excited going into this second book, based on the author's first book (which doesn't seem to be set in the same universe but there are a few shared concepts that made me wonder for a while), and early on it sucked me in right away, just immersed in a world of ideas of a future that at least felt vaguely plausible and some characters that I could get attached to. .

However, by the time I finished, I felt I needed to sit with the book and think about it before I could really come up with a review, hence this is coming almost two months later than I wanted it to (to be fair, not all of that was on the book, November was a LOT). There was still a lot I liked about it, but I wasn't sure how I felt about the book as a whole, and to be honest, I'm still not.

As the story went on, I felt a growing sense that--although I was still having a lot of fun along the way--I wasn't very satisfied with where the narrative was headed and, perhaps, not even why the author wanted to write the book. From the start it's a very political book, both in the sense that it deals with characters who have particular political views, and that it feels like the author has an axe to grind. I want to be clear here, though, that when I say 'politics' I don't mean traditional conceptions of left vs right wing, there are no thinly veiled screeds on gun control or why liberals or conservatives are evil. There's a government that might be described as totalitarian, and others that might be described in other ways, but it's not really about the political axis of how it stands right now, but rather how politics and human rights and dignity might be affected in the future with technological change and AI in the mix. So when I mention the author having an axe to grind, I'm talking about a firm attitude about THAT and honestly don't think either left- or right- wing readers would be particularly turned off by the ideas expressed (though people on each side could still either agree or disagree on some of the central attitudes of the book). With any book that might be described as political, there's always the worry that the author pushing their ideas will get in the way of the story. For me, though, the problem was more that I kept feeling that the characters I was following didn't get very satisfying closure to their stories, they were sacrificed in the service to the larger plot. Often, a character would just be suddenly assassinated. Or survive but never find what they were looking for because, in the meantime, the political landscape around them changed and they just had to deal with that. And, when the book completed, I was left, a little bit, with a feeling of, "okay but so what?" Yes, the world had changed, but it felt like the author had the world as the book's main character whereas for me it was the people in it, and they felt somewhat short-changed.

That said, the book is still chock-full of good ideas, and gave me a lot to think about even when it got political, some ideas I'll be tossing around in my head for a long time, and I love that. For what it is, it felt well done, it just wasn't quite what I wanted it to be. Yet I'd never say I disliked it. Honestly, I'd probably put it between 3 and 4 stars (which for me is still quite a good score), and even after all this time to think of it, I'm still not sure which direction I should push it on places that don't allow half-stars. I feel like if I push it to 4, I'm possibly allowing my love of the author's other work color my score, and if I push it to 3, I'm allowing my disappointment of it not living up to the author's previous work bias me too much. But I have to make a decision, and in the end, I feel like the disappointment is more honest, a 3 with the note that I feel like this could have hit it out of the proverbial park but didn't quite get there and instead wound up with something that was merely quite interesting and still well-worth reading.

*I received an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks for the free book.*

"Where the Axe is Buried" is about Europe falling apart told through various focalisers from all over the world (England, Russia, Turkey...). It is a dystopia set in a world where surveillance has taken over and freedom is a lost concept.

The book is quite short and we don't get enough depth: characters, story, world-building, it only scratches the surface. But I nevertheless couldn't put the book down. Reading it right now when peace is more fragile than ever felt weird. I am quite thankful that Netgalley let me discover this author, I am sure going to check out his other books.

4.5 stars

[NetGalley Read #19]
4.5 ⭐

"Any way you looked at it, a human being was doing the killing. The machine was nothing but a tool."

Excellent.

Great story. Good characters.
An acute examination of evil, power, resistance, our overdependence on technology and its pitfalls, and what it means to be human in a world gone mad.

- Observation Shadow (Book 1: Chapters 1–12)
A solid setup. The narrative establishes relationships between characters from different places/countries, builds their motivations, reveals their backgrounds, and creates a dystopian world that is barbaric, cruel, and unforgiving. Despite all this, there remains a glimmer of hope and resistance.

- The Children of Sarez (Book 2: Chapters 13–24)
Secrets are revealed. Governments fall. The world descends into chaos. The plot thickens.

- What the Wasps Know (Book 3: Chapters 25–36)
Heavily focused on the Federation (which makes sense). Great payoffs.

All in all, a great book. Not overly long and definitely worth the time.

Recommended. 👍

This new stand-alone novel by Ray Nayler is an awkward combination of darkly serious themes with childish characterizations and simplistic future speculations.

