Where the Axe Is Buried

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.)