Ray Nayler’s haunting novel, Where the Axe Is Buried, draws us into a dystopian world governed in most countries by AIs, and in one Federation, by a single human mind successively incorporated into different bodies to achieve a kind of immortality. While some of the AI governed countries see themselves as free and the Federation as a rigidly controlled dictatorship, the reality is that all people are confined and imprisoned, whether literally by force, or by the limitations imposed by their own minds. It is a chilling portrait that I think should take its place beside such classics as We and 1984 for its ability to show us exactly where we could be headed.
Where the Axe Is Buried reveals its world from multiple perspectives. There is Zoya, author of The Forever Argument, quoted throughout the novel, that details the workings of power and its tendency toward absolute control. We find Nicolai, physician to the President of the Federation, who has overseen the transfer of his mind into new bodies. The President is troubled by the decay of his present body and awaiting the vulnerable moment when he will be re-embodied and continue in power after a phony election. The brilliant scientist Lilia has created a powerful new technology that could enable the manipulation of reality. Though she developed the technology in London, she decides to revisit her home in the Federation to say goodbye to her father and realizes too late that she’ll never be able to leave.
Her lover Palmer lives in “free” London, but his warehouse job controls his every movement by computerized decisions. Lilia has left strange “diorama” boxes with him that may contain the secret of her work, and he decides to try to follow her. He is pursued by mysterious agents who stop at nothing to steal those boxes and take control of her discoveries. We meet the parliamentarian Nurlan in a nameless republic as he is trapped inside a government building as a huge mob begins to storm it. They are enraged by the apparently insane behavior of their governing AI that keeps doubling energy prices every few minutes. Reports come in that other AIs are also collapsing around the world. Most countries have adopted them to govern through a process of rationalization. This is meant to meet human needs while removing extremes of wealth and poverty and correcting environmental destruction. The AIs have been able to do this by perceiving solutions that human minds can’t grasp or implement because of competing demands for power. But something is going terribly wrong.
Power is a great theme of Where the Axe Is Buried. It is power divorced from ideology of any sort that has become an end in itself. Regimes guided in this way have no conscience, no sense of guilt for the brutalities they commit. The character Krotov seems to embody the exercise of such power as a force behind the scenes, perhaps the most powerful in the Federation overseeing its apparatus of total surveillance and ensuring the continuity of the Presidency through fake elections. Yet he has no illusions about the structure he manages and its pure devotion to control.
We see how the power of the Federation works when we first meet Lilia, and she abruptly feels the tightening noose of the government’s reach. She has just returned from a shopping trip only to find that the permissible circumference of her movements has been tightened. For each person is only allowed to live within a carefully prescribed boundary determined by their social credit score. Hers was abruptly reduced so that she cannot even go to a food store and will have to rely on her ailing father to painfully make his wake out of the apartment to shop. Yet how long would it be before his circumference would also be tightened? Yet as Lilia considers her new circumstance, she also finds a message and a special device hidden in a sack of flour. Will this provide a possible escape route or will it prove to be a trap? The device seems to offer a kind of invisibility from the ever present eyes of “facerec” and “choicerec” that can detect the slightest sign of behavior that is considered deviant. This is the beginning of a long trek to find some form of freedom, and all of the characters in their separate ways soon find themselves embarked on journeys seeking a degree of liberation.
Nayler seamlessly weaves the stories of these characters as their societies and regimes approach collapse, some with a promise of better things to come, some in danger of falling into chaos. While Where the Axe Is Buried does not have quite the visceral impact of Orwell’s 1984, it captures so well the internalization of authoritarian control that leads people to censor themselves in order to evade physical repression. Once again, Naylor has produced an unforgettable novel that mirrors the realities of the present day and pushes them into an easily foreseeable and terrifying future.
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