Where the Axe Is Buried
Aug. 30th, 2025 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraWhere the Axe Is Buried, Ray Nayler, 2025 science fiction novel. Some interesting stuff going on here, but it didn't quite come together in the end for me; I went back and did some rereading which helped, but I continue to have various issues with this book which I am of course going to talk about at length as I do, behind the cut.
I kind of want to describe it as a thriller without the thrills; the central plot about hacking the President's brain could totally have had caper or heist energy in a different book, but here we only get to see it in fragments and they're all either too far away or too close for that. Still an interesting plot, but not a dramatically tense one. And there are a number of sequences that involve someone following terse messages or instructions ("they are coming to kill you, leave now and get in the white car" kind of business) but the effect of them is to show how impossible it is for the people receiving such instructions to know the motives of the people "helping" them or how/why they are being used. And also to contrast the top-down, need-to-know, cog-in-a-machine cell-in-a-network experiences of people in both warehouse labor and espionage/security work with the local, concrete, face-to-face, individually decided work post-collapse.
The first time I read it I wasn't sure in the end how many different factions there had been, or who had ultimately instigated the PM plot; on the second read, I think both plots, both halves of the collapse, were Krotov's. There is something a little unsatisfying to me about that, that all the work of all the resistance and revolutionaries was futile and change only came about because of the choices of one centrally-placed powerful figure who decided to betray the system he was part of, but, ugh, maybe that's realistic. But it's also a pretty dark message to send in a book where Nayler then talks in the acknowledgements about real people fighting oppression - like, okay, Nayler, you're in awe of their courage, but do you also think they're hopeless? Or is it just the particular imaginary systems of this novel you could only imagine failing at this one weak point? Or did you just want it that way for story reasons?
I'm willing to give him that one for story reasons, btw. A couple other things, not so much. While it feels unfair to blame Nayler for not anticipating US fascism while writing this in 2023 or 2024 or whenever he would have been working on it, there's a bunch of lines about the "free West" that landed poorly in 2025. Now, granted, the West here is London not the US - North America is kept off the page except for a mention of isolationism - but lines like "as if what she was really telling him about was the West. The freedom she'd had there. How it felt to walk down a street and know the cameras trained on you were there only for your safety, or to gather information about you in order to sell you a product. ... Nothing more terrifying than that. A free world." were weird to read in a place that also claims to the the West at a time when people are getting snatched off the street constantly. Or, like, the UK's growing gender-surveillance state... I bet lots of people there are not feeling like the cameras are only there for their safety. The idea that people from the West are only going to have to "share the fear she had been brought up with, had to know that a government was not simply a thing to be annoyed at the insufficiences 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." if they come to the attention of the foreign totalitarian state... who in 2025 can claim to not have an acute sense of the government as a thing that can reach out and destroy you for no reason. :(
And then, worse, Nayler wants to imagine the collapse as a big reset button that's going to free everyone from existing oppressions, let people reimagine social structures and create new ones that have the opportunity to be better, but he's doing this by completely handwaving the realistic costs of the collapse. When he says that global shipping is gone, that no transport is moving, roads are clogged with dead cars, automated fishing fleets have sunk, power systems have failed, ports have failed, and there are no more commercial flights, that sounds to me like widespread mass starvation in a matter of weeks. Now, maybe I'm the one of us who is wrong about the fragility of the food economy - I'm sure he knows a lot of stuff I don't, has worked for the Foreign Service, maybe he had a whole picture in his mind for how food would still be available. But I think he wanted to get to do a global tech apocalypse scenario and end on an optimistic vision of reinvention without the unfortunate mass death part, and it just didn't work for me - the book is too gritty/realistic in tone to pull off that kind of "let's imagine this for feelgood reasons" move.
(Setting aside that the people who are supposed to kill Lilia ironically decide not to when they feel the freedom to make local, face-to-face choices instead of following top-down orders, which is nice for her/the reader in the moment but maybe means the world gets mind-control that much sooner, a classic horror-movie "the evil survived after all" ending.)
