Today, it seems like nearly everyone is caught up in either utopian dreams or dystopian nightmares about AI. It feels like it’s almost gotten to the point where you can’t pick up a science fiction story or watch SF on the large or small screens without coming across exaggerated scenarios projecting humanity’s highest hopes or worst fears about what may be coming in artificial intelligence.
Where the Axe is Buried, one of 14 works nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel, takes a more intelligent, balanced, nuanced and realistic view of such possibilities.
Where all too often such AI-themed novels uncritically embrace one extreme or the other, Ray Nayler’s post-apocalyptic utopian/dystopian tale probes both scenarios from an anti-authoritarian, very human and humane perspective. His novel is notable for finding both extremes lacking from the standpoints of community, common decency and personal liberty.
In a gripping but sobering narrative highlighting libertarian themes of resistance to tyranny and human endurance under oppression, Nayler ultimately rejects such wishful social engineering as an unattractive prescription for suffering and stagnation.
An acclaimed Hugo- and Locus-winning author whose realism about international politics is rooted in long experience as a US Foreign Service Officer, Nayler has been widely praised for his subtle depictions of how ordinary people are affected – not always for the better, to put it mildly – by major technological and political changes.
His latest novel, recently hailed on Locus magazine’s shortlist of the best novels of 2025, is an excellent example.
Blending political intrigue, suspense, espionage and cybernetic SF, Where the Axe is Buried probes the ups and downs of an against-the-odds revolution led by disparate dissidents while exposing the many forms of soft and hard tyranny that suffocate human freedom.
EXPOSING THE EVERYDAY COSTS OF OPPRESSIVE GOVERNMENT
Set in the near future in and around Europe and Russia, Where the Axe is Buried explores the fight and plight of people struggling under a wide range of oppressive governments.
Some countries are suffering under routinely fascist/socialist regimes, such as a Russia not that far beyond Putin’s oligarchic dictatorship, but many others in Europe have adopted a new AI-led system dubbed “rationalisation.”
With advanced AI intelligences (known as Prime Ministers) set up as heads of state with wide support to “deconflict” human needs, the rationalized technocracies seem like relative improvements to many – at least, at first. After all, the AI Prime Ministers operate without the partisan rhetoric and over-the-top melodrama of much current politics, since the remaining human politicians agree to respect their decisions.
Plus, Europe’s rationalized administrations do seem more efficient and effective in addressing a variety of long-standing issues, from maintaining infrastructure and balancing budgets humanely to reducing human trafficking and taking steps to reduce or mitigate climate change.
Yet, it becomes apparent that life for millions of people has not improved, but actually grown worse, under all the systems of coercion and control. As Nayler reveals in convincing granular detail, any authoritarian system is inhumane and deadening to the human spirit – regardless of whether it’s administered by people or AI entities.
A PEOPLE-LED MOVEMENT FOR FREEDOM
Among the main characters one comes to care about is a brilliant woman who returns home from studies abroad to help her ailing father, only to be detained in London by the authorities.
Among the dissident characters is Zoya Alekseyevna Velikanova, the exiled author of The Forever Argument, an anti-totalitarian manifesto that is smuggled throughout Europe like Russian samizdat to give hope to rebels.
But it’s a hope mixed with harsh reality that the book explicitly acknowledges: “There is no solution to disagreement…. no technology that can overcome it, no leader that can repress it.”
Even as the authoritarian systems persist, some dissidents prove inspiring.
“It’s different here: We know what our government can do,” one says.
“And what they will keep doing, if we continue to let them,” responds another.
Here Nayler is making an implicit call to arms, a plea for every one of us to take responsibility to resist evil and tyranny.
As if the long-standing habits of dictators and egotistical rulers wasn’t already threatening to override any remaining limitations on government as they change the rules to enhance their power and in some cases search for ways to indefinitely extend their rule, Nayler’s well-conceived SF dystopia centers one more: an advanced but restricted technology permitting rulers to transfer their consciousness sequentially to fresh bodies when their current body gets too old.
To his credit, Nayler offers no easy answers.
Even though the Federation, one of the worst regimes, falls by novel’s end, the politics and cultural subsoil remains that made authoritarianism not only possible but prevalent. Idealists, including libertarians, may wish for happy endings in both fiction and life, but the painful truth is that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Or, to put that classic libertarian wisdom in Nayler’s terms, resistance and revolution may come with high costs and risks, with no guarantee of success, but it’s a price that sincere advocates of a freer and better world must be willing to pay – and keep paying.
