The impending AI-generated apocalypse looms large across Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe is Buried (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20), in which Western civilisation has ceded its governance (“the Rationalization”) to the logical approach of AI Prime Ministers.
Generational peace and prosperity beckons until one of the AI minds begins to malfunction and institute developments that brings the West into conflict with the Federation, the authoritarian state where the President secretly transcends mortality by uploading his mind into successive human brains.
Caught in the crossfire is Lilia, a young and brilliant scientist in exile from the Federation, and whose innovation could hold the key to subverting the AI hegemony. Already a Hugo and Locus award-winner, Nayler’s third offering is as much a novel of ideas as it is a techno-thriller, and fully delivers on both counts. A more erudite and emotionally engaging Philip K Dick, Nayler thrives on technology’s potential but roots his story very firmly in human fragilities: “That was the logic of the world. If a technology was invented, it would be used. There was no use talking about ethics.”
Sally Magnusson’s The Shapeshifter’s Daughter (John Murray, £16.99) is a literary fantasy that splices parallel narratives. Hel, the daughter of Loki – a “dazzling beauty and withered crone, who was flung out of Asgard to rule over death itself” – emerges from the primordial ice of Niflheim into modern-day Orkney. There she pursues Helen Firth, a middle-aged Orkney native who has returned from a lifetime’s exile in England to experience the healing balm of the islands’ “lovely skies and holy silences” as her self-prescribed palliative care.
Magnusson is superb at evoking a landscape rich in history and prehistory, although the novel’s greatest strength is her feminist interpretation of Norse mythology in a story that centres equally on Hel and Helen, both of whom are daughters wounded by “fathers whom they still, in the last winter of their own lives, struggled to forgive”.
Set in a future Dark Ages, Tom O’Connell’s impressive debut Lichtenberg (Temple Dark Books, £16.99) centres on Riven, a Corpsman sworn to defend the walled city of Raidon against the brutal, barbarous Ramasites who inhabit the Wildlands beyond the city walls.
But when Riven discovers that the Ramasites are not “untamed beasts” but starving refugees, he finds himself on a collision course with Raidon’s psychotic Chancellor and what Riven belatedly comes to realise is an authoritarian regime. The quasi-medieval feudal world and its “perpetual winter” bring to mind Game of Thrones, of course, but O’Connell deftly sidesteps clumsy comparisons with his exploration of themes that could hardly be more timely.
The world-building is expertly done, and Riven is a wonderfully complex character as he struggles to slough off his psychological conditioning and a lifetime’s devotion to “a bunch of brainwashed half-Vikings with no real enemy”.
Mason Coile’s Exiles (Baskerville, £16.99) opens with a three-person terraforming team arriving on a one-way mission to Mars, only to discover that the team of worker bots who have established their base camp, the Citadel, are under siege. But is the Citadel being attacked by an unidentified “organic entity” or has one of the bots transcended its programming and gone rogue?
Coile (the pseudonym of the award-winning crime writer Andrew Pyper) delivers a full-bodied thriller fuelled by anxiety and paranoia about the indefinable Other, and provides an immersive experience of the unforgiving environment of the Red Planet.
The more interesting subtext, however, that of the possibility of sentient evolution when robots are left to their own devices, is left a little underdeveloped.
A 10-year-old female pope with magical powers is perhaps the least unlikely character in Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils (Gollancz, £25), a fantasy romp that begins with the street urchin and failed thief Alex being hauled off the streets of the Holy City to be anointed as the next Empress of Troy.
Commissioned to escort Alex from the Holy City to Troy, and keep her safe from “the apocalyptic threat of the elves” massed on the empire’s borders, is the Chapel of Holy Expediency, a motley crew comprised of a jobsworth monk, a vampire, “one of the top three necromancers in Europe”, an immortal Templar knight, and “a proper Norse blood-and-lightning werewolf”.
Attacked on all sides, bickering mightily as they go, our antiheroes lurch from one catastrophe to another and somehow manage to outwit a succession of magicians, demons, warrior hordes and monsters conjured up from the pit of various hells.
The satire of the form is gentle, the barbs aimed at organised religion less so (“He had never had much patience for religion. What was it, really, but superstition with money?”), and Abercrombie is clearly having a whale of time with this loving and frequently laugh-out-loud parody of the fantasy genre’s conventions.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
