Blazing Reader,

Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler begins with Zoya, a political prisoner exiled to a small cottage in the Russian wilderness, with a robot as her sole companion — an opener that reminded me of my own novel, All the Humans Are Sleeping, where a dissident farmer is exiled to a small greenhouse in the mountains of Northern Norway with a purple robot named Domestico.

From the first chapter of Ray Nayler's cybernetic thriller:

"Now Zoya sat in her canvas chair and watched her robot assistant chop wood. There was nothing mechanical about its actions. The way it adjusted its stance and grip between blows, the way it balanced each new round on the block. The word that came to mind was 'intelligence.' The intelligence of the body. The effortless, accurate intelligence of a child jumping rope. It did not have will, did it? And yet, although each round of wood was different, the blow it struck was perfect every time. What the robot had, its perfect calculation, seemed better than human will. Or, at least, more efficient."

Both our Prometheus-nominated novels also share themes of resisting authoritarianism and global oppression. Where the Axe is Buried, however, contains far more political intrigue than All the Humans are Sleeping.

In Nayler's near-future dystopia, Europe is run by AI prime ministers who are blindly trusted by the people to make "rational" decisions that eventually cause the collapse of civilization. The only exception to the AI politicians is the president of "the Federation" (present-day Russia), who preserves his power by transferring his consciousness from body to body — until, well, something else gets added to his most recent copy-and-paste.

The Washington Post hails the book as deserving "to be read and discussed for its futuristic philosophical exploration of our era's problems." I don't often listen to The Washington Post, but this week I will. On Wednesday, I'll share what I didn't like about the book, and on Friday, what I loved about it.

Until then, if that opening scene of a robot cutting wood with the somatic intelligence of a girl jumping rope hooked you as much as it did me, you can find out more about Where the Axe is Buried on Ray Nayler's website.

John C.A. Manley

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.