I had a few ideas for a post this week, but many of them were derivative/too close to other Saturday Notes I’ve done in the past. Which might not be bad as such, considering that I’m posting these on a new website now rather than on Facebook Notes. But I don’t like to feel like I’m always harping on the same things.
I also had an idea for writing about the increasing homogenization of American culture but that sounded a bit big and it’s Friday and I haven’t written jack so, uh, maybe some other time.
Some, uh, spoilers ahead.
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Arc of a Scythe by Neal Shusterman Review-Shaped Thing
So I recently finished The Toll, which is the third book in Neal Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy. Starting with Scythe the story goes something like this: in the far future, we live in a world where death itself has been cured. The benevolent AI that runs everything, the Thunderhead, decides though that since too many people on the planet is still a problem, proposes the institution of a body to regulate death: the Scythes. The Scythes are not subject to the rules or laws of the Thunderhead and act independently. The Scythes must ‘glean’ a certain amount of people in order to keep population in check. Of course, while there are people who hold a morbid fascination of them, for the most part they’re not exactly popular with the Average Joe who does his or her best to avoid gaining their attention.
Our story follows two young people, Citra and Rowan, who are chosen to become apprentice Scythes, but given the condition that only one of them will make the final cut. Things get complicated when someone makes a ruling that whichever one graduates must glean the other. And of course this is a teen book so the two fall in love. And then there’s this one guy among the Scythes who has a thing for murdering people (because OF COURSE) and he’s trying to grab power for himself.
I liked the first book a lot because it seemed like an interesting thought experiment. What does a word that has cured death look like? And how would the people living in it live? It was a bit more teen drama-y than I would have preferred, and I didn’t think all of the worldbuilding really added up. For instance, it’s explained that there isn’t a lot of religion in the new deathless world, because religion’s a lot about the afterlife, and because people don’t die they don’t care anymore! Except people totally do die, it’s just regulated and less frequent. Most of all, I don’t think it really dealt with the fact that the main characters are essentially state-sponsored murderers. But it was still funish, and it was a science-fiction idea I hadn’t seen before.
The sequels? Not as much for me. Especially this last one, The Toll, which felt bloated and overdone without actually delivering anything I particularly wanted to see. It was established in the first book that one of the only religions that survives into the deathless world is a sort of Tone cult, which worships… sound. For some reason. And the Tone Cults become increasingly focused on in the second and third books. Why do they worship sound? [shrugs] I dunno. I don’t really care. And the resulting explosion of Plot Importance just didn’t make much sense to me, other than he needed a religious group to fill the role and a made-up one would probably offend less people, I guess.
The story also is meant to sort of be a love story between Rowan and Ctira. The problem of course being that aside from the first book, they hardly ever spend that much time together. Years after their training, I’m still struggling to work out why these two are apparently so in love with each other and what they like about each other. Unlike some examples, there’s groundwork to develop this relationship, but since they spend most of the story apart concerned with saving the world, it feels almost extraneous. But it clearly wasn’t meant to be because the end of the final book ends with a scene establishing that they’ll be together. But why? Why are they so obsessively in love with each other?
It’s also hard to feel serious about character death when it feels like the way it works is arbitrary. It’s explained in the first book that a body destroyed by fire cannot be revived, but then the main villain is revived because his body was burned but his head was recovered, so one of his minions grafts it onto another body. The end of the second book goes, “Oh and by the way, if an animal consumes your body then it also can’t come back from that!” which makes sense but still should have been mentioned before. We also see that the Thunderhead keeps recorded memories and personalities of every single person, and can upload them as a consciousness to someone’s body, effectively reviving them that way. And gleaned people are off-limits to revival, I guess, but is there anyone physically stopping someone from doing that if the technology exists?
So basically, even if someone is permanently killed, there are plenty of BS reasons to use in order to bring him or her back that don’t get used unless it’s to tie up some Plot.
