Ray Nayler’s “Where the Axe Is Buried”
Escape from the Larry Ellison future.
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me in SAN DIEGO next MONDAY (Mar 24) at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour stops here.
Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe Is Buried is an intense, claustrophobic novel of a world run by “rational” AIs that purport to solve all of our squishy political problems with empirical, neutral mathematics:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374615369/wheretheaxeisburied/
In Naylor’s world, we there are two blocs. “The west,” where the heads of state have been replaced with chatbots called “PMs.” These PMs propose policy to tame, rubberstamp legislatures, creating jobs programs, setting monetary and environmental policies, and ruling on other tricky areas where it’s nearly impossible to make everyone happy. These countries are said to be “rationalized,” and they are peaceful and moderately prosperous, and have finally tackled the seemingly intractable problems of decarbonization, extreme poverty, and political instability.
In “the Republic” — a thinly veiled version of Russia — the state is ruled by an immortal tyrant who periodically has his consciousness decanted into a blank body after his own body falls apart. The state maintains the fiction that each president is a new person, manufacturing families, friends, teachers and political comrades who can attest to the new president’s long history in the country. People in the Republic pretend to believe this story, but in practice, everyone knows that it’s the same mind running the country, albeit sometimes with ill-advised modifications, such as an overclocking module that runs the president’s mind at triple human speeds.
The Republic is a totalitarian nightmare of ubiquitous surveillance and social control, in which every movement and word is monitored, and where social credit scores are adjusted continuously to reflect the political compliance of each citizen. Low social credit scores mean fewer rations, a proscribed circle of places you can go, reduced access to medical care, and social exclusion. The Republic has crushed every popular uprising, acting on the key realization that the only way to cling to power is to refuse to yield it, even (especially) if that means murdering every single person who takes part in a street demonstration against the government.
By contrast, the western states with their chatbot PMs are more open — at least superficially. However, the “rationalized” systems use less obvious — but no less inescapable — soft forms of control that limit the social mobility, career chances, and moment-to-moment and day-to-day lives of the people who live there. As one character who ventures from the Republic to London notes, it is a strange relief to be continuously monitored by cameras there to keep you safe and figure out how to manipulate you into buying things, rather than being continuously monitored by cameras seeking a way to punish you.
The tale opens on the eve of the collapse of these two systems, as the current president of the Republic’s body starts to reject the neural connectome that was implanted into its vat-grown brain, even as the world’s PMs start to sabotage their states, triggering massive civil unrest that brings the west to its knees, one country after another.
This is the backdrop for a birchpunk* tale of AI skulduggery, lethal robot insects, radical literature, swamp-traversing mechas, and political intrigue that flits around a giant cast of characters, creating a dizzying, in-the-round tour of Nayler’s paranoid world.
* Russian-inflected cyberpunk with Baba Yaga motifs and nihilistic Russian novel vibes
And what a paranoid world it is! Nayler’s world shows two different versions of Oracle boss (and would-be Tiktok owner) Larry Ellison, who keeps pumping his vision of an AI-driven surveillance state where everyone is continuously observed, recorded and judged by AIs so we are all on our “best behavior”:
https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveillance-state-police-ai/
This batshit idea from one of tech’s worst billionaires is a perfect foil for a work of first-rate science fiction like Where the Axe Is Buried, which provides an emotional flythrough of how such a world would obliterate the authentic self, authentic relationships, and human happiness.
Where the Axe Is Buried conjures up that world beautifully, really capturing the deadly hopelessness of a life where the order is fixed for all eternity, thanks to the flawless execution of perfect, machine-generated power plays. But Axe shows how the embers of hope smolder long after they should have been extinguished, and how they are always ready to be kindled into a roaring, system-consuming wildfire.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting
