Official summary:
“Thou shalt kill. A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control. Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.”
Review:
Let’s just get right into it.
In the world of “Scythe”, humans advanced the Cloud and amassed information in it until it achieved sentience and omnipotence, and became known as the Thunderhead. It solved all the world’s problems: hunger, economic inequality, overpopulation, war, even death. All diseases have been eliminated, the body’s natural process of senescence can be endlessly reversed, the world is in such a state of peace that there is no war or even murder, there is enough food so that nobody can starve. Only death by accident remains - but not to fear, for this society can reverse even death itself.
Unfortunately, people have tried and failed to branch out to other planets, and while the population is much higher than our current one with none of the problems, our earth only has so much space.
“We have one very limited world, and although death has been defeated as completely as polio, people still must die.”
“The ratio of population growth to the Thunderhead’s ability to provide for humanity requires that a certain number of people be gleaned each year...”
So overpopulation is the sole reason people still have to die. Everything, literally everything, in this new world is fair and just, because the Thunderhead has made it so. So what would a fair method of manufacturing death be? Perhaps, everybody gets a certain number of years to live - the number being calculated by the Thunderhead to allow people to live the maximum number of years that still prevents overpopulation - and then they are no longer allowed to reverse senescence, and they either die of old age or undergo euthanasia. Fair and just.
Is this what they do in this new world? Unfathomably, absolutely the fuck not. Instead, they have scythes to mete out death via a system that allows a 16 year-old to be selected to die while the average lifespan is hundreds of years and people like Rowan’s grandmother are on god-knows-what-number husband and having new babies while her grandchild is sixteen. Not only is that extremely unfair to the 16 year-old, but there’s your overpopulation problem, right there.
The system upon which this entire novel is based makes no goddamn sense whatsoever. They claim to live in a perfect world but then intentionally recreate the most unfair system of our world: the randomness of death. It’s entirely avoidable and then they do it anyway. The scythe that chose to kill the 16 year-old did so on the basis that a percentage of deaths in our world - the Mortal World - were caused by car accidents, and an overconfident teenage boy with a penchant for getting drunk was a prime candidate for a car accident. So the Thunderhead, in all its omnipotence, eliminated car accidents, only for scythes to kill people basically in the name of car accidents. I very sincerely cannot fucking even with this.
“There was only one thing the Thunderhead was not given authority over.
The Scythedom.
When it was decided that people needed to die in order to ease the tide of population growth, it was also decided that this must be the responsibility of humans. Bridge repair and urban planning could be handled by the Thunderhead, but taking a life was an act of conscience and consciousness. Since it could not be proven that the Thunderhead had either, the Scythedom was born.
I do not regret the decision, but I often wonder if the Thunderhead would have done a better job.”
If the entire premise weren’t fundamentally flawed then it would be absolutely obvious to the characters that the Thunderhead would absolutely have done a better job.
It is the job of the scythe to decide who dies “fairly” and without bias, selecting evenly across gender, race, age, family size, even level of attractiveness. Because it was decided that death was a human responsibility, scythes can use the Thunderhead as a database but not harness its sentience to select who will die. Even without the Thunderhead’s sentience, they could enter their parameters and then use the Thunderhead like a random number generator to generate their victims. Instead they’re not allowed to do this and humans who are incapable of not being biased have to chose. Once again, this makes no sense, and is purely to manufacture another part of a scythe’s job and add weight and drama~ to the process.*
The same reasoning applies to why the Scythedom is the single human-governed system: so that their meetings and the corruption caused by their human failings can be part of the plot. They’ve also allowed themselves to be subject only to a set of laws that govern their roles as scythes, putting them above the laws that apply to everyone else., which is just asking for trouble. Goddard doesn’t even follow the Scythe Commandments anyway, ignoring “Thou shalt kill with no bias” so he can steal peoples’ properties and possessions by threatening to “glean” them if they don’t hand it over. Their whole Scythedom is a mess.
