Partway through the spring conclave, the assembled scythes of MidMerica sit through a run of sales pitches. Vendors get ten minutes each to demonstrate new products to the Weaponsmaster, who controls procurement. One offers a digital poison that turns a person’s healing machinery against them; he uses the word victim and is dismissed on the spot for bad taste. Then a saleswoman presents a pill that makes the taker’s fingertips lethal for an hour. The Weaponsmaster comes up on stage, swallows a dose, and demonstrates the product on her. It works. She sells fifty vials posthumously, and the room moves on to the next item. Nothing else in Scythe by Neal Shusterman is quite that efficient.
That passage runs about four sentences and it is the best thing in the book — better than the chase, better than the duel, better than the romance. It is also a fair warning about what kind of novel this actually is underneath its packaging.
Neal Shusterman’s Premise Is Good and His Institution Is Better
The setup has been widely described and deserves its reputation. Around the middle of the twenty-first century humanity solved death. An artificial intelligence called the Thunderhead absorbed the world’s knowledge, then its governance, and administers a genuine utopia: no disease, no hunger, no war, no poverty, no crime, no politics. Injury is provisional — die badly enough and a drone collects the remains, and a few days later the deceased is complaining about the ice cream at the revival centre. Age runs backwards on request.
The single unsolved problem is arithmetic. People must still die at some rate or the planet fills. And because ending a life was judged an act of conscience unsuited to a machine, the task was handed back to humans, who formed the Scythedom: a self-governing profession, exempt from all law but its own ten commandments, the first of which is thou shalt kill.
What lifts Scythe by Neal Shusterman above the many novels with a comparable hook is that its author is far more interested in the filing cabinet than in the blade. Scythes are audited every year on the demographic spread of the people they killed, and disciplined for imbalance. One is censured for gleaning too few wealthy people and ordered to glean only the rich until the next session. Another, an unusually good-looking man, is reprimanded for a documented pattern of killing unattractive people, and the chamber laughs. Motions are debated on whether the ring should be worn on the left hand or the right, and whether a scythe may endorse a breakfast cereal. A ban on remote detonators passes on a blend of genuine ethical objection and quiet lobbying money.
The argument underneath all of it is unfashionable and sharp: absolute power does not spend most of its time being dramatic. It spends most of its time in session, and the atrocity gets minuted under any other business.
Neal Shusterman Sets a Rule That Everybody Calls Stupid
The plot of Scythe by Neal Shusterman is more conventional than its world. Citra Terranova and Rowan Damisch are sixteen and are chosen — both of them, irregularly — by an austere scythe who selects his subjects using mortality statistics from the twentieth century and attends the funeral of every person he kills, because he considers it common decency. Neither teenager wants the position, which is the qualification.
A rival faction then amends the terms so that only one can be ordained, and the survivor’s first official act must be to kill the other.
This is a contrivance, and Scythe by Neal Shusterman is candid about it: half the cast says so out loud, at volume, in the room. It is nonetheless the engine, and the engine drives an entirely serviceable story. What it does not drive is the romance, which is prohibited by the mentor in chapter four, discharged in a single kiss, mutually denied in almost identical dialogue by both parties, and then set aside for two hundred pages. Readers arriving for a love story will find one only in outline.
The stronger of the two arcs in Scythe by Neal Shusterman belongs to Rowan, reassigned midway to a mentor who runs his household like a nightclub and believes shame is a superstition of the old guard. His training proceeds by increments — pain suppression disabled, a ceremonial beating, blades into straw, blades into paid living targets who are revived afterwards, and finally a person who will not be. He becomes extremely good at it, and the horror of the book is that he begins to enjoy it exactly as promised.
Citra, meanwhile, gets a research project. She is a fine character with a real conscience and a childhood crime she has never confessed, but for a long stretch she is investigating while he is being transformed. She reclaims the novel in its final forty pages, decisively and with considerable style, and it is still late.
- What a book club will actually argue about: the secret rite every scythe must pass. Each apprentice, alone, must kill someone they love; the victim is revived days later, so no permanent harm is done, and the novel’s own position is that this is irrelevant, because the subconscious cannot tell a temporary killing from a real one. One candidate refuses and walks out. One begins and cannot finish. One fires before the instructions have been read aloud. The fourth spends ten minutes cutting her brother’s bonds, letting him hold the knife, telling him honestly that it will hurt, and getting him to choose what ice cream he wants when he wakes. The judges then bicker over whether she was sloppy, and whether efficiency serves compassion or compassion serves efficiency. Almost everything worth discussing about this book is in that room.
The weaknesses of Scythe by Neal Shusterman are worth naming plainly. The rules technicality that resolves the central dilemma is delightful and costs the preceding year most of its weight. The chief antagonist argues better than he acts; his journal entries are seductive, his scenes are two notes played loudly. And the mathematics do not survive scrutiny — the novel itself concedes, in a scythe’s own words, that five million deaths a year worldwide comes nowhere near checking population growth, which quietly makes the entire institution ceremonial. That hole is deliberate and is excavated in later volumes. In this one it sits under the waterline.
Readers who finish Scythe by Neal Shusterman and want the same author’s other engineered utopia should go to All Better Now, which runs a single monstrous premise to its conclusion with the same cold patience. Those drawn by the testing-and-sorting apparatus will find a sleeker version in The Sixth Faction by Veronica Roth, and a broader survey in our roundup of the most chilling dystopian fiction. For the machine intelligence rather than the teenagers, Shusterman’s Thunderhead is a distant relative of the consciousnesses in Paul Tremblay’s work, though a far more benign one.
Final Thoughts
The profession’s own vocabulary is the point. They do not kill, they glean — a word borrowed from the practice of walking behind harvesters to gather what was left for the poor, chosen precisely because killing is not, as one character puts it, socially or morally correct. Everything else follows from that substitution: the robes, the journals, the annual diversity audit, the ceremonial hand-washing, the donuts in the rotunda between motions.
Scythe by Neal Shusterman is sold as a story about two teenagers competing to survive, and that story is fine. The book it is actually writing is about what happens when a society hands unlimited power to people it has decided are the best of us, exempts them from every law, and then trusts them to hold themselves to a standard. It runs beautifully for a while. Then the meetings start.
One disclosure, kept in the manner the book demands. Every scythe is bound by the sixth commandment to record each day’s business in a journal open to public inspection, on the reasoning that anyone permitted to act without oversight must at least be legible. The same principle applies here: this copy came from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, free and unrequested. Nothing was promised in return and nothing was withheld — the half star docked above was docked on the merits, and no ring was kissed on the way in.