In Ray Nayler’s dystopian sci-fi novel, incredible technological advances have enabled autocracy to run amok. But the world he depicts isn’t so far from our own. We talked to Nayler about artificial “intelligence” and how it all goes back to Borges.
You have an extensive background in foreign service and development. How does that work affect the way you approach writing and what you are driven to write about?
I spent two decades of my life living in countries outside the United States, and I think what that has done more than anything else is open me up to the idea that there is never one way of seeing things, never one way of doing things, never one way of structuring and organizing the human world. I am learning Spanish right now for a future assignment and was reading a collection of poems by Borges. In his poem “Amanecer” or “Break of Dawn,” I came across these wonderful lines: “el mundo / es una actividad de la mente, / un sueño de las almas / sin base ni proposito ni volumen.” In English: “the world / is a mental activity / a dream of souls / without foundation, purpose or volume.”
Borges is paraphrasing Berkeley and Schopenhauer here, and his intent may be more spiritual than mine, but these lines feel very true to my experience. The physical world is real—that is, the world of air and plants and animals and all of the systems in which we are embedded. But the world humans live in is not exactly that world. In fact, we are totally unsuited to life in that world. Our niches, the places to which we are adapted and in which we live out our lives, are the social and technological castles we have built within that real space.
Those castles, made up of language and culture and technology, obscure the natural world and shape what we are capable of seeing. What living in many different places and speaking different languages teaches you is that the human castle is nowhere the same—everywhere, it is a highly localized mental activity of the souls (I use this term loosely) who inhabit it.
As a writer, I am interested in exploring those castles, and also in exploring what lies beyond and between them.
“As much as science fiction claims to be about the future, about an alternate past or about an alternate present, I believe it is always primarily concerned with its own historical moment.”
Where the Axe Is Buried appears to be set in the same future as The Tusks of Extinction. Is this the case? How were they related in your mind as you were developing them?
It is not the same future. All three of the books I have written so far reference one another and have areas of overlap. They are filled with Easter eggs that refer back to one another and invite the reader to find links between technologies, themes and concerns that they share. They also link to short stories I have written. But they are not set in the same world. One way to think of them would be as different worlds extending from similar templates of possibility—variant futures linked to a similar past.
One of the things that immediately jumps out about Where the Axe Is Buried is that most of the countries you’ve set the action in don’t have proper names. They’re referred to by terms like “The Federation” or “The Republic” instead. Why make the locations vague (even if their real-world counterparts in some cases are seemingly clear)?
Naming things and places often locks down people’s imaginations, and creates a false sense of a 1:1 relationship with reality, in which the fictional world is viewed as nothing more than a commentary, a gloss on the real. Not allowing them to be named invites, I think, a greater degree of cross-pollination. I hope it also invites broader, richer comparisons.
In a world where authoritarians can just go ahead and effectively become ruler for life, why body hop?
I think this, like everything in speculative fiction, needs to be viewed both as a practical concern (it may be easier to keep power if you constantly stage the overthrow and replacement of your own regime, which is a practical method of self-correction and reinforcement) and as an allegory (the mask and body changes, autocracy remains fundamentally the same).
Near-future science fiction often draws on themes authors see in the present. What do you see in our current moment that made you want to write Where the Axe Is Buried?
Again going back to Borges, since he is who I am reading right now: In his preface to the 1969 revised version of Luna de enfrente or Moon Across the Way, one of his first books of poetry, originally composed in 1925, he writes: “No hay obra que no sea de su tiempo.” That is, “There is no work that is not of its time.” As much as science fiction claims to be about the future, about an alternate past or about an alternate present, I believe it is always primarily concerned with its own historical moment, and its speculations are devised as a refractive instrument for the reexamination of that present moment. I think that almost any reader who picks up Where the Axe Is Buried will understand, after reading it, what I see in this present moment that moved me to write this book.
“Behind all of these ‘artificial’ intelligences are human beings and human institutions, filled with bias and financial concerns.”
“Garbage in, garbage out” is a phrase that’s often thrown around when referencing AI models, which often just take whatever is already being done and intensify it. Why do you think the people in your world (and by extension, ours) are drawn to using AI in political decisions, seemingly in spite of the GIGO concept?
