Ever since The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler has been a writer to watch for me. Like some monster out of the cosmos, he has several eyes looking in several directions at once. His stories often explore the relationships between consciousness, intelligence, governance, and power that call to me like a rock opera composed by the deadly sirens. His stories often feature concepts I read about in non-fiction, giving them a grounded base from which to speculate, giving his science fiction a thoughtfulness that I look for. Where the Axe is Buried features the classic Nayler staples, but feels less cohesive when viewing the mosaic as a whole.
A republic bordering the Union and the Federation has just installed its AI prime minister. The majority of Europe’s core has already adopted theirs, setting a policy of economic rationality. But in the republic, the AI seems to have gone mad, rapidly increasing the price of energy and stirring up a riot outside the capital. In the Federation, the president, during his most recent consciousness transfer, has undergone radical mind-altering to speed up his brain processing by three times. His police state is dedicated to rooting out dissidents as the hunt for a secret technology begins. This technology has implications for everyone, Federation and Union alike. Whoever holds it could dominate the realm of consciousness and intelligence in the decades to come.
Where The Axe Is Buried, like many books I’ve read recently, has conjured a set of mixed feelings within me. Nayler’s exploration of the various ways generative AI could be used within society is compelling in its ideas and messy in its execution. There are many different characters within (I think) three or four different nations/states/political entities. Each chapter is devoted to a specific point of view, except for the chapters where two POVs are interlinked. I didn’t pick up on any structural reasoning for the linked chapters beyond pacing and removal of incredibly short chapters that feel like a small update. Each chapter already rushed by, throwing the reader back and forth across the geography of Eurasia. Characters were often people of import, either closely related to power, or in fulcrums where their will could tip the scales in one direction or another.
One of the problems I had with this pacing and structure is that each character was engaged in different projects that were semi-related but wholly their own thing. So I often was flipping back and forth between chapters, trying to remember who was working on what and why during the first hundred or so pages of the book. I have applauded this style in the past, the disconnected and semi-related plot threads that slowly coalesce into a larger whole, but it didn’t quite work for me here. There just didn’t feel like there was enough room for the ideas to breathe and develop in the way that they did in The Mountain and the Sea. Granted, Nayler’s debut felt more like a meditation on the mind. Where the Axe is Buried feels like a thriller tinged with meditations on statehood and the minds that perceive it. It isn’t an inherent flaw; it just felt messier and without direction.
There are some cool bits, especially as Nayler tries to incorporate more studies about the mind in his work. Where does it begin, and where does it end? What tricks do the biological and chemical processes that we barely understand play on our consciousness and beliefs about the world? How can those processes be exploited by those in power to remain in power? These are wrapped in neat little stories that populate the various chapters of Where the Axe is Buried. There were two instances that stood out to me the most as interesting conundrums – one that was not explored as deeply as it could have been, and the other a sort of reevaluation of Artificial Intelligence through generative AI and large language models (LLMs). The first is the president of the Russian Federation, whose brain processing was increased to handle the growing load of a dictatorial regime. There is only one time where this is explored, and I wish there had been more to it, especially with the revelation that everyone else around him seems slower, and it makes him annoyed because he still has to sit there and gather information at a much slower rate than previously. It’s a flawed enhancement that could have dug into the ennui, mundanity, and brutality of dictatorial control. Instead, it’s a single remark, and then we are never inside the head of the president in that state again.
However, I will say that the LLM exploration was well thought out in terms of governance and how it might be employed to support the state. It wasn’t the most thorough and multi-faceted approach. However, the singular way in which it was employed I found thought-provoking and would want to dig into it more from a psychological perspective. There are a few explanations within the story itself attached to real-world research about the way our brains trick themselves into specific narratives. Having just read about the research he employed in another book exploring the rise of consciousness and weirdness of our wet brains, it fit in nicely. I think there is definitely room to explore this more, and personally, I wish there was a little more exploration of this idea, especially as it’s foiled against the biological upgrades to the human brain/body employed by the Federation.
Ultimately, I think I have high expectations based on The Mountain and the Sea and how that story was a kaleidoscope. Where The Axe is Buried feels like a few good short stories that could exist in the same world but don’t quite form a cohesive narrative. I think part of this stemmed from the fact that I didn’t really care about many of the characters. They didn’t feel like they had the oomph I needed to really sell them. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue. I’m a firm believer in the “characters serve the story,” mentality, but here I just ran into a mental block where I needed more dimensions to them. Their individual lives were shitty in the way that dystopias often present them, but for me, they lacked tragedy. And so we passed each other like ships in the night.
In the end, Where The Axe Is Buried is a curious book that I think would have been more poignant as a set of short stories that spent time really digging into the various pieces. There are some really interesting ideas within it that need time to fester and grow. I don’t necessarily believe that the author should always do the work of connecting their themes across different POVs, but I felt a little more nudging to let the mycelium work would have benefited the existing story. I’m happy to continue reading Nayler so that the conversations he presents are kept alive and well.
Rating: Where the Axe Is Buried – A little sharpening would have made it stick.
-Alex
