Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler begins with Zoya, a political prisoner exiled to a small cottage in the Russian wilderness, with a robot as her sole companion.

From the first chapter of Ray Nayler’s cybernetic thriller:

“Now Zoya sat in her canvas chair and watched her robot assistant chop wood. There was nothing mechanical about its actions. The way it adjusted its stance and grip between blows, the way it balanced each new round on the block. The word that came to mind was ‘intelligence.’ The intelligence of the body. The effortless, accurate intelligence of a child jumping rope. It did not have will, did it? And yet, although each round of wood was different, the blow it struck was perfect every time. What the robot had, its perfect calculation, seemed better than human will. Or, at least, more efficient.”

In Nayler’s near-future dystopia, Europe is run by AI prime ministers who are blindly trusted by the people to make “rational” decisions that eventually cause the collapse of civilization. The only exception to the AI politicians is the president of “the Federation” (present-day Russia), who preserves his power by transferring his consciousness from body to body — until, well, something else gets added to his most recent copy-and-paste.

The Washington Post hails the book as deserving “to be read and discussed for its futuristic philosophical exploration of our era’s problems.” I don’t often listen to The Washington Post, but in this post I will. I’ll share what I didn’t like about the book, and what I loved about it.

The Loneliest Book I Read This Year

This is a dystopian story about collapse and revolution. Don’t go in expecting many laughs. The whole novel has a depressing tone filled with lonely characters — who get even lonelier (save one) as the pages turn:

“She cared too much, and that care destroyed them both. That was how it worked in this country. The ones who cared too much were destroyed by throwing caution away. The only way to survive was to be indifferent to others. Other people could not be allowed to matter.”

Not that any of the characters had much chance to care about others — as they spend most of the book in some form of isolation or another — either on the run, hiding out or imprisoned. Due to their isolation, chapters are filled with passive third-person internal dialogue but little external dialogue. The story lacks the level of interaction with other beings (human, robot or otherwise) that I won’t say is essential to a story, but certainly my personal preference.

Furthermore, when the characters did have extended periods of interaction with other human beings, it was often summarized rather than played out.

For example, one of my favourite parts of the novel is when a parliamentary bureaucrat becomes a true “public servant” after the AI-run government collapses civilization. But, sadly, this section of the story — full of human interaction — was largely summarized into a well-crafted but insufficient paragraph:

“Nurlan had done many things. He had reinforced barricades, moved dead self-driving cars out of the street, boarded over broken windows, administered first aid. He had buried bodies in the parks, cleaned glass from the streets, stood watch while children played at a playground. He had helped bake bread, and carried warm stacks of it wrapped in cloth up and down the staircases of the local apartment buildings, where it was snatched out of his hands by fiercely hungry children or taken gratefully into the gnarled hands of elders who tried to force him to drink tea with them, or who pressed a jar of jam preserves into his hands in thanks. He helped the elders, like Chinar, to do the small things they could not do anymore. And he had helped with so many other things. At night he came home exhausted and slept well.”

I would have loved to have seen that “outline” fleshed out into a few chapters. The entire book, in my opinion, would have benefited from twice as many pages.

Until then, if that opening scene of a robot cutting wood with the somatic intelligence of a girl jumping rope hooked you as much as it did me, you can find out more about Where the Axe is Buried on Ray Nayler’s website.

A Grim Yet Entertaining Plot

Certainly, the world Nayler has created in his novel is not one I’ll easily forget. It paints a grim future. Cameras surveil the cities of the Federation, ensuring anybody who says anything out of line is confined to smaller and smaller geographical regions:

“Sometimes, walking down the street, [Lilia] imagined she could tell who the people on conditional release were. They were the ones minding their steps a little more. They were the ones checking their terminals a bit too often, watching the map of their perimeter to make sure they didn’t stray over the edge.

“You were always about to stray. You always walked right up to the edge of your circle. At the zoo, as a child, Lilia remembered watching the polar bears pace back and forth in front of the glass. The gouged barren streaks in the grass of their enclosures. The boundary line. And the other animals, the tigers, the monkeys, the lions — they did it too.

“They were marking the edge of where they could be. The edge of their terrain. I can go this far. Here, but no farther.”

But the power that technology gives to the oppressors is also available to the resistance:

One character escapes the urban prison by wearing a device which makes him transparent to surveillance cameras. Another scientist discovers how to download the consciousness of the Federation’s greatest freedom fighter and upload it into the mind of its fascist president. The same robotic giants used by the government to control the people are commandeered by the people to tear down parliament.

Where the Axe is Buried mixes the almost-upon-us wonders of AI, robotics and other tech fantasies with a complex, thriller-style plot and a generous sprinkling of libertarian philosophy which challenges the widespread Stockholm Syndrome most people suffer when it comes to government institutions:

“Palmer, who now had to share the fear she had been brought up with, had to know that government was not simply a thing to be annoyed at the inefficiencies of, an abstraction to accuse of incompetence, a frustrating source of inadequacy or neglect, but a thing to be feared. That it could reach out, even beyond its borders, and destroy you.”

I’m not sure I’d call Where the Axe is Buried a “fun” read. But it was nonetheless entertaining, and certainly rewarding. It’s an alarm bell warning about the prison that AI, robotics and smart devices might make for us, as well as the freedom they could wield. Who pulls the strings of technology, as the book purports, is a matter of politics more than anything else.

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John C. A. Manley is the author of All the Humans Are Sleeping praised by Just Right Media as “a compelling post-apocalyptic psychological drama where a man faces his ultimate challenge: follow the rest of humanity into a life of shallow fantasies and comfortable lies, or face death in a harsh and unforgiving world devoid of love and hope. And then there’s the robot… You won’t predict the ending, and you won’t be able to put it down.” Read more reviews, get a free sample or buy the book at https://AlltheHumansAreSleeping.com

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