Synopsis
All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.
In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.
As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.
Review
Ray Naylor doesn’t write unimportant books. With The Mountain In The Sea, he had something to say that could change the way we think about life. The same with Tusks of Extinction. So it shouldn’t have surprised me that every single sentence in Where The Axe Is Buried felt like it was packed with urgency and meaning.
I know it’s the job of a good review to give you a flavour of the book and to highlight what it does well and any areas that it doesn’t work quite as well. But I honestly don’t know how to be objective over a book as timely and absorbing as this one.
I didn’t put it down. I picked it up and read to the end, and knew that it would stay with me forever. And part of why I knew that is not just because of the plot twists and layers upon layers so masterfully interwoven together, but the message that it left me with. The questions it raised. It’s not preachy. It’s not following an agenda. It’s just a powerful statement about the amount of time we’ve got left to make changes in the world, and what’s required of us to do so.
When I got to the end of Where The Axe Is Buried, I felt like I’d just read something like 1984 or Brave New World right at the moment those stories were released. It’s amazing, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is going to be one of those books we talk about in years to come, and we say, “Isn’t this getting more and more relevant?” It’s a book we’ll keep talking about and listing alongside the greats because the things it says actually matter.
The speculative elements of the future are so brilliantly conceived, I felt like I was living in this world even though the technology is impossible right now. There’s a believability about all of it, and it’s very easy to imagine. The plot twists were expertly timed and delivered in just the right way. The different strands come together to form a satisfying whole. And on a sentence level, there’s usually a number of points in any given chapter where you could stop and meditate on a single line and spend the entire day just trying to absorb the fullness of it.
If you feel like you want to read something important, something that says more than just, “Here’s a good escape for a while,” something that’ll entertain AND edify you, something that’ll make you think, feel, and question, then you absolutely have to pick up this book. This is the kind of scifi that we need right now. The kind that asks the right questions and spotlights the right issues. The type of scifi that you feel could actually make a difference.
Where The Axe Is Buried is a future classic. It’s another essential book from an author who is building a reputation for saying the hard things in inventive, new, stylish, challenging, and remarkable ways.
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