Blazing Reader,

My wife is currently in France visiting friends. Don't tell her, but in her absence I dug a hole in her garden. Having finished Ray Nayler's Where the Axe Is Buried, I thought — considering the title — it would be appropriate if I buried my paperback copy...

That was the plan. But there was no way I was going through with it. I love having shelves full of books I enjoyed — sort of like a souvenir to remind me of a country I visited.

Certainly, the world Nayler has created in his novel is not one I'll easily forget. It paints a grim future. Cameras surveil the cities of the Federation, ensuring anybody who says anything out of line is confined to smaller and smaller geographical regions:

"Sometimes, walking down the street, [Lilia] imagined she could tell who the people on conditional release were. They were the ones minding their steps a little more. They were the ones checking their terminals a bit too often, watching the map of their perimeter to make sure they didn't stray over the edge.

"You were always about to stray. You always walked right up to the edge of your circle. At the zoo, as a child, Lilia remembered watching the polar bears pace back and forth in front of the glass. The gouged barren streaks in the grass of their enclosures. The boundary line. And the other animals, the tigers, the monkeys, the lions — they did it too.

"They were marking the edge of where they could be. The edge of their terrain. I can go this far. Here, but no farther."

But the power that technology gives to the oppressors is also available to the resistance:

One character escapes the urban prison by wearing a device which makes him transparent to surveillance cameras. Another scientist discovers how to download the consciousness of the Federation's greatest freedom fighter and upload it into the mind of its fascist president. The same robotic giants used by the government to control the people are commandeered by the people to tear down parliament.

Where the Axe is Buried mixes the almost-upon-us wonders of AI, robotics and other tech fantasies with a complex, thriller-style plot and a generous sprinkling of libertarian philosophy which challenges the widespread Stockholm Syndrome most people suffer when it comes to government institutions:

"Palmer, who now had to share the fear she had been brought up with, had to know that government was not simply a thing to be annoyed at the inefficiencies 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."

I'm not sure I'd call Where the Axe is Buried a "fun" read. But it was nonetheless entertaining, and certainly rewarding. It's an alarm bell warning about the prison that AI, robotics and smart devices might make for us, as well as the freedom they could wield. Who pulls the strings of technology, as the book purports, is a matter of politics more than anything else.

You can find out more about Where the Axe is Buried (or purchase a copy) at Ray Nayler's website.

Now, I'd better go and fill in that hole in the garden, before Ina gets home (and put Nayler's novel on the bookshelf where it belongs)...

For more antics and photos from our Dutch garden, check out: Stephen King: "stories are found things, like fossils in the ground"

John C.A. Manley

P.S. You can read part one (and then two) of my review of Ray Nayler's near-future science fiction here: Robot chops wood with the ease of a girl jumping rope

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.