*There is also a part where the Thunderhead is not searchable by date or location like a useful computer, but instead is more like a human brain and groups things by image association, making it more difficult for a character to find what they’re looking for. It was nonsensical and purely to manufacture plot. And just because the Thunderhead is not involved in the business of Scythes it’s not even allowed to record them the way it does everyone else, which is a great way for them to get totally out of hand.
Now onto the actually killing - or “gleaning”. They call it by a euphemism because it’s not “socially or morally correct” to call it killing, and yet they are allowed to “glean” people however they want: from the pain and general unpleasantness - no matter how brief - of slitting their throat to death by flamethrower. Yes, these honorable ‘gleaners’ are allowed to incinerate their victims with a goddamn flamethrower. There is no reason whatsoever for these people to be killed anyway other than instantly and painlessly, but where’s the drama in that? Furthermore it makes weapons and combat training part of scythe training., ie. yet more total nonsensicality to create plot.** The scythes won’t even allow these people to be informed of their impending death ahead of time, not only to maybe get their affairs in order or do something they love for the last time, they’re not even allowed to say goodbye to their families. Why? Once again, no goddamn reason whatsoever! Everything about it is needlessly cruel. And the “Mass Gleanings”, carried out by the antagonist and his “New Order” scythes, are nothing short of legally sanctioned terrorist attacks.
**It also makes the creation of new weapons one of the few industries left in this “utopia” (not that a utopia should even have weapons) and the pitching of them part of the Scythe’s gatherings. There is a scene where the creator of a new weapon is pitching it to the scythes and they test it by using it on her AND KILLING HER. Not only is that a terrible idea because they’re prevented her from creating any new weapons for them but also WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK???
Basically if you base an argument on a flawed premise, no matter how well constructed that argument is, it’s negated by its very foundation being incorrect. This book had its merits, but since they were either involved with or directly stemmed from a flawed premise, I couldn’t care for the whole.
Even so, if it hadn’t had fundamental premise flaws it still would have only been about a 3 star read for me, and here’s why.
Prose/Writing
The prose is good enough to be unobtrusive (ie. not jarring or pulling you out of the story with an awkward turn of phrase) but really nothing beyond that. Schuster’s use of words did nothing to elicit any emotion from me, and everything felt rather vague due to a lack of meaningful description.
Character Rowan started out bland and gradually became more interesting. His development was still a little shallow, however. The classic “Woe, what am I becoming?” narrative without much emotional depth or originality. Plotwise he went ALL THE WAY OFF towards the end, and I look forward to his character in the sequel. I also appreciate how he took drastic action when the opportunity presented itself and took fixing their fucked up system into his own hands with little apprehension. I love a character that gets shit done without protracted soul-searching first just to prolong the plot and create drama (especially since Schusterman sure did enough of that elsewhere).
In contrast to Rowan, Citra started out with interesting potential but just coasted as a character from there. She definitely got the weaker plot once they were separated. I still feel like I don’t really know her and therefore don’t have much to say.
Faraday and Curie were very interesting characters, and served well as counterpoints to the youth and inexperience of Rowan and Citra.
At first I thought Goddard was a bit of a cartoon villain and that the existence of someone like him was antithetical to a utopia, but as we saw more and more of the Scythedom I could absolutely see how their bullshit system breed someone like him.
I’ll comment here on the romance, which was only a few brief mentions and therefore unobtrusive but it was still undeveloped, shoehorned in, and ultimately pointless.
Plot, Pacing, Structure
It was hard to judge the plot and pacing of this novel, because I think a lot of the interest in the first half would have been generated by the world-building of the Scythedom, but because I found it fundamentally flawed I not only wasn’t interested, I was annoyed and mildly angry the entire time. The second half was more plot-driven and definitely more interesting, and the last about 20% was quite thrilling. I may have whooped a few times, even.
There are two elements to the worldbuilding: the utopic world created by the Thunderhead, and the Scythedom within that. The Scythedom is the dominant aspect, and maybe if it had made any sense it would have absorbed my focus. Instead, I found myself more interested in the society that was utopian but still rather bleak. Because of the Thunderhead, everything that can be known is known, anything that can be created is created “perfectly” by the Thunderhead. So there is no academia, people no longer create any kind of art or music, there are no governments to be staffed, no celebrities but Scythes to fawn over, no problems of war and peace or crime and justice to be answered. Basically there’s hardly anything left to do, and certainly nothing intellectually or creatively satisfying. People live for so long and have so many kids that they don’t even care about them.
