One of my favorite science fiction novels from the past few years was Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea. Here’s what I said about it a couple of years ago:

It’s kind of a first contact story on multiple levels, a near-future thriller that imagines not only some possible (but perhaps not positive) advances in AI, but what it might be like if octopuses developed culture and language. It’s the first novel I’ve ever seen that cited Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”

When I saw that Nayler had a new novel out this spring, Where the Axe is Buried, it was an instant pre-order from me, even before I read the blurb. And I ended up saving it for May, so that I could really dig in once the semester ended.

The Axe

The title of Nayler’s novel comes from one of the central character’s (Krotov) unfamiliarity with the North American colloquialism “bury the hatchet,” a phrase that comes to us from the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s a ritual that symbolizes peace, the idea being that both sides dispose of their weapons so that they can no longer attack the other. Krotov is recounting his high school years in the “North American Union,” where, after weeks of a disagreement with a friend, he is told that it’s time to bury the hatchet, which confuses him. He learns that a hatchet is a small axe and that “burying” it meant to end an argument.

“‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘ No one forgets where the axe is buried. It will always be there to dig up again.’ I laughed, but he was not laughing. We rarely spoke afterward.”

It’s a weird moment, because it happens at the end of the book, and the anecdote itself isn’t fully provided, because it’s interrupted. But there are a few subtle moments throughout the book that give this moment some resonance. We’re introduced to a character (Zoya) at the outset of the book who provides an undercurrent for the story throughout (more on her below). The very first scene describes her chopping wood with an axe. Zoya is living in exile, in a forest, and there’s a materiality to this activity that she appreciates. She’s interrupted by her “robot assistant,” who takes over for her.

Maybe her will had failed her.

That was what she feared most. Chopping wood wasn’t about strength or accuracy. You willed the axe through the pith of the wood. The physical action was a muscular extension of that, nothing more.

It’s a small moment, Zoya’s own efforts being supplanted by a robot, and one that doesn’t pay off until the very end of the book.

Autocratic Intelligence

The blurb for Axe describes the book’s setting as “a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage,” which is accurate enough, as such things go. Early on in the book, a few different political systems make themselves apparent. Zoya is a citizen (in exile) from the Federation, which feels like a mix of Putin’s Russia with a heavy dose of Chinese surveillance and social credit1. Another main character, Lilia has been working the West, but returns to the Federation to visit her ailing father one last time. She begins to run afoul of that system and its “conditional release,” where each person’s “circumference” is tied directly to their score, and where every remark or facial expression can be captured and penalized.

From here, you couldn’t see the convenience annexes gridded through the streets. You couldn’t see the invisible loops limiting the movements of those on “conditional release.” Those circles were the city’s true geography. Overlapping orbits of limitation.

[…]

There weren’t any stores within her reduced radius. If they needed flour, Vitaly would now have to limp out to get it. If his social credit score was still high enough. They could not rely on the charity of neighbors: few would risk their own social credit to help a neighbor, not knowing how the authorities would view their assistance.

The Federation is an autocracy, and its President, we learn, has a sort of immortality—his neural pattern is copied from one host to another every generation or so.

We learn about the rest of the world through a couple of other characters, including Palmer, Lilia’s boyfriend. Unlike the Federation, the rest of the world has undergone what’s called “rationalization,” where the governments have been replaced by Ai’s, and the consequence of that is a relentless sameness:

Before that first paycation, Palmer had thought life was different elsewhere.

It wasn’t. It was just carried out in a different language. All the countries he traveled to had gone over to rationalization….

[…]

In the city centers Palmer had traveled to, things looked different—there were cathedrals, castles built on patterns one did not see elsewhere, temples. But the back end of human reality was repetition. The countryside was the same everywhere. The edges of the cities were the same too: age-sagged warehouses with broken windows, wastes of rails in the switching yards, silent cranes, loading docks and trucks.

In every country he saw people going to work with expressionless faces, coming home from work with the same faces, slack with exhaustion.

