Ray Nayler

"[H]e was a man like you."
"Like me?"
"Yes. A man who thought he could pass the good on to his son without the bad."
There was silence in the tent, for a moment.
Then one of the other men said, "He's right, Mitya. All our fathers were the same."
"Well, let's drink to our fathers then. They wanted the best, but it turned out the same as always."

This is going to be a bit mean, but this is so good it's hard to believe it's a Tordotcom novella. Unlike most of what they publish, it's not a show more fantasy story that feels like a pilot for a streaming show; this isn't aimed at people who watch a lot of tv and movies, but it's a clever, inventive piece of sf that wouldn't be out of place in Clarkesworld or Asimov's. The basic premise is that in the near future, elephants have gone extinct but woolly mammoths have been revived through cloning, so ivory poachers have turned to mammoths as a new source. It's beautifully written, full of interesting ideas, as a bunch of different plotlines intersect. Disorienting in the way the best sf is, with lots to say about the world we live in now and the world we will live in. show less

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is show more malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.

As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.

Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buriedcombines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Political allegory is risky for authors to indulge themselves by creating. "The irony that haunts our entire history is that we humans have been the ones standing in the way of our own happiness the whole time" is a pithy truism. It's not much to hang a novel on.

Yet hang it does. The near-future techno-dystopia is all too real, all too probable, and dankly depressingly akin to the tech...bros...in charge of the most important functions of infrastructure's clear intentions. Why is "hacking" a crime? Because it interferes with the Aynholes' desires to install ransomware in all societal functions to exert supreme control over all humans. "The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me," is Ayn Rand's own deeply evil, greedy, and selfish distillation of the deeply evil, selfish, and destructive soi-disant "philosophy" entrenched in the tech industry, that reaches apotheosis in this story.

There are no good, humane systems in this novel, albeit they are uniformly very human-centered. Control of Humanity has always been at the center of all social and governmental systems throughout time. The eternal tension between the ideal of individual liberty and the safety of others has never, in my opinion can never, be anything more than temporarily balanced. It's the moment of imbalance, the time when the system built is not in equilibrium that makes this a novel not a short story. Looking into a dark and a deep void is courting vertigo. It's vertigo, a sense of the ground deciding it's not going to support one's weight any longer that defined this story to me.

Author Nayler blew past the discomfiting (to me) notion of AI government leaders into nightmare territory with the Federation president whose personality is digitized and downloaded time and time again into fresh bodies. An immortal being, like the Meths in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, will not in any meaningful way be human. I don't even think the present-day model for this character is human. Well, genetically so but not humane or honorable in human terms. Be that as it may...this is a cautionary tale about ignoring mile-long freight trains barreling towards you. You will get flattened.

“What a world, Nikolai,” the president had said. “no old age, no sickness, and no death. Finally, we can have both our wisdom and our health.”

The president said we—but it was only he who could have those things. It was only he who could escape old age, sickness, and death.”

Like the immense benefits promised to thee and me in the rollout of "AI" there's a very, very low likelihood of anyone under billionaire status deriving more than the tiniest benefits, and as few of those as they can manage, from "AI". Assuming it's ever better than it is at this moment, where the divide is already stark, it will immiserate billions and make greedy oligarchs a scoche richer.

The essence of the story is:

“That was how it was. One day you had your own country. Next day you were a refugee. You were in a line, waiting to be someone again. To be legal again. Not to be nothing.

You could spend your whole life waiting.”

...and you will.

It's a bitter pill of a tale written by Author Naylor from a far greater pool of knowledge than mine on every story axis. It is not me, an old, bitter, angry socialist, shouting at the clouds the tech...bros...float atop. It is one of their own saying, "pay attention now before you pay a very steep price for lazy inattention."

It behooves us without his knowledge, or his storytelling nous, to listen up while we can. show less

The Mountain in the Sea is a masterfully spun poem of a story that explores power differentials, what we do to each other, and what we do to the species with which we share our planet - while (often unwittingly) serving the interests of our masters.

Naylor writes the story of a scientist who is researching the intelligence of sea life, particularly cephalopods, when she is assigned to an island where the octopi are displaying self awareness. There, she meets the android Evrim, who helps in show more giving an expanded perspective on the nature of consciousness, memory, and communication- themes which repeat and intertwine throughout. At the same time, we follow a young man enslaved on a fishing vessel, as well as a systems expert, contracted to find vulnerabilities in artificial minds, who is similarly stripped of his agency by vastly powerful corporate entities.

This book challenged and delighted me, and I recommend it to anyone who either enjoys reading science fiction or reading stories that grapple with big philosophical questions.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this Advanced Reader Copy. show less

"All systems fail. The result can be catastrophic, or generative. Most often, they are a mixture of both." - Ray Nayler.

Having been following Ray Nayler's writing career since he began writing long-form speculative fiction, I've been impressed, but felt he was still feeling his way forward to writing THAT novel. This book may well be that novel, as Nayler gives you a dystopic thriller which remains propulsive even when he opted for a mosaic structure; this is where his efforts as a show more short-story writer have probably served him well.

I'm not going too talk to much in detail, because this is a new enough book that I don't feel like spoiling too much. However, what we have here is a work that feels like it's in conversation with cutting-edge social thought at the same time as it is with classic 20th-century dystopian literature, written by a man with a young daughter who is pissed off about her future prospects.

My expectation is that this book will remain in my top-five novels at the end of the year. show less