It seems in the mold of the great early-to-mid twentieth century dystopias like We and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but updated with current geopolitical status and contemporary technology. Global dehumanization is the norm, through “rationalization” in “The Union,” and authoritarianism in “The Federation.” I’m not sure why Nayler has abstracted these national groupings, as they are simply identical with Western Europe and post-Soviet Russia. And a lot of the action also takes place in “The Republic,” which is one of the central Asian former Soviet states. As is characteristic of the classical dystopias, the system is challenged by an impossible romantic relationship – between Lilia of The Federation and Palmer of The Union. From there, the plot diverges along several threads and distantly interconnected situations, following a theme of the futility of resistance in an authoritarian regime. Major characters die. Survivors become disillusioned. “She had watched resistance to the state whittled away for decades. Even when she began her own fight, there was little will left in the people. Watching the same leader elected, over and over again, they had become numb to it. At first – many decades ago, when Zoya was no more than a child herself – they had gone to squares with enthusiasm. There were so many of them then. But with each new election, there were fewer. And who could blame them? Sometimes, the people who fought against autocracy were simply killed – beaten to death, as Yuri had been. But there were so many other ways to silence them. They were arrested, tortured, stripped of careers, forced to denounce their loved ones, labeled traitors, imprisoned, sent to punishment battalions in one after another colonial war. The state always hit back, and it always hit where it hurt most. If you were personally courageous – if you could not be broken with pain or the destruction of your own life – it went after those you cared about.” “One by one, the dissidents fell silent. Some stopped fighting. Some chose a life in exile. Many were dead.” “Eventually, there was only her, and her ghosts.”

The possibility of change comes about through the secret technological machinations of a select few insiders, rather than the dissidents. Some of the very naïve characters portrayed in the novel are manipulated into introducing a shut-down code into a PM under a ridiculous pretext of giving them the ability to innovate. PM’s being the master computers which have replaced human heads of state in The Union and The Republic and others, as part of global rationalization. At the same time, the President of The Federation is replaced with younger clone, who has been psychologically conditioned for take-over by a more benign leader. To accomplish these, many of the characters are so easily manipulated, that they must be stupid. The technology for psychological take-over is just magical while mentioning a few technical sounding words, like entanglement. This is all so simplistically described, that I literally thought for a while that this must be YA or even MG writing – except that the plot is too dark for that.

Overall, I am disappointed to give this novel such a low rating. I was highly enthused about Nayler’s debut novel The Mountain in the Sea, but this is nothing like that. Perhaps with more work, aiming the characters and technologies at a more adult level of comprehension, this could have been great at something beyond its post-Soviet cultural awareness.

I read an Advance Review Copy of Where the Axe is Buried in an ebook format, which I received from Farrar Straus and Giroux through netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review on social media platforms and on my book review blog. This new title is scheduled for release on 1 April 2025.

I received an eARC of this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Watching a new voice in SFF flex like this incredible. I was reminded by the author bio that Nayler has an MA in Global Diplomacy, and worked in Central Asia, Russia, and surrounding countries for 20 years, and currently lives in DC. You can see the experience in this book. Readers who read his debut may be surprised by Where the Axe is Buried. His first novel and novella were both deeply concerned with animals, animal consciousness, those webs of interactions on a slightly more individual level. But reading this I found the through-line of Nayler's writing becoming clear: systems.

This book takes you by the hand and pulls you through a constellation of (unnamed, but guessable) places in Europe, seen through the eyes of myriad people thrashing towards one goal: change. Like various creatures caught in a web, they pull in their own directions but they do all, in theory, have one goal. With our birds-eye view we can glimpse the web, see the threads the tie them together, transfer the motion of one person through to another person. It's an intricate book, and one with many questions to ask. Some may walk away from it feeling unsatisfied, because Nayler, wisely, doesn't answer most of them. Can systems ever really change? What does it mean to end a regime? Isn't it really that power simply changes its mask, puts on a new guise the public is happy to play along with? What does it really mean to have responsibility? Is it individual or collective?

I'll be thinking about this book for a long time, just like Nayler's last and I'm thrilled I had the opportunity to read the ARC.

In a far future on Earth, many societies are run by “rationalized” AI leaders. Eastern Europe is a hold out with draconian leadership dictating the social scores of its citizens, which determine who can eat, work, and move about their communities. An ensemble of characters from across these societies tell a story about the true will of humanity, what it means to dissent, and how we relate to each other.