Schusterman himself has confirmed his world was not intended as the classic dystopia masquerading as a utopia, like almost every dystopia in fact does (eg. Zamyatin’s “We”, Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, Huxley’s “Brave New World”, Lowry’s “The Giver”, and Collin’s “The Hunger Games”). Instead, it poses a genuine question: what is “perfection”? Where does it end? And what comes afterwards? It may be “perfect” but as an academic and an artist, it’s not a world I would want to live in.
There is of course the rest of the series to explore this aspect, but I do feel there could have been some more substantial exploration in this book. I’m not even entirely sure that I buy that the Thunderhead’s “perfection” would cease all creativity, so exploration of this topic could have solidified the foundation of the utopia better.
I do have one fully-formed criticism of it, though: It’s a “utopia”. All oppression and suffering is gone. It’s like 1000 years in the future from our time. And yet everyone, every character passingly mentioned, is fucking straight. Every woman has a husband and every man has a wife. Every child has a mother and a father. Utopia? More like hetero hellscape. Goddard makes a passing reference to the existence of gay people in a sexual way and that’s fucking it. I let the social construct of gender still being in place slide since this is a product of our current time, but not a single regular citizen being mentioned to have a same-sex partner is a joke.
Scythes are commanded to keep a journal, and each chapter began with a journal entry mostly from Scythe Currie, but also others. They were a great inclusion, and for me the most interesting and well executed aspect of the novel.
Ultimately, I am (unfortunately?) interested in the sequel, because based on the ending of this one the plot it’s likely to have is one of my favourite kinds. We’ll see how it goes.
I have decided to forgo the weaker and stronger aspects breakdown for this novel since it was so inconsistent even within the same aspects I had a hell of a time trying to make it.
Content/age appropriateness warnings: a lot of murder and blood, obviously, but that’s all I can remember
“Thou shalt kill. A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control. Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.”
Review:
Let’s just get right into it.
In the world of “Scythe”, humans advanced the Cloud and amassed information in it until it achieved sentience and omnipotence, and became known as the Thunderhead. It solved all the world’s problems: hunger, economic inequality, overpopulation, war, even death. All diseases have been eliminated, the body’s natural process of senescence can be endlessly reversed, the world is in such a state of peace that there is no war or even murder, there is enough food so that nobody can starve. Only death by accident remains - but not to fear, for this society can reverse even death itself.
Unfortunately, people have tried and failed to branch out to other planets, and while the population is much higher than our current one with none of the problems, our earth only has so much space.
“We have one very limited world, and although death has been defeated as completely as polio, people still must die.”
“The ratio of population growth to the Thunderhead’s ability to provide for humanity requires that a certain number of people be gleaned each year...”
So overpopulation is the sole reason people still have to die. Everything, literally everything, in this new world is fair and just, because the Thunderhead has made it so. So what would a fair method of manufacturing death be? Perhaps, everybody gets a certain number of years to live - the number being calculated by the Thunderhead to allow people to live the maximum number of years that still prevents overpopulation - and then they are no longer allowed to reverse senescence, and they either die of old age or undergo euthanasia. Fair and just.
Is this what they do in this new world? Unfathomably, absolutely the fuck not. Instead, they have scythes to mete out death via a system that allows a 16 year-old to be selected to die while the average lifespan is hundreds of years and people like Rowan’s grandmother are on god-knows-what-number husband and having new babies while her grandchild is sixteen. Not only is that extremely unfair to the 16 year-old, but there’s your overpopulation problem, right there.
The system upon which this entire novel is based makes no goddamn sense whatsoever. They claim to live in a perfect world but then intentionally recreate the most unfair system of our world: the randomness of death. It’s entirely avoidable and then they do it anyway. The scythe that chose to kill the 16 year-old did so on the basis that a percentage of deaths in our world - the Mortal World - were caused by car accidents, and an overconfident teenage boy with a penchant for getting drunk was a prime candidate for a car accident. So the Thunderhead, in all its omnipotence, eliminated car accidents, only for scythes to kill people basically in the name of car accidents. I very sincerely cannot fucking even with this.
