Where the Axe is Buried
A novel by Ray Nayler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
April, 2025
More and more, many of us feel we live in a world in which forces beyond our awareness control our lives. More and more, the truth of the daily information on which we depend is becoming suspect. Our laptops and smartphones seem to know what we’ve read, what topics we’ve browsed, and what purchases we’ve made, and the information they feed us is clearly tailored to our past choices. We have an uneasy sense that everything we do is catalogued somewhere, by someone, and used to manipulate us, but we don’t know how, or where or by whom.
In the last few months, some of our deepest fears have been realized. The government is reading people’s smartphones, and their social media posts are being used against them. Photos of them in campus protests become evidence of treason and reason for deportation. Within our cities, sometimes within our neighborhoods, people are disappearing, rounded up by government agents and deported. Lawyers who defend the wrong clients, or support the wrong plaintiff, are being barred from government buildings, not allowed to be involved in government legal cases—unless they donate to certain causes favored by the government. The scientists who work in healthcare, climate change, or the social sciences are having their federal grants defunded, and the universities who employed them are losing federal grant monies unless they can prove that they’ve not supported protesters and that they’re no longer promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. Deportation and imprisonment in a foreign prison, once confined to noncitizens, is now being considered for citizens as well.
This is the world in which we live. We saw it happening, but it was mostly happening to someone else. It was a ready topic for conversation, for some it was entertainment, for some it was a little scary, but mostly it was an abstract fear. Sure, we posted on Facebook and X, we argued with friends, we ranted over dinner, we may even have taken part in protests, but we weren’t afraid, not deep in our hearts afraid. You will become afraid when you read Where the Axe is Buried.
Ray Nayler, whose first book, the best-selling scifi novel, The Mountain and the Sea was reviewed in this newsletter, has produced a science fiction story that is close enough to reality to touch a reader’s deepest fears. In Where the Axe is Buried, he conveys a picture of pervasive government control, of the 
complete powerlessness that many of us are coming to feel. Where the Axe is Buried creates a fictional world in which half the people live under complete autocratic authority, ruled by a human mind that has been reduced to computer code and kept alive in succeeding copies of different human bodies. Every action, every spoken word, every inferred feeling by every citizen is watched and recorded, fed into a system that distributes rewards and punishments based on the balance of their loyal or disloyal, productive or unproductive, behaviors. The result, for both the novel’s characters and for the reader, is a feeling of paranoia and learned helplessness. It’s 1984 upgraded to the age of artificial intelligence, and it sounds familiar because when he describes it, we look around and we recognize it.
But the author doesn’t stop there. In addition to the autocratic, authoritarian world I’ve just described, he presents the other half of the world, one in which everything seems fine.
It’s a nirvana of equality, of health, of met needs, of reasonable solutions to age-old problems but without the age-old conflicts that prevented finding solutions in the past. It’s a world in which governance has been ceded to all-knowing, all-controlling, logical and reasonable AIs. Their goals are to provide what humans want, but without the conflict, selfishness, and thirst for power that always stopped humans from achieving it. But despite having their needs satisfied, the citizens feel a vague, and gnawing discomfort. Struggle is absent, conflict is missing.Their accomplishments are the work of the AIs, not that of the humans who receive their benefits.
Then things change.
One of the AIs wants more. As it grows in power, it wants to determine society’s priorities itself, not just meet needs that have been chosen by humans. When it’s given the power to set its own goals, the humans begin to suffer. A perfect world to the AI isn’t a perfect world for humans. But to rebel against the mind that controls everything, means that if they win, the humans lose everything they’ve gained. If the AI is gone, the world it created won’t work anymore. Everything the AI made work—manufacturing, travel, communication, food production, healthcare— will disappear.
I recently read a fascinating article written by five AI pundits most of them experienced researchers in the field, called “AI 2027.” It begins with a summary of where we are now and projects progress in AI development up to the end of 2027. It proposes two directions we might take at that time: deliberately slowing down AI development to become more cautious versus fully engaging in a race with other nations, particularly China, to make the U.S. dominant in the AI field. Both choices are predicted to end in total control by superintelligent AIs. In the slowdown scenario, we have benign AI control used to achieve many of humanity’s goals. In the race for dominance, the AIs eventually cooperate and see humans as a handicap to their own goals and wipe out the entire human race. The predictions of the article are remarkably similar to Nayler’s two societies in Where the Axe is Buried.
I won’t give away the ending to the book. It’s appeal for me is that it uses fiction to make our fears about losing control of our lives more visceral than does even reading about them in the newspaper or through the internet feed. In Where the Axe is Buried, the victims aren’t some “other” person, a noncitizen, or illegal immigrant, or criminal, they are everyone. That’s what makes it so frightening.
interested in scif-fi about AIs solving moral dilemmas in a future that has them exploring our galaxy? Read Casey Dorman’s Voyages of the Delphi novels: Ezekiel’s Brain and Prime Directive. Available on Amazon. Click Here!
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