I think the concept I introduce in the book of the “Immortal Turk” is worth introducing here. It’s a reference to the Mechanical Turk—the fraudulent automaton of a Turkish-costumed person at a chess table that was supposedly able to beat anyone at chess, but was really just a cabinet concealing a man inside who was a chess master, and who determined all the moves of the “automaton.” The Mechanical Turk even had doors that could open into its supposed system of clockwork gears, to “prove” to doubters that it really was a machine.
That is what artificial intelligence is, at its core. It is a way of concealing the biases of decision making behind a mechanized process, and then presenting the products of that process as both original and correct. It has been shown in multiple studies (and in real-life situations where people drive off of docks and over cliffs because Google Maps told them to) that people have a strange trust in the accuracy and neutrality of computers. But that perceived accuracy, and neutrality, is nothing more than the drawer of the Mechanical Turk being opened up onto fake gears: Behind all of these “artificial” intelligences are human beings and human institutions, filled with bias and financial concerns. Open enough drawers, dig down through enough layers and there is always a human being behind the process.
The idea of using artificial intelligence as a part of the political process is not a futuristic invention—it is already upon us. The decisions of these supposedly automatic mechanisms will be presented as ideal, as neutral, as unbiased. They will not be. There is always human motivation, bias and avarice hidden in the cabinet of the Immortal Turk.
Read our review of ‘Where the Axe Is Buried’ by Ray Nayler.
Where the Axe Is Buried features a fairly wide cast of characters spread across a vast amount of land. Did you know at first how it was all going to come together?
I knew how it was all related, in its skeletal outlines, but for me writing is process. The real composition of a book is in the writing itself. Plot and theme and character and setting and everything else come together in a way that is emergent and hypercomplex, and the narrative pathways which are opened and closed as they do that can’t be perceived in some kind of initial planning process. I always have a sense of where I am going, but the characters and situations they create and respond to soon have their own sense as well, and we work our way through it all together, inside that process of composition.
Your work feels futuristic (with its AI, mechs and other gadgets) with just a sprinkling of old-school science fiction. What sort of influences—whether fictional or not—did you turn to while creating the world of Where the Axe Is Buried?
Everything is an influence. Where I am living at the time, what I am reading, what is occurring in the world at the time, what films I am watching. It can be hard to pin down. But while I was composing this book, we were seeing a massive extension of surveillance and control capacities worldwide, being used by governmental, corporate and other entities. In many ways, I think you could say that during the composition of Where the Axe Is Buried, the feared totalization of surveillance that seemed a futuristic concern, a worry on the horizon, became fully integrated into the present medium in which we exist.
“. . . writing is process. The real composition of a book is in the writing itself.”
The balance between control and autonomy—whether that’s control of speech, movement or your own government—is everywhere in this book, even within the liberal, “normalized” systems. Do you think this is inherent in the technology that’s been created in this future, or is something else going on?
I think the concept of control is one which we, as human beings, have always been concerned with. We’re looking for a balance of some kind: a structure that is capable of enabling us to live well, but also does not suffocate our freedoms. What does that structure look like? What limits need to be placed on it so that it does not encroach on our freedoms? What freedoms do we want to have? What does “freedom” even mean within a cooperative structure? How does surveillance impinge upon freedom? How might surveillance support freedom, at some level? During the writing of Where the Axe Is Buried, I reread Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and a number of other ancient works.
Consistently, the concerns of the ancients remain our concerns: How do we organize our political life? I think one answer is that we must constantly continue to work at it—that it is a continual process and struggle. Technologies, from the stone axe to the chariot to the Greek phalanx to the Macedonian long spear to the airplane, the rocket, the nuclear bomb and massive computational power, all shape and often threaten both our potential future freedoms and our present structures. I believe only total, knowledgeable engagement of the population offers a positive way forward. That engagement is always going to feel like argument and struggle, and that is precisely what it has to be in order for us to make progress and not simply cede control to others.
The exiled revolutionary Zoya and her work are a throughline in Where the Axe Is Buried. I loved how familiar her story was to the real history of exiled and imprisoned (especially Russian) revolutionaries. Were there any sort of references you had in mind as you wrote her, whether fictional or not?
There were many I had in mind. Soviet dissidents, American dissidents and dissidents from around the globe. We owe a great, collective debt to those who have offered everything up to human freedom, and often lost everything in its name.
Photo of Ray Nayler by Anna Kuznetsova.