Read. This. Book. It is absolutely going to be up for all the major SFF awards. It’s inventive, engrossing, and ultimately hopeful.

Ray Nayler creates an extremely eerie, yet plausible world in Where the Axe is Buried. The governments of the world are "rationalized," aka. run by AI leaders that may or may not know what's best for their citizens.

As always, Nayler drops you right into the action, so you immediately feel both immersed and curious about the world he's created. The most compelling characters are Lilia and Zoya. And the most terrifying were the Federation's president and it's head of security.

Where the Axe is Buried is an extremely timely novel about humanity's desire to break free from authoritarianism. I couldn't help but draw parallels between current events and this novel while reading.

My favorite moment in the book involves someone talking about wanting to douse individuals who claim to be apolitical and subsequently light them on fire.

If you like political thrillers mixed with sci-fi elements this book is for you!

I received an advance review copy from NetGalley/the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Just some grammatical errors I noticed:
-Loc 2124, 3 sentence, “than” should be “then”

-Loc 2378 “and are they are still working?”

-Loc 2932 “the could access it remotely”

I enjoyed this book. I think Nayler is finding his voice and his sophomore novel is really proving it! I docked because the multiple POVs were very difficult to keep straight (this is very common with Nayler). I love the concept of the dioramas and the plot was really engrossing. I look forward to reading Nayler’s next work. My review can be found https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6874162622

So this book is a lot like the movie Glass Onion where the main character quickly realizes that everything is very dumb. This book is meant to be a deep discussion between the totalitarian surveillance state (a la the USSR) vs a technological surveillance state (a la the US/Five Eyes). But once you make all the connections between the allegories and realize the characters act on rails it's a very boring and dumb book. The main 'villain' does a whole Blofield reveal and then we're left wondering what happens to some characters. Hell one character literally is described as a blank canvas and quickly dies once his plot armor is gone.

Not very good. I'm disappointed.

I DNF’d this at 50% as I found it quite slow and not what I was hoping for after adoring ‘The Mountain in the Sea’.
I think that this was just not the book for me.
A shame but I am still keen to see what Nayler does next.

Han pasado ya muchos años desde que asistí una mesa redonda en la que participaba mi querido amigo Elías Combarro titulada “La reseña es política”. Si esta afirmación es cierta de por sí, aún lo es más cuando hablamos de un libro con una carga política tan importante como Where the Axe is Buried.

Esta es una novela sobre refugiados, sobre poder, sobre sistemas que se perpetúan a sí mismos pero, sobre todo, es una novela sobre resiliencia. No se dan nombres sobre los países en los que están basados la federación, la ciudad-estado y los distintos regímenes donde tiene lugar el relato, pero no hace falta, porque todos sabemos a quiénes se refiere Nayler. Es un libro tremendamente frío y cerebral, lo cual hace que sea un poco difícil entrar en él, pero el mensaje que nos hace llegar es tan duro como certero, avasallador como un derrumbamiento.


Desde distintos puntos de vista asistiremos al desarrollo de los acontecimientos en un futuro cercano, donde el poder de casi todos los países está en manos de Primeros Ministros que son Inteligencias Artificiales que aplican sus despiadados algoritmos para hacer más eficiente el sistema, en una especia de extrapolación de la inteligencia artificial marítima que ya vimos en The Mountain in the Sea, pero con mayor capacidad de influir en las vidas humanas. La resistencia es fútil. Y qué decir del Presidente que se perpetúa en el poder a través de clones convenientemente cambiados para que parezca que hay progreso, cuando solo hay inmovilismo. Se ha llegado a esta situación por la pasividad de las masas y también por cierto hartazgo con los sistemas probados hasta entonces, con los que nadie estaba contento.

Ray Nayler es un gran conocedor de la situación geopolítica actual, especialmente de Rusia y sus exrepúblicas socialistas y no pierde la oportunidad de hacernos ver que el sistema actual es corrupto y se tambalea, pero no sabemos cuál sería la solución más idónea. Como digo, los personajes mediante los que expone sus ideas muestran una apatía casi contagiosa, han bajado los brazos a base de darse cabezazos contra la pared. No se puede decir que el libro ofrezca esperanza ni respuestas, por que no lo hace, pero sí que nos da material para la reflexión. Si me permitís la exageración, es un libro con mucha más ciencia que ficción, con unas importantes reflexiones sobre el camino que estamos tomando con las inteligencias artificiales, pero también con especulación sobre dónde nos están llevando los políticos en la actualidad. Creo que se trata de una lectura imprescindible y está llamado a ser una de las obras del año.

