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.

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

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.

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.