A book like Scythe wasn’t truly on my radar. It’s YA, and while I am not averse to YA, it’s also not a genre I pay much attention to. But then my friends over at Gabbing Geek all seemed to be reading it, so why not read it myself? If anything, it had an interesting premise. What if society somehow conquered death? And if then, what if there were people whose job it was to make sure people still died from time to time?
That’s the basic premise of author Neal Shusterman’s Arc of the Scythe series, starting with this first book. Now, I do like it when my sci-fi asks big questions, so how does this one go anyway?
At some point in the future, a superintelligent, cloud-based computer system called Thunderhead basically took over the planet. Thunderhead is, from the looks of things, a benign master, but there are no governments, no crime, and everyone more or less gets by without any real problems. There are nanites in everyone’s system that can repair almost any injury and even resurrect the recently deceased. As such, death doesn’t exist anymore, and the most that happens is someone is knocked out for a couple days while his or her body knits itself back together. People don’t even feel pain.
But there needs to be some kind of death. There’s no such thing as off-world travel for reasons that are only hinted at, so to prevent overcrowding, men and women belonging to the Scythedom take care of all the death. They “glean” people by whatever methods they see fit, having a quota to keep the world from overcrowding. At this point, even old age isn’t an issue and people can live for centuries by continually turning back the clock and making themselves young again at will.
The plot, therefore, is about two teenagers, Citra and Rowan, chosen by a traditional Scythe to be his apprentices. It’s a bit unorthodox to take two, but Scythe Faraday sees something in both kids. Both showed a complete lack of fear and intimidation when he met them during separate gleamings, with Citra asking him tough questions and Rowan staying with a kid he barely knew Faraday came to gleam at Rowan’s high school. Neither really wants to be a Scythe, but that actually makes them more qualified for the position in Faraday’s mind. Some Scythes seem to enjoy their work a little too much…
Philosophically, there’s a lot going on here. Since no one can die, much of life has lost its meaning. If you can always put it off until tomorrow, why do much of anything? Scythes are the only people not answerable to Thunderhead, and they do scare and intimidate most people, but despite all that, they are performing a public service, and many of them are depicted as benevolent souls doing an unwanted duty because somebody has to. Furthermore, the general purposelessness of life reminded me a bit of the movie Children of Men. There, humanity was dying due to a lack of birth, life lost all meaning, and people were just destroying themselves and anything that might act as a legacy for the human race. Here, no one is really creating much worth using a legacy and the human race is, arguably, just as dead at least in spirit if not in fact.
Those are some pretty heady ideas there, speculating on the role of death in society and the like. Those are the kind of ideas I like reading sci-fi for. However, even with all these cool, philosophical questions, I wasn’t much interested in the fates of Citra, Rowan, or Faraday. There’s a particularly despicable villain character, but much of the others are, well, bland at best. The story’s twists didn’t grab me. I wanted to really explore the world and its ideas, but I really didn’t care what happened to the protagonists. As such, while I wouldn’t call it a bad book, it didn’t leave me with a desire to finish the trilogy.
Grade: B-
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