“There was only one thing the Thunderhead was not given authority over.
The Scythedom.
When it was decided that people needed to die in order to ease the tide of population growth, it was also decided that this must be the responsibility of humans. Bridge repair and urban planning could be handled by the Thunderhead, but taking a life was an act of conscience and consciousness. Since it could not be proven that the Thunderhead had either, the Scythedom was born.
I do not regret the decision, but I often wonder if the Thunderhead would have done a better job.”
If the entire premise weren’t fundamentally flawed then it would be absolutely obvious to the characters that the Thunderhead would absolutely have done a better job.
It is the job of the scythe to decide who dies “fairly” and without bias, selecting evenly across gender, race, age, family size, even level of attractiveness. Because it was decided that death was a human responsibility, scythes can use the Thunderhead as a database but not harness its sentience to select who will die. Even without the Thunderhead’s sentience, they could enter their parameters and then use the Thunderhead like a random number generator to generate their victims. Instead they’re not allowed to do this and humans who are incapable of not being biased have to chose. Once again, this makes no sense, and is purely to manufacture another part of a scythe’s job and add weight and drama~ to the process.*
The same reasoning applies to why the Scythedom is the single human-governed system: so that their meetings and the corruption caused by their human failings can be part of the plot. They’ve also allowed themselves to be subject only to a set of laws that govern their roles as scythes, putting them above the laws that apply to everyone else., which is just asking for trouble. Goddard doesn’t even follow the Scythe Commandments anyway, ignoring “Thou shalt kill with no bias” so he can steal peoples’ properties and possessions by threatening to “glean” them if they don’t hand it over. Their whole Scythedom is a mess.
*There is also a part where the Thunderhead is not searchable by date or location like a useful computer, but instead is more like a human brain and groups things by image association, making it more difficult for a character to find what they’re looking for. It was nonsensical and purely to manufacture plot. And just because the Thunderhead is not involved in the business of Scythes it’s not even allowed to record them the way it does everyone else, which is a great way for them to get totally out of hand.
Now onto the actually killing - or “gleaning”. They call it by a euphemism because it’s not “socially or morally correct” to call it killing, and yet they are allowed to “glean” people however they want: from the pain and general unpleasantness - no matter how brief - of slitting their throat to death by flamethrower. Yes, these honorable ‘gleaners’ are allowed to incinerate their victims with a goddamn flamethrower. There is no reason whatsoever for these people to be killed anyway other than instantly and painlessly, but where’s the drama in that? Furthermore it makes weapons and combat training part of scythe training., ie. yet more total nonsensicality to create plot.** The scythes won’t even allow these people to be informed of their impending death ahead of time, not only to maybe get their affairs in order or do something they love for the last time, they’re not even allowed to say goodbye to their families. Why? Once again, no goddamn reason whatsoever! Everything about it is needlessly cruel. And the “Mass Gleanings”, carried out by the antagonist and his “New Order” scythes, are nothing short of legally sanctioned terrorist attacks.
**It also makes the creation of new weapons one of the few industries left in this “utopia” (not that a utopia should even have weapons) and the pitching of them part of the Scythe’s gatherings. There is a scene where the creator of a new weapon is pitching it to the scythes and they test it by using it on her AND KILLING HER. Not only is that a terrible idea because they’re prevented her from creating any new weapons for them but also WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK???
Basically if you base an argument on a flawed premise, no matter how well constructed that argument is, it’s negated by its very foundation being incorrect. This book had its merits, but since they were either involved with or directly stemmed from a flawed premise, I couldn’t care for the whole.
Even so, if it hadn’t had fundamental premise flaws it still would have only been about a 3 star read for me, and here’s why.
Prose/Writing
The prose is good enough to be unobtrusive (ie. not jarring or pulling you out of the story with an awkward turn of phrase) but really nothing beyond that. Schuster’s use of words did nothing to elicit any emotion from me, and everything felt rather vague due to a lack of meaningful description.
