Arc of a Scythe Series
September 7, 2020
The Arc of a Scythe series, which includes
Scythe, Thunderhead, and The Toll, by Neal
Shusterman was both interesting and boring at the same time. The
author’s writing and futuristic vision is really impressive. The
books are told from numerous different and seemingly random
perspectives, and the way Shusterman weaves all them together is
really satisfying. I haven’t read The Toll yet, but
hopefully it won’t change my opinion so much.
At the beginning of Thunderhead, we get a few pages from
the perspective of Scythe Brahms, who seems completely irrelevant
and isn’t even mentioned till 300 pages later. When he is
mentioned though, the reader realizes that the scene from the
beginning of the book was, in fact, quite important.
I thought the books got a bit boring because the main characters,
Citra and Rowan, barely ever interact. In Thunderhead, they
only interacted twice, once at the beginning of the book and once
at the end. Over 95% of the book has them in completely different
parts of the world. Of course, their own separate perspectives are
still really interesting to read, so I wasn’t exactly bored, but I
just felt annoyed because it’s always more interesting when
they’re not apart.
I think the most compelling part of the series for me was not its
characters, but its worldbuilding, which is a first for me since
I’m generally interested by character dynamics. Scythe is set in a
futuristic world, according to my estimation around 2150 or 2200.
I can’t know for sure because in their world, they’ve stopped
keeping track of the year. Instead of numbering each year, they
just refer to it like Year of the Ocelot (they must come up with
creative, lesser known, animals to name them for after a while).
In 2042, AI called Thunderhead was given control of the world and
all it’s decision. There’s no governments or countries or anything
of the sort, and Thunderhead is almost all-powerful. This might
seem like a setup for the plot that AI is evil and humans have to
surge to defeat it. This is far from the case. Thunderhead is the
perfect sovereign: it’s just and has the best interest of the
human race at heart.
In fact, it’s helped improve human life so much that humans are
immortal. The term ‘dead’ is replaced with ‘deadish’, because a
deadish person can just be taken to a revival center. In fact,
killing others is just seen as a minor nuisance, and the only
penalty for killing someone is to pay for their revival, which is
a pretty good incentive. There’s no concept of poverty or hunger:
everybody has enough. Employment is available to those who seek it
(100% employment rate). Even getting old isn’t an issue anymore.
There’s technology that restores people to any age above 20 they
want to return to (generally called turning the corner), which
everyone does when they get old, and even more than once.
It sounds like utopia, which it is, I guess. It just made me
realize how maybe Neal Shusterman wrote about a perfect world to
make us realize that we don’t want our world to perfect. In his
world, ambition, fear, pain, suffering, and perseverance don’t
exist. Nobody needs to go to college or research, because there’s
nothing to be discovered--everything in the world is known. People
still do to pass time, though. In fact, because everything is
known and freely available, nobody even takes the effort of
learning about it. What’s the point? People don’t even feel
physical pain because of healing and painkilling nanites in their
blood. I guess since nobody experiences any loss, pain, or
suffering, it’s impossible for anybody to experience real joy.
Their whole lives are just pleasant, with no highs or lows
of emotion. Imagine living FOREVER, with no sense of purpose in
your life.
Overpopulation is still an issue, though with nobody dying and
everybody living forever. That’s where the Scythedom comes in.
Scythes are people who glean (aka kill) people to keep the
population in check. They are socially sanctioned killers,
everybody knows they’re necessary and they’re extremely well
respected and feared. The Scythedom is the only part of the world
that isn’t controlled by the Thunderhead, which is why I said
before that the Thunderhead was ALMOST all powerful. This is by
choice, as the Thunderhead decided that it didn’t have any
consciousness and was therefore unfit to take human life.
Most of the plot in all the books revolves in this separation of
the Scythe and Society. It’s just so annoying to see how bad
humans are at governing themselves—just let the Thunderhead
intervene and make it much fairer and just.
Anyways this post got a bit long, so I’d be a little surprised if
people got all the way down here. Series was worth reading, but
not great I would say. Also the kitty fanart is so CUTE hehe <3