Skip to main content

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.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more