She had believed that writing itself was an action. But she had stopped believing that: She had come to see her writing as nothing but empty words. A delaying tactic. Something to do to hide her own impotence in the face of unchanging, unconquerable, indifferent state power.
In Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe Is Buried (2025), Zoya Alekseyevna Velikanova is the author of The Forever Argument: airport fodder in The Union (a future state of the West, with all its affectations of benevolently liberal capitalism), but dangerous to possess in The Federation (a future state of the East, with strong Soviet structural influences). But Zoya herself, as noted in the above quote, has markedly changed in her outlook toward her work and its ability to impact the world. Then again, when living in a closely monitored state of exile, it’s hard to imagine that change will ever come.
And is she wrong to feel the way she does about her life’s work? What does writing actually do, in the face of political systems that are only differently managing—if not accelerating—the ruin of human life? Moreover, what is the work of reading, in such a bitter global context as our own, when the power of any book’s ideas to influence the world for the better feels murky at best?
Before we dive into the answers that Nayler’s book invites us to consider, through a story of tech intrigue and political resistance that spans stagnant paradigms around the globe, I will add one more, three-pronged, question into the fray. What kind of text is Where the Axe Is Buried? Is it meant to entertain? To move us toward resistance? Is it like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie: an object to be found and revered for a moment, then stored, with thousands more bearing the potential to transform the world, in an ever-growing warehouse of human striving?
One answer lies with a common preoccupation in Nayler’s fiction: artificial intelligence. For decades, the very idea of “technology” has been reduced in popular discourse to recent advances in material and medical sciences, automation, software, and aerospace projects. This hazy generalization has stunted our understanding of what artificial intelligence is—or, more to the point, how diversely present artificial intelligence has always been.
The problem might have started with Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology (1954). In this text, Heidegger explores an ancient analysis of material causality (i.e., what causes an object to be the way it is: its purpose, its form, its material, and its manner of construction). In place of that ancient analysis, he crafts an understanding of technology as something which serves to reveal the world’s truth to us—or, in the case of “modern” technology, as that which simultaneously hinders our ability to see the world’s truth.
Today, our most familiar application of the term “artificial intelligence” falls into this secondary domain, of technologies that become endpoints unto themselves and thus distance us from the core purpose of their construction. (For example, the smartphone that becomes a coveted object above and beyond the communicative purpose of its original invention.) We become so consumed by the possibility of artificial intelligence elevating, saving, or destroying us that we tend to forget the primary function of every pseudo-thinking entity we’ve created.
Including systems of government.
Including language.
Including writing.
Because, yes, a book is an inert and “made” thing—until read. A novel might be an unusual sort of algorithm, inasmuch as it interacts differently with each being that picks it up; but these narrative objects are still artificial entities, which we anthropomorphize and infuse with notions of self-directed pseudo-intelligence. Stories “come alive” and “linger” in our imagination. They take on an existence with ends we worry about, too: Will this book destroy the world—or save it?
One of Nayler’s many strengths as a writer is his ability to depict the similarity in systems-thinking across fields often treated as distinct, which is why the “technology” of narrative itself lies so comfortably alongside the “technology” of state apparatuses in Where the Axe Is Buried.
In The Mountain in the Sea (2022), Nayler held together a wide range of inter- and intra-species approaches to borders, language, intelligence, and personhood; global espionage and extraction economies; and the deeply intertwined state of human violence in its environmental ecosystem. Although the book was often touted for its machine character and its communicative “octopuses,” these elements could not have achieved the same effect in isolation. It is only in dialogue that any human activity gains meaning—and that capacity to hold ideas in tension is what makes Nayler’s work distinctive in our time.
Nayler manifests this same steadiness even in miniature. In one of his recent short stories, “A Gray Magic” in Asimov’s Sept/Oct 2024, a young woman is dying in a world where life is almost entirely reduced to shift work. She has no hope of a grand recovery, or even of a grand escape into some luxurious final chapter of her hard and too-short life. A chatbot given to her as hospice care encourages her to make the most of whatever time remains, and … that’s it. In a world in which, due to menacing economic “technologies,” humans are cogs and then die, the best thing that other, more approachable machines can do for us is help temper our sense of despair along the way.