But I thought the main problem I had with the series was that the characters all lived in a dystopia, and none of them seemed to really notice or care. The world is run by an omnipresent AI that knows everything about everyone, controls every facet of life, and can easily wipe a person’s memories and implant someone else’s personality and memories into them. And yet we’re not really meant to view this as a terrifying amount of power that this AI has, because it’s benevolent.
This feels super weird having watched Person of Interest, which similarly deals with a godlike AI. But in that one, even though the Machine is benevolent, it’s still infringing on what we’ve been told are our basic rights, and everyone is either horrified by this invention or is trying to control it. And this is made even more complicated by the introduction of Samaritan, an AI that doesn’t have as many moral compunctions. And even though Samaritan is trying to make the world a better place, it’s an AI trying to take over the world and will murder anyone that gets in its way, rig elections to get its candidates in power, play with people’s lives to figure out how to best control them…
But the Thunderhead is okay, because this one’s nice!
[Between this series and Spider-Man: Far From Home, I’m wondering why there’s an increased upsurge of people in popular media who are perfectly alright with mass surveillance and using AI to control the world.]
The only thing that the Thunderhead doesn’t have control of is the Scythedom, which is also kind of horrifying because it’s a privileged class of people who are given the job of murdering people and governing themselves however they want. And the villain is this douchebag who gets his kicks out of killing people, and the old school Scythes act like this is an affront to their vocation, as if it wasn’t insanely obvious that the job that requires you to kill people every month would attract axe-crazy maniacs. Especially when they can basically claim whatever they want, so that so many of the Scythes have the biggest mansions, nicest cars and jewel-encrusted cloaks. Yeah, the sympathetic Scythes don’t do this, and wealth as we think of it has been eliminated, but Scythes are still the upper class in a system they helped build to benefit themselves and let them kill people. Theoretically, it’s for the good of the world, but that’s what it boils down to: an upper class that tells everyone that it kills people for the Greater Good, and a disagreement between factions in that class as to the correct way to kill people. Yes, they specifically can’t kill people based on things like race, ethnicity, age, sex, orientation, political beliefs or religion, so at least they’re not bigoted, in theory anyway, but I feel like that’s putting a great big ‘Not As Big A Jerk As You Could’ve Been’ sticker instead of a bandaid on a gaping head wound. They pick the names of famous people as titles, and that’s cool, but that doesn’t cover the fact that they’re murderers and we’re meant to be cool with it.
And there’s some conflict that Citra and Rowan feel about the idea of being Scythes, of being state murderers, but this isn’t really explored enough. Rowan goes off to become a vigilante, going and assassinating Scythes who are corrupt, and that’s fine, even if the narrative acts like he’s going down a dark path. But Citra goes on to become a revered Scythe, because she treats her victims with compassion and speaks out against the villain’s corruption. But it’s still working within a system which essentially trusts that the Scythes will behave themselves.
The conclusion to the story isn’t overthrowing the corrupt system entirely. It’s just… reworking it a bit, so that a lot of the Scythes die, but presumably they’ll just re-recruit and some time later the cycle will start all over again. What’s to stop some other bloodthirsty Scythe from climbing up the ranks in the future? Especially now that our two leads have buzzed off to space?
Also everyone from Madagascar is genderfluid in the future. Why? [shrugs] I dunno. Apparently that’s how queerness works in the deathless future.
It just felt like the author thought a lot about the setting, but not at all about how horrifying this all is if you stop and think about it for five minutes. Which is okay for a science-fiction novel that’s a standalone, but the more he revisits this world the less sense it made. As a teen love story it doesn’t feel like it works because it doesn’t put enough focus on their relationship. As a commentary on society it doesn’t feel like it works because no one seems to react to how horrifying this system is, mostly chalking it up to a few bad apples.
The system is rotten to the core, and the resolution just doesn’t really address that in a way I found satisfactory. It’s frustrating to me because this is the second trilogy I’ve read this year that had an ending like that (the Soldier Son trilogy had a similar problem), and I just really want authors to address the societal problems they establish in their first novels, you know?
And I don’t care about cults that worship sound. Not even a little bit.
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