Where the Axe Is Buried

"Where the Axe Is Buried", by Ray Nayler, 2025, 272 pages, 84k words.

I enjoyed Nayler's 1st novel, "The Mountain in the Sea". Well, I was forced to like it, it had octopuses in it.

His latest is also near-future sci-fi. It was somewhat eerily similar to Ken Liu's latest: lots of LLM-based "AI", with powerful new technologies introduced over that. In the Liu, the additional technology is dream manipulation, as an art form. In the Nayler, there are 2 new technologies:

1. Serial immortality - but only for the Beloved Leader - via consciousness transfer into a new body.
2. Mind-to-mind communication, via quantum entanglement, both a read-only & a read-write version.

I think I read this book the fastest of any I've read in several years. The fact I was 1/2-way into it when I had a 2 hour airplane flight prolly helped that.

This is really well-written, great characters, lots of surprises. Maybe not for the squeamish.

I would be hard-pressed to choose which I liked better: this or the Liu. I think this 1 was a good bit shorter, so it might get the nod.

Note, you don't get the title explained until very late in the book. It is worth the wait.