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.

As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.

Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.

This is another hit from one of the best upcoming science fiction writers. I loved his first debut novel about the octopus', and loved his Tusks of Extinction novella even more. This was a great folow up to both of those. Fast paced, fun and very scientific, but told in a way that even simpletons like me can understand it. The techno thriller is alive thanks to Ray Naylor. I think him and Blake Crouch are going to have to fight it out for the heir apparent to Michael Crichton

This ended up being a hell of a ride. There's a lot going on here, to the point of there almost being too many POVs to track across all the intersecting threads, but at its core it's a story of change and what people are willing to do to enact it. It just also happens to feature using dioramas to implant thoughts in a subject's head, AI Prime Ministers and hellish social credit implementation, a President who's been reimplanting his consciousness in successive bodies, and the woman he exiled decades ago for the book she wrote about the world as it is now. Masterful plot work, and absolutely one of the books to read this coming spring.

Thanks to the editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux for letting me read an advanced reader's copy through Netgalley.

I am very happy to have the chance to read the book before it's out!

This is a timely science fiction novel that deals with themes of AI and politics in Russia. To say more would be a spoiler, but I can say it is very much worth reading and listening to what the author hast to say.
Ray Nayler is a relatively new author, I started following him after reading some of his short stories in Asimov's. He has a background in foreign relations and knows the world beyond the USA. This shows in his writing which has a sensibility for different cultures.
I suffered with his characters in their impossible situations, trying to do the right thing more often than not.
This is not light reading. There are more questions than answers.
Like in Nayler's previous novel The Mountain in the Sea, I hoped the main point of view characters would interact more towards the end. But this is a minor point, the novel has many interesting ideas that will stay with me and I definitely recommend it.

This was such a good book! I loved the concept and the futuristic idea of people taking over bodies to keep their power. it was a strange idea but honestly I could see it happening. I liked the plotline and the pacing of this book, it kept me entertained throughout reading!

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for an honest review!!

This was a fascinating concept for a scifi novel, it had that feel that I wanted and enjoyed from this type of book. I enjoyed the idea of someone using new bodies to keep their power. The plot has that concept that I wanted and enjoyed in the genre. I was invested in what was going on in this world and thought the characters were everything that I wanted.

this book has left me reeling. in a good way.
the chapters are told from the perspectives of our main characters, which sometimes cross each other.

there’s two elements that i found the most interesting. disclaimer - i am not knowledgeable about all topics and geopolitical aspects that have served as inspiration for this novel, so i will speak of what i know. as a person with russian heritage and family that lives there in near poverty but still blindly and actively supports the regime, or shrugs in apathy, the tale of zoya hit close to home. as someone who has not seen that part of the family in years, lilia was relatable to me. nayler also touched upon the topic of refugees and their worth, depending on their home country. does a refugee from an agressor state deserve pity? in general, i felt like „where the axe is buried“ presented a pretty accurate account of the way russia has been functioning.

„In the years that followed, Zoya and her allies would come to understand that they would never win. Their resistance to power was purely symbolic.“

„And when the West makes their accusations,“ Krotov said, „we accuse them of lying. And we repeat our own lie to them again. Forever.“

these parts of the book reflected the feeling of helplessness that i see in russian speaking anti-authoritarian communities. what can be done against such a system? in „where the axe is buried“, the author describes an ending so not in tune with the bleak starting situation, it gave me whiplash. for that, i am deducting one star.

the second aspect i found interesting was the setup and fall of the PMs.

„We mystified the public with the idea that the machines were intelligent, maybe even conscious, when they really were nothing more than incredibly advanced statistical calculators, designed to give us the kinds of solutions we needed them to give.“

the next person that says „oh let me just ask chatgpt“ to my face will get slapped with this book. the gen ai craze is costing me my last nerve. that is all i will be saying on this matter thank you :)

one last thing - the book was well written, i really enjoyed naylers style. however, my knowledge of the russian language and folklore did help me out at multiple points. if this book is meant for people unfamiliar with russian, perhaps it would be smart to include a glossary. i feel like some small but interesting aspects of the story would be lost otherwise.