In Where the Axe Is Buried, a similar depiction of human technology thus emerges. Nayler gives us “rationalization,” whereby Westernized countries defer to the hype of an AI supposedly capable of governing better than humans (but only recapitulating old systems in shinier packaging); he also shows us a single leader semi-immortalized through regenerative tech, allowing the same mind to govern through new body after body. He depicts a romantic bond formed between a lonely man and a being he doesn’t realize isn’t human, along with revolutionary texts and minds like Zoya’s; he shows us swarms of bots, counter-detection devices, and inventions that might allow humanity to be governed right down to their patterns of thought and “choice.”
Nayler’s writing holds in tension all of these use-cases of technology, and does so in a way that dispenses with Heidegger’s differentiation between “modern” technologies and those that preceded recent industrial eras. He achieves this by showing us that the capacity to live in a mechanical way lives in us. Rather than being mere victims of externalized mechanical threats to life and liberty, we are all engaged in the production and maintenance of ways of thinking and being that can easily dull us to the possibility of more dynamic relationships with ourselves and our environments.
Some of the strongest character moments in Where the Axe Is Buried thus arise less in its exceptional figures—the great mind of Zoya, which an action group decides can be used to further a plot to bring down one system of power, or the great mind of Lilia, who develops an incredible tool that she takes great care to protect from exploitative use—and more in the portraits of people who have lived without much interest in personal agency for most of their lives.
Palmer, for instance, is a man whose curiosity about the larger social systems that shape his life was never greatly piqued, until a personal loss—and immediate risk to his continued existence—stirred him into an atypical bout of action, in large part for the woman he loves. Another character, Nurlan, does his most revolutionary work in a “rationalized” country by similar accident: not out of any great personal conviction in a political cause, but after having been “catfished” by a most unusual deceiver. And for Nikolai, physician to the semi-immortal President of The Federation, cowardice is all he’s ever really enacted—but at least he knows who he is in that regard. It is this self-knowledge that spares him from worse punishment the one time he tries to do something approaching real bravery.
In Western fiction, there is often great fondness for imagining characters stronger than we are, braver than we are, and more resolute in notions of justice than we are—but Nayler’s writing entertains no such delusions. His empathetic wisdom about the characters in this latest novel doesn’t come out of the ether; you can find its lineage in many older stories by the author, in which the vast majority of decent people recognize that praise for heroism is often prompted by doing the bare minimum in awful systems—and in which the vast majority of human beings, full stop, struggle to achieve even that, most of the time. From his most self-aware characters to the many living as quieter cogs in the machine, the same argument applies: We’re all part of a social “technology” that keeps working on us—using us, distracting us, changing us—even as some try to work on it in turn.
There is no end to the problems that systems-thinking poses in worlds like Nayler’s, and our own. Whether we live in an artificial paradigm that veers closer to the structure of The Union or The Federation, and whether our greatest danger comes from words on a page, leaders in office, or elaborate lines of code set loose upon our economic ecosystems, we are always part of constructs—technologies—that will take on a life of their own if we let them. Much like one of the AIs in this book, then, Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe Is Buried offers us a challenge, which might be best summarized by the one raised in Zoya herself, in her The Forever Argument: “What I ask most urgently is that someone write the book that counters this one.”
If escaping “the system” isn’t feasible because we are the system, engaging with human technologies under Heidegger’s original use-case—that is, to better understand deeper truths of the world, and of ourselves—is in reach. Any “narrative tech” that helps us to see past artificial divides in contemporary arguments about the nature of oppressive systems may not change the nature of the machine as a whole. But, by calling attention to that machine’s existence at all, work like Nayler’s reminds us to keep looking for whatever stray cracks of individual agency may yet lie deep within it.