Anyways. Interesting book and I'll be curious to see whether it makes the Hugo ballot with his related novella having just won.
I kind of want to describe it as a thriller without the thrills; the central plot about hacking the President's brain could totally have had caper or heist energy in a different book, but here we only get to see it in fragments and they're all either too far away or too close for that. Still an interesting plot, but not a dramatically tense one. And there are a number of sequences that involve someone following terse messages or instructions ("they are coming to kill you, leave now and get in the white car" kind of business) but the effect of them is to show how impossible it is for the people receiving such instructions to know the motives of the people "helping" them or how/why they are being used. And also to contrast the top-down, need-to-know, cog-in-a-machine cell-in-a-network experiences of people in both warehouse labor and espionage/security work with the local, concrete, face-to-face, individually decided work post-collapse.
The first time I read it I wasn't sure in the end how many different factions there had been, or who had ultimately instigated the PM plot; on the second read, I think both plots, both halves of the collapse, were Krotov's. There is something a little unsatisfying to me about that, that all the work of all the resistance and revolutionaries was futile and change only came about because of the choices of one centrally-placed powerful figure who decided to betray the system he was part of, but, ugh, maybe that's realistic. But it's also a pretty dark message to send in a book where Nayler then talks in the acknowledgements about real people fighting oppression - like, okay, Nayler, you're in awe of their courage, but do you also think they're hopeless? Or is it just the particular imaginary systems of this novel you could only imagine failing at this one weak point? Or did you just want it that way for story reasons?
I'm willing to give him that one for story reasons, btw. A couple other things, not so much. While it feels unfair to blame Nayler for not anticipating US fascism while writing this in 2023 or 2024 or whenever he would have been working on it, there's a bunch of lines about the "free West" that landed poorly in 2025. Now, granted, the West here is London not the US - North America is kept off the page except for a mention of isolationism - but lines like "as if what she was really telling him about was the West. The freedom she'd had there. How it felt to walk down a street and know the cameras trained on you were there only for your safety, or to gather information about you in order to sell you a product. ... Nothing more terrifying than that. A free world." were weird to read in a place that also claims to the the West at a time when people are getting snatched off the street constantly. Or, like, the UK's growing gender-surveillance state... I bet lots of people there are not feeling like the cameras are only there for their safety. The idea that people from the West are only going to have to "share the fear she had been brought up with, had to know that a government was not simply a thing to be annoyed at the insufficiences 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." if they come to the attention of the foreign totalitarian state... who in 2025 can claim to not have an acute sense of the government as a thing that can reach out and destroy you for no reason. :(
And then, worse, Nayler wants to imagine the collapse as a big reset button that's going to free everyone from existing oppressions, let people reimagine social structures and create new ones that have the opportunity to be better, but he's doing this by completely handwaving the realistic costs of the collapse. When he says that global shipping is gone, that no transport is moving, roads are clogged with dead cars, automated fishing fleets have sunk, power systems have failed, ports have failed, and there are no more commercial flights, that sounds to me like widespread mass starvation in a matter of weeks. Now, maybe I'm the one of us who is wrong about the fragility of the food economy - I'm sure he knows a lot of stuff I don't, has worked for the Foreign Service, maybe he had a whole picture in his mind for how food would still be available. But I think he wanted to get to do a global tech apocalypse scenario and end on an optimistic vision of reinvention without the unfortunate mass death part, and it just didn't work for me - the book is too gritty/realistic in tone to pull off that kind of "let's imagine this for feelgood reasons" move.
(Setting aside that the people who are supposed to kill Lilia ironically decide not to when they feel the freedom to make local, face-to-face choices instead of following top-down orders, which is nice for her/the reader in the moment but maybe means the world gets mind-control that much sooner, a classic horror-movie "the evil survived after all" ending.)
Anyways. Interesting book and I'll be curious to see whether it makes the Hugo ballot with his related novella having just won.
