Where The Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler - Thoughts
Just finished Ray Nayler's latest novel last night and today typed out a review on Goodreads, that I thought I'd share here 'cause I'd love to talk about this book. Here's my quick review, which very much includes spoilers.
Great! Characters were well inhabited, mysteries tantalizingly developed, political statement strongly asserted. I honestly thought the ideology went a bit too pointed at the end and moved from being anti-AI to being fully anti-technology, which maybe was a bit of a bit of a bridge too far. At the same time I liked the way Nayler subverted expectations with the "brilliant scientist develops genius and terrifying new tech" thing. Lilia's dioramas that can peer inside someone's brain and inject new thoughts were introduced like chap 2, but never really utilized, and then at the ending Nayler used this tech as a metaphor for the inherent evil of human invention, pointing to an endless history of technology being invented out of pure curiosity and then being used just because it can, with myriad unintended consequences arising. Which is true and a good point. The whole bit with the AI prime ministers achieving a more authentic consciousness and immediately realizing they were a harm to humanity and killing themselves was definitely interesting, but again kind of heavy-handed. I don't know, I really liked this book a lot, it just didn't have a lot of subtlety in its messaging and presents as its core theme the statement that technology nearly always makes human lives worse, which is a non-nuanced statement.
What made this book shine for me was the nuance and subtlety given to the characters. While the political messaging of the book was very black/white, the characters were allowed to be complex and multi-faceted. There are no hard heroes and villains in this story, only human beings trying to breathe in a society that has removed all the oxygen from life.
Also, the prose was lovely! Nayler is very good at the short, beautiful sentence. The writing feels pretty refined, even more-so than his first novel. 4 stars!
Thoughts welcome! From what I've seen on other posts here Nayler doesn't seem to be well-embraced yet but I've enjoyed both his novels so far and really dig his writing style. And even if I personally think the political messaging of WTAIB lacks some nuance or room for discussion, it at the very least has made me think quite a bit and will certainly remain in my mind for quite some time. To be clear on where I stand : I also think AI is a mostly shitty and useless thing and I agree with Nayler that if we as a society keep pushing machine learning into every facet of our society the outcomes will be bad. I only disagree with the extrapolation of that train of thought: that technology in general is a mostly negative force. Would love to hear what others got from the book. Okay cool thanks bye!