There’s a bit of historical exposition. Palmer recalls a conversation with Lilia where she asks him if rationalization made things better. He doesn’t remember much, except that “before rationalization everything was nearing collapse. That was what people said, anyway. Protests, labor shortages, supply chain breakdowns, strikes, wars, the climate catastrophe no one seemed to have the will to deal with—a constant cycle of disasters.”

Rationalization is contested at first, but once the first dominoes begin to fall, “it became inevitable. Everyone would rationalize. The incentives were right. It was easier: all their parliaments had to do under rationalization was busy themselves with bureaucratic details while the artificial minds of the Prime Ministers made the big decisions.”

1984 (+100)

All of the above comes from the first several chapters of the book, and I’ve left out a fair bit. Nayler’s novel relies far more on character and plot than it does on exposition or setting, but the glimpses we receive of the latter (existential greyness, cultural stagnation, and relentless surveillance) suggested parallels for me with Orwell’s 1984. There are a few other reasons for that resonance, a couple of which I wanted to note here.

I’m fully aware that this may be a function of the fact that I’ve read Orwell’s book so recently, so it’s fair to take this with a grain of salt. And to be fair, the characters in Axe do have more agency than Orwell allows Winston and Julia. There’s a case to be made, I think, that 1984 is a dystopic vision of disciplinary society, while Axe offers a similar take on a society of control2. That is, the citizenry of the Federation, the Union, and the Republic have internalized their limitations that would once have been imposed by the state:

From that moment, we understood that the state was everywhere. The state did not need to anticipate us: it was always with us. It shaped the mistakes we would make, and it was there to take us into its prisons when we made them.

That’s a passage from a book called The Forever Argument, about which I’ll say more below. But here, I’d note one of the setting features that doesn’t appear much, but gave me that 1984 feeling. At one point, Palmer is on the run from the State, trying to figure out what’s happened to Lilia; Elmira is the agent assigned to locate him, and we get a brief glimpse of the tools she has at her disposal, which include facial recognition (“facerec”) as well as insect-sized drones. But there’s a short passage where she talks about “choicerec” (choice recognition), which tracks all citizens according to their behavioral patterns.

Midway through the book, Palmer gives away his location, and the forces trying to keep him hidden explain his mistake:

“You went into a store. You considered buying something.”

[Palmer] “For a moment. Not even seriously. How would I? You haven’t even given me money.”

“Do you know how much has been invested in that moment of decision? How many programs are tracking your eyes, your body movements, your posture, your gestures, the dilation of the capillaries in your skin when you are about to make a purchase? All the power of private industry is invested in dissecting and manipulating those seconds of decision-making. You are never more vulnerable than when you are about to buy something.”

Like I said, this is a momentary plot element, one that is mostly background for Nayler’s novel, but it encapsulates that transition from discipline to control, particular when you consider how corporations and political parties have already been making use of data that’s not nearly as fine-grained and microtuned as it will be five years from now, or five years after that. (Considering how many of us have volunteered to train Ai chatbots/assistants, I suspect it’ll be even quicker than I fear.)

There’s a final moment I want to point to. I won’t say more about it than to note that it happens towards the end of the book, after most of the story’s events have occurred. Nurlan, a former government functionary, is reflecting on how the circumstances he finds himself in differs from what he’d expected.

The image of the end of the world was a mechanical foot stomping on a human skull. Over and over again. Forever. The world in flame and ashes.

I’ll admit that this was one of the passages that really triggered the connection with 1984 for me; as you’ll recall, there’s that scene where O’Brien is finally explaining the world to a broken Winston. O’Brien promises that there will always be “the intoxication of power,” because there will always be additional oppression to visit upon others. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

The Forever Argument

I mentioned at the end of my last episode that I wanted to talk about a fictional book3 called The Forever Argument. It’s a “character” in Axe in the sense that each of the novel’s parts is preceded by an epigraph from the book, and we learn right away that its author, Zoya Alekseyevna Velikanova, is the person whom we meet in Chapter 1, living in isolation and exile. And the book occupies a place in Axe not unlike Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism does in 1984—it is forbidden in the Federation, to the point that the first thing Lilia does when she escapes to the West (before the events of the novel) is to buy a copy from the airport where she lands. In the Federation, simple possession of the book is a death sentence.