CLARITY AND CONSISTENCY ABOUT UNLIMITED STATISM
While some readers may take the novel to heart in short-term and partisan ways, Nayler’s critique of statism and unlimited government runs deeper than anything superficially solvable by a mere rotation of one elected administration for another.
The novel attains admirable clarity and consistency in its critique of all forms of authoritarianism, whether of the Left or Right and whether AI-led or human-led.
“She thought of Palmer. Palmer, who now had to share the fear she had been brought up with, had to know that a government was not simply a thing to be annoyed at the insufficiencies 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.”
To his credit, Nayler understands that the roots of authoritarianism run deep. From a libertarian perspective, the roots go to the core of the State, defined by the great sociologist Max Weber as the only institution based on a “legitimized monopoly on the use of force” within a geographical area.
Although Nayler may not go that far in his novel or in his own grasp of the nature of coercive government, his characters sense both the inherently regressive and coercive nature of the State and how broader human politics entrenches it:
“Our human systems are trapped in these same extinct patterns. The tsar is dead. Long live the tsar.”
THE PURGATIVE POWER OF TRAGEDY
Powerfully and poignantly but often disturbingly, the novel drives home the despair that all too many millions have experienced under statism and collectivism in all of its many forms and extremes of the Left and Right.
Like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, an early Prometheus Hall of Fame inductee, and other great dystopian novels, Where the Axe is Buried conjures a dark and disturbing vision. If that proves difficult for some readers to get through, imagine how much worse it is for the suffering characters – and the millions who in real life have suffered under tyranny, throughout history and around the world today.
To me, vicariously experiencing such a dystopia is part of the author’s intentions, and is equivalent to reading or watching any great tragedy. Whether envisioned by the ancient Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, Orwell or a first-rate contemporary writer like Nayler, such works ultimately aim to purge us of our relative comfort or blindness to such evils and inspire us to work for a better, freer world.
Perhaps Where the Axe is Buried approaches its mythic peaks when Nayler weaves in poetic interludes and apt stories. A few evoke ancient folk tales retold, offering cautionary and anti-authoritarian lessons:
“In Byzantium, they would blind the fallen emperors, strand them on an island, exile them to a monastery. They would do everything they could to stop short of regicide. But it was never enough. Their very existence nagged. The strangling cord is the only way the tyrant can live in peace, then or now. This state grew within Byzantium’s mold…”
A CAUTIOUS MEASURE OF HOPE
Yet, ultimately, Nayler offers a measure of hope via a reaffirmation of our common humanity.
Nayler shows no signs of being directly familiar with the wisdom or classic works of Friedrich Hayek, Adam Smith or Thomas Sowell about the resilience and initiative that people muster in free or freer societies and free or free-er markets. Yet, as a superb novelist with a profound appreciation of human nature, Nayler grasps the psychology, history and the everyday battles of human life – and thus eloquently dramatizes the small but manifold shoots of renewed life possible every day, even amidst adversity, via voluntarism, localism, community, and simple caring for one another.
As Cory Doctorow, a three-time Prometheus Best Novel winner (Little Brother, Homeland), observed in his rave review: “Where the Axe is Buried shows how the embers of hope smolder long after they should have been extinguished, and how they are always ready to be kindled into a roaring, system-consuming wildfire.”
Near the end, after the AI-implemented regimes of “rationalization” fall, one character expresses cautious optimism that there are “a thousand different ways of living together being tried out.”
That’s what actually happens in free or relatively free societies every day, beyond the scare headlines. And it’s happening right now, something to recognize and find solace in – even though freedom always remains messy amid human fallibility, disagreements and conflicts.
Even when a tyranny ends, the “good ways” may not always or immediately emerge. Yet as that character and Nayler himself affirm, “it could be.”
P.S. In a very personal and passionate afterword, Nayler writes about authoritarian trends in the world today – and expresses a poignant hope about his daughter:
“I want her to live in a better world than the present one – a world where authoritarian government is the rarest aberration, and the future is something her generation thinks of with excitement and optimism, not dread.”
Isn’t that the hope of every adult, every libertarian and every parent, for their children and for the generations that will follow them?
Note: For the full list of 14 current Best Novel nominees, read this recent Prometheus Blog news story.
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