Where the Axe is Buried (SF) - Ray Nayler ***

This book was described to me as a 'gripping technological thriller'. It's not that at all - it's a book driven by ideas and politics which for structural reasons entirely fails to thrill, but is interesting nonetheless.

Ray Nayler portrays a grim future - the West has replaced democracy with AI benevolent dictators as permanent 'Prime Ministers', while 'the Federation', essentially Russia, has an eternal non-benevolent dictator as its President, able to move from body to body. While both of these central conceits are extremely unlikely, they do provide useful vehicles for thinking about the nature of society and politics - in this sense it's an impressive book.

The two key characters are Zoya, the dying author of a transformative political text that seems to be able to capture people's hearts and minds and is a death sentence to own in her homeland of the Federation, and Lilia, another Russian who has escaped to London, where she constructs some remarkable technology before returning to be captured on a visit to her father. As the novel progresses they both have a major part to play in an attempt to overthrow the President, while the West has its own problems with the AI Prime Ministers.

There are two things that get in the way of the book working as anything approximating to a thriller. Firstly it starts with what's now become a clichéd approach of chapter after chapter introducing new characters in different locations, seemingly unconnected but eventually linked. This makes it difficult to identify with any of the characters - even difficult to remember who is who. The other problem is that the book is driven by page after page of inner monologues with brief spurts of dialogue or action. I'm sure it's very arty, but it makes for uninspiring reading.

There are a couple of smaller issues too. On the science front, Lilia's amazing one-woman invention (something that really would take a huge academic team) involves quantum entanglement in a way that entanglement simply could not work - it feels like the entanglement is thrown in rather as quacks use 'quantum' in claims for their pseudoscientific medical treatments. Then there's the usual problem of trying to give us quotes from a transformative book that would change the world - and ending up with a set of wishy-washy platitudes. Finally, Nayler falls for the usual SF habit of applying new names to something that is clearly a development of an existing piece of technology - his 'terminals' are phones, and that's what they would be called.

I did read the book all the way to the end as I was engaged enough to want to find out how it turned out - but it wasn't a thrilling experience. If you haven't already read it, I preferred Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea, though that too had some issues as a work of fiction.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here