Whereas Orwell has Winston read out long passages from Goldstein’s book, The Forever Argument is both more and less present in Nayler. The book appears more often as a physical object, and it serves as one of the ways that a number of the varied characters are interconnected. But the content of the book is only given to us in bits and glimpses. We know that it’s a revolutionary text, a gambit in the failed attempt to dislodge the autocratic leadership of the Federation.

This was the line from The Forever Argument that got me thinking, and you can see echoes of it in my discussion of rhetorical ethics.

“‘There is no solution to disagreement,’” she recited. “‘There is no technology that can overcome it, no leader that can repress it. There is only the eternal flow of argument…’”

This comes early in Axe, so I don’t think it spoils anything in particular. But those first six words echo those definitions of rhetoric that I find most appealing. Moreover, they represent a pretty radical understanding of argument and disagreement that upends a commonsense approach to rhetoric. There is no solution to disagreement. Differences of opinion are not the problem. Of course, we are faced regularly with the need to act in the face of disagreements, but that’s very different from imagining that disagreement is something we need to “solve.”

The commonsense approach to rhetoric that I’m talking about is the idea that the purpose of rhetoric is (functionally) to persuade one’s audience, to overcome their difference of opinion. This treats disagreement as an aberration, a negative condition that rhetoric can “solve.” And to be fair, most of us treat those who disagree with us as opponents to be persuaded, circumvented, or silenced. When we are so arrogant and/or narcissistic as to believe that we are in full possession of the Truth, then it makes sense that anyone who disagrees with us must be in need of education, if not outright removal.

Late in the book, Nurlan picks The Forever Argument up and reads briefly from it:

Imagine what you would be without resistance. Everyone complicit in your plans, or helpless in the face of them. Every desire that flickered in your brain fulfilled. Every person obedient to you.

Imagine how, as day followed day and everything was granted to you, your desires would metastasize. There is no cancer like the will, unopposed.

What we need most is opposition. It keeps us not only honest, but human. Without it, any one of us is a monster. Where there is complacency, every human power becomes monstrous. Togetherness is not agreement: it is the collective act of resisting one another.

The best among us understand this. They understand that their own beliefs and perspectives are not fortified by surrounding themselves with sycophants and parasites. They understand that sometimes they’ll lose board games or elections, and that this requires them to change their attitudes and approaches. Unfortunately, we occupy a cancerous moment, dominated by metastasized monsters who are doing everything in their power (much of which we’ve granted them) to ensure that they are the boots stomping again and again on others’ skulls.

A Review?

This isn’t a very good review of Where the Axe is Buried4. The fault is partly mine, because I’ve treated it as two books in one. One of those books is composed of these symbols and snippets that provide the background for the plot itself, and it’s that book that I think pays homage to Orwell’s novel. Based on Nayler’s end-of-book Acknowledgments, I don’t believe that I’m wrong to read Axe in those terms.

But the second book, the one where the characters interact and a larger geopolitical (and technological) plot takes place, has received very little reference here. Part of that is my intentional attempt to avoid spoiling things. I did read a couple of reviews of Axe, and one of the complaints I saw was that the number of characters and the intricacy of the plot made it a little more difficult to follow. It certainly kept the 1984-ness of it tucked in the background and more intermittent.

If I’m being honest, I might have suggested tweaking the ratio between action and exposition a bit. But I don’t really care all that much. I found the book deeply resonant and thought-provoking, and I think it warns us about the choices we’re (still) making today. There’s a point in the book where Krotov is telling the story of his home (Sarez), where he was orphaned after a massive, disastrous dam collapse.

The earthquake, the shattered dam, the flood—these were not the disaster. They were aftermath. The disaster happened before that. It began in 1911, when this country was the colonial master of that republic. The disaster began then and stretched for lifetimes. It stretched beyond revolution, beyond the collapse of an empire. It involved thousands of people who knew what would happen one day but did nothing.

Where the Axe is Buried is a novel that made me think about how much of what’s happening now is aftermath, at the same time that it offers a compelling vision of the potential aftermath of our contemporary decisions. I’m glad I read it, and that I waited until I had time to read it.