Character Rowan started out bland and gradually became more interesting. His development was still a little shallow, however. The classic “Woe, what am I becoming?” narrative without much emotional depth or originality. Plotwise he went ALL THE WAY OFF towards the end, and I look forward to his character in the sequel. I also appreciate how he took drastic action when the opportunity presented itself and took fixing their fucked up system into his own hands with little apprehension. I love a character that gets shit done without protracted soul-searching first just to prolong the plot and create drama (especially since Schusterman sure did enough of that elsewhere).
In contrast to Rowan, Citra started out with interesting potential but just coasted as a character from there. She definitely got the weaker plot once they were separated. I still feel like I don’t really know her and therefore don’t have much to say.
Faraday and Curie were very interesting characters, and served well as counterpoints to the youth and inexperience of Rowan and Citra.
At first I thought Goddard was a bit of a cartoon villain and that the existence of someone like him was antithetical to a utopia, but as we saw more and more of the Scythedom I could absolutely see how their bullshit system breed someone like him.
I’ll comment here on the romance, which was only a few brief mentions and therefore unobtrusive but it was still undeveloped, shoehorned in, and ultimately pointless.
Plot, Pacing, Structure
It was hard to judge the plot and pacing of this novel, because I think a lot of the interest in the first half would have been generated by the world-building of the Scythedom, but because I found it fundamentally flawed I not only wasn’t interested, I was annoyed and mildly angry the entire time. The second half was more plot-driven and definitely more interesting, and the last about 20% was quite thrilling. I may have whooped a few times, even.
There are two elements to the worldbuilding: the utopic world created by the Thunderhead, and the Scythedom within that. The Scythedom is the dominant aspect, and maybe if it had made any sense it would have absorbed my focus. Instead, I found myself more interested in the society that was utopian but still rather bleak. Because of the Thunderhead, everything that can be known is known, anything that can be created is created “perfectly” by the Thunderhead. So there is no academia, people no longer create any kind of art or music, there are no governments to be staffed, no celebrities but Scythes to fawn over, no problems of war and peace or crime and justice to be answered. Basically there’s hardly anything left to do, and certainly nothing intellectually or creatively satisfying. People live for so long and have so many kids that they don’t even care about them.
Schusterman himself has confirmed his world was not intended as the classic dystopia masquerading as a utopia, like almost every dystopia in fact does (eg. Zamyatin’s “We”, Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, Huxley’s “Brave New World”, Lowry’s “The Giver”, and Collin’s “The Hunger Games”). Instead, it poses a genuine question: what is “perfection”? Where does it end? And what comes afterwards? It may be “perfect” but as an academic and an artist, it’s not a world I would want to live in.
There is of course the rest of the series to explore this aspect, but I do feel there could have been some more substantial exploration in this book. I’m not even entirely sure that I buy that the Thunderhead’s “perfection” would cease all creativity, so exploration of this topic could have solidified the foundation of the utopia better.
I do have one fully-formed criticism of it, though: It’s a “utopia”. All oppression and suffering is gone. It’s like 1000 years in the future from our time. And yet everyone, every character passingly mentioned, is fucking straight. Every woman has a husband and every man has a wife. Every child has a mother and a father. Utopia? More like hetero hellscape. Goddard makes a passing reference to the existence of gay people in a sexual way and that’s fucking it. I let the social construct of gender still being in place slide since this is a product of our current time, but not a single regular citizen being mentioned to have a same-sex partner is a joke.
Scythes are commanded to keep a journal, and each chapter began with a journal entry mostly from Scythe Currie, but also others. They were a great inclusion, and for me the most interesting and well executed aspect of the novel.
Ultimately, I am (unfortunately?) interested in the sequel, because based on the ending of this one the plot it’s likely to have is one of my favourite kinds. We’ll see how it goes.
I have decided to forgo the weaker and stronger aspects breakdown for this novel since it was so inconsistent even within the same aspects I had a hell of a time trying to make it.
Content/age appropriateness warnings: a lot of murder and blood, obviously, but that’s all I can remember
