Where the axe is buried A novel

Nayler (The Mountain in the Sea) blends quantum theory and gulag history in his byzantine sophomore outing set in a near-future world divided between the Union, which is run by artificial intelligence, and the Federation, controlled by a Putin-like dictator who evades death by repeatedly downloading his consciousness into new bodies. Lilia, a brilliant programmer living in exile in London with her boyfriend, Palmer, decides to return home to an unnamed city in the Federation to visit her dying father. Her arrest as soon as she steps off the plane triggers a race between rival underground organizations to recover her research project, a pair of "dioramas" left in Palmer's safe keeping. These contraptions use "induced entanglement between neural networks" to enable users to get inside each other's minds--a technology with world-ending or -saving potential, depending in whose hands it lands. Nayler crams in a boatload of sci-fi concepts as well as plentiful references to Soviet Russia. The scene-setting is on point ("The city stretched off into the distance, composed of unlike fragments: an onion dome, the dray skeleton of an office tower... a scabrous line of apartment blocks"), but the pile-up of narrators (there are at least a half-dozen) and the many narrative switchbacks can be difficult to track. Still, Nayler's writerly bravado impresses. (Apr.)

This near-future world has fallen into dystopia, but most people don't realize it. The Russian Federation has turned to outright tyranny under a quasi-immortal president, while the Western democracies have turned over control to the Rationalization policies of AI-based Prime Ministers. Observing this world from the perspectives of an old Russian activist, a genius young cyberneticist, a bureaucrat seduced by an AI, the people caught up in their lives, and a shadowy group of operatives who don't even know their own motivations, readers get a slowly forming picture of a spider at the center of a vast web, determined to either save or destroy humanity before it's too late. But it's already too late, as even when warring factions bury the hatchet, neither ever forgets where that axe was buried. This near-future, borderline dystopian geopolitical espionage thriller tells a story of authoritarianism run amok even as it hides in plain sight and is set against by shadowy forces that have the best intentions but the worst methods of carrying them out. VERDICT Thought-provoking in the extreme, Nayler's (The Tusks of Extinction) sci-fi cyberthriller will trap fans of technothrillers in its